OPatch

Only 10% of Oracle Databases are Secure!

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

A recent article in eWEEK revealed alarming statistics surrounding patch and CPU application. The survey was conducted by a company that appears to benefit from the patch application process being as painful as possible (they sell a solution that attempts to mitigate security risks surrounding non-patched databases). Back to the survey, here are a few [...]

Issue Installing the Oracle July 2008 CPU

Friday, February 29th, 2008

The threats mitigated by installing the quarterly security patches are numerous. There are also risks involved, in this case specifically the risk that the database will be unavailable after the patch installation until invalidated objects are recompiled.
Here is a snippet from the readme:

Run the view recompilation script. Note that this script is run with [...]

Please Insert One More Bit

Monday, November 19th, 2007

I just ran into an error while installing the new CPU for October 2007 (Patch #6394981) on RHEL 4 x86_64 so I figured I would share this error to save you the time of figuring out what the problem is. See the full log here.
The errors started after 5-10 minutes of processing and looked [...]

Use Silent Mode!

Saturday, July 14th, 2007

I simply refuse to do my database provisioning using interactive methods. Just about every Oracle command has an option to have no interactive steps.
These are the only times I think it makes sense to use interactive processes:

When Oracle support tells you to.
When you are learning how to do something.

Excluding those cases, do yourself a [...]