Hello out there,
this weekend I installed patchset 10.2.0.5 on our production system
anfter having patched the development system on thursday.
I want to point out some of the pitfalls i came upon. Maybe this helps
others to circumvent them.
Most of them are most likely mentioned in the release notes but real
programmers don't read release notes. ;-)

The starting situation was an Oracle 10.2.0.4 (SE1) installation on an
almost fully patched Windows 2000 Server. There were almost none of the
quarterly security patches (aka CPU) applied.

The installation of the patchset itself ran quite smoothly, except that
I (as almost always) forgot to stop the Distributed Transaction Manager
service which locked some files the patchset tried to update.
Maybe Oracle should point that out in the installation
instructions. (When they did, I didn't find it ;-)

But then came dbua! On the first system I started it from the start
menu. I chose the appropriate instance and started the upgrade.
After a while, it opened a messagebox in the background which did not
appear even when I changed the application via Alt-Tab. I had to
explicitly select the Java symbol in the task switcher. This is a Java
issue (maybe only on W2k) but I lost some time waiting for something to
happen.

After a while I got messages the the Windows event log filled
up. Obviously, dbua filled up the application event log with audit
messages. I had to increase the size of the event log an clear it
frequently. Totally, these messages sum up to about 100MB. Another
system on Windows 2003 Server did not show this behavior though.
This seems to be a W2k only issue.

Later on, dbua tried to upgrade Enterprise Manager dbconsole and failed
because it did not recognize the domain part of the hostname and
complained about a hostname longer than 32 characters. I had to manually
configure dbconsole using dbca later.
To prevent this, I set the environment variable ORACLE_HOSTNAME before
the subsequent runs of dbua.

The last issue is a change in Oracle's handling of password protected
roles that I did not expect to happen in a patchset. After installing
patchset 10.2.0.5 password protected roles cannot made default (they
actually can, but aren't enabled at login). Luckily, I had a script at
hand from my tests with Oracle 11g a few months ago. Basically I create
a new role without a password and copy the grants over to that.
I did not expect such a fundamental change in behavior happen in a
patchset that changes the fourth digit in the version. (Remember, real
programmers don't read release notes ;-)

Hope that helps others to circumvent these pitfalls,
Lothar

--
Lothar Armbrüster | lothar.armbruester (AT) t-online (DOT) de
Hauptstr. 26 |
65346 Eltville |

Lothar:

# Hello out there, this weekend I installed patchset 10.2.0.5 on our
production system anfter having patched the development system on
thursday. I want to point out some of the pitfalls i came upon. Maybe
this helps others to circumvent them.

.... Most of them are most likely mentioned in the release notes but
real programmers don't read release notes. ;-)

OK ... you lost me completely. The patchset comes with a readme and
probably some real specific details on any windows specific install
steps necessary.

You were installing this on your production system without thoroughly
reading thru the install instructions?

Or did you discover things that really are not documented by Oracle
already?

John Hurley <hurleyjohnb (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> writes:

them not that thoroughly.
Before I installed on the production system I had a test run on the
development machine so I did not jump directly into the cold water.

installations of the previous patchsets always ran smoothly so I was
somewhat lazy this time. ;-)

Lothar

--
Lothar Armbrüster | lothar.armbruester (AT) t-online (DOT) de
Hauptstr. 26 |
65346 Eltville |