At our recent workshop in London, I was advocating for using out-of-place patching and the many benefits it brings. One of the questions was:

How do I do that on Exadata Cloud@Customer?

When you use the patching functionality in the cloud tooling, it will patch an entire Oracle home, including all databases, using in-place patching. This is a convenient option, but it extends the maintenance window on your database.

Let’s find out how to do it using out-of-place patching!

Benefits of Out-Of-Place Patching

• You can patch the database with less downtime. You just shut down the database in the old Oracle home and immediately restart it in the new Oracle home.
  • With in-place patching, you need more downtime. While the database is down, you need time to roll off patches and apply the new ones. Depending on the number of patches you have, this can take 5, 10, or 20 minutes.
• You prepare the new Oracle home in advance.
  • With in-place patching, all changes to the Oracle home occur during the maintenance window when the database is down.
• There are fewer tasks in your downtime window, so less risk and less stress.
• You can use a fresh, brand-new Oracle home to avoid issues with rolling off patches. Plus, a brand-new Oracle home means you don’t carry any old luggage in your Oracle home.
  • With in-place patching, your Oracle home will grow over time. You’ll see that disk space keeps increasing.
• In the unlikely event that you need to roll back or fall back, that’s a lot easier. You just restart the database in the old Oracle home.
  • With in-place patching, you have to reverse the entire process. So, all that was cumbersome when you patched will be cumbersome when you roll back.

AutoUpgrade

In the workshop, I showed some cool demos of using AutoUpgrade for out-of-place patching. You can’t do that on Exadata Cloud@Customer. You must use the cloud tooling when you patch an entire CDB.

Alternatively, you can patch an individual PDB using AutoUpgrade and refreshable clone PDBs. I’ll have to write a blog post about that.

How to Patch Out-Of-Place on Exadata Cloud@Customer

1. Create a software image at the desired Release Update with any additional one-off patches. You can skip this if you want to use the Oracle-provided images.
2. Create a database home using the software image you just created, or use an Oracle-provided one.
3. I recommend that you update the cloud tooling.
4. Your maintenance window starts.
5. Move the database to the new Oracle home. The cloud tooling does that in a rolling manner, so there’s no database outage.
   • It also executes Datapatch and other post-patching steps.

That’s it; your database has been patched!

• After a while, you can remove the old Oracle home.
• If you want to script the process, you can also use the REST APIs or dbaascli.
• This also works for Exadata Database Service.
• There’s no way to use out-of-place patching on Grid Infrastructure.

Happy patching!

Appendix

Other Methods

You are free to use Exadata Fleet Update for your Exadata Cloud@Customer system. It can greatly reduce your workload and automate your patching operations. Check out these resources:

• Announcing Exadata Fleet Update
• Exadata Fleet Update Concepts

Further Reading

• External blog post, How To Do An Out of Place Patching In ExaCC via dbaascli