One of the most common questions I get from customers and partners is to suggest a regime for applying patches to my products more effectively. Customers and partners should keep up to date with the latest patches but it important to do this in the most cost effective and efficient means.
When asked about this, I start to remember my early days working in operations for several systems where we had to manage them to reduce our outage times and also reduce costs. There are older techniques that I find are so strong they still can be applied to newer techniques and newer tooling.
Here are my words of advice to help reduce your costs and outage times when implementing patching regimes:
- Only patch when necessary. Too many people apply patches when they don't need to. This drives up costs and lowers efficiency. Some patches impact your implementation and some don't (as they impact features you may not even use). I tell most partners to only apply individual patches when they are directly impacting your business. In fact, if you register a bug then really only apply the patches (and its related patches) you need to fix the bug.
- Take patchsets or build your own. Oracle regularly provides patch sets within My Oracle Support, so that you can apply the latest patches in one installation event to increase efficiency. As these are regular, you can schedule them on regular basis so the business knows when they are coming. If you cannot wait for them, then we provide tools to build your own patch sets from the product (refer to the documentation or the Installing Patches and Fixes document in the Software Configuration Management Series (Doc Id: 560401.1) available from My Oracle Support). In my operations days, we used to schedule patching days regularly. I know that Oracle uses this type of regime on the Oracle Utilities Cloud Services to maximize availability whilst maintaining services up to the desired support level.
- Apply patches according to your Promotion Models. As pointed out in the Software Configuration Management Series (Doc Id: 560401.1) available from My Oracle Support, there are a sequence of environments modelled using a promotion model, which outlines the data migration relationships between environments. For example, apply patches to non-production first, test and then implement in production. This is to reduce negative impacts on extensions due to changes implement in the change.
- Read patch notes. With each release, patch, service pack and/or patch set, Oracle supplies documentation to help understand the impact of the patch. This is useful information to assess whether you need to change or remove your extensions to use the capability to its fullest.
Patching your system does not have to be a burden. With careful planning and some standard procedures you can reduce the impact of patching, reduce your costs and improve your availability. It is interesting that when I started in this business, these principles were already entrenched but over time with the easier way of patching, I find that patching practices have deviated to a point where they add cost rather than add benefit. Maybe a return to the older techniques and thinking has benefits for newer technologies after all.
Consulting Technical Director at Oracle
5 个月Another point to be added to a good patching strategy is that by patching regularly you are fixed issues discovered by other customers. You don’t have to go thru the process of : 1) raise a defect , 2) wait for fix and then 3) apply. Customers can consider doing security patching on a quarterly basis as released by the quarterly oracle cpu releases. Combine this with application patching to reduce downtime. Also patching regularly adds value to your ROI , the solution “asset” adds value , appreciates.