Oracle Database 11 g - Online Public Access Catalog

CHAPTER 1 ■ INSTALLING, UPGRADING, AND MANAGING CHANGE 55• Critical security patches: Critical security patches (also called critical patch updates)are periodic patch releases by Oracle to fix major security holes.• Patch recommendations by feature: Lists all patch recommendations based on thedatabase feature.• Patch Cache page: Any patches you download from the Oracle MetaLink to the EnterpriseManager are saved in the Enterprise Manager repository. You can view the currentpatches in the repository by clicking the View Patch Cache link, which takes you to thePatch Cache page. This page shows, in a tabular format, all the patches you downloadedfrom MetaLink. The advantage of the using the patch cache is that you need to downloada patch only once and stage it to multiple destinations. If you haven’t downloaded apatch, that’s OK too, since Enterprise Manager will automatically download the necessarypath from MetaLink when the patch job runs.• Oracle Patch Prerequisite Checker page: Click Path Prerequisites in the Database SoftwarePatching section to get to the Oracle Patch Prerequisite Checker page. Here, youcan select the software updates from MetaLink or the Software Library. You can stagethe updates to a staging location and run prerequisite checks on those updates.• Stage Patch page: This page lets you select patches from MetaLink, based on searchcriteria you provide.• Apply Patch page: This page lets you select the patches to apply. You can select patchesfrom MetaLink for the Software Library.Emergency Hot Patching (Online Database Patching)You can use the online database patching feature in Oracle Database 11g to apply emergency,one-off patches to the database server software, while the database is online. This means youcan now patch Oracle executables with no downtime. This feature is especially useful for diagnosticpatches. Some one-off patches can be done online now.■Hint Patches can now be installed with the runInstaller executable instead of opatch. This was oneof the enhancements added to 10.2.0.3.The new online patching capability is integrated with OPatch. Besides installing a newpatch, you can uninstall a patch without bringing the database offline. Similarly, you can alsoenable and disable one-off patches online. You can use the online patching capability to patchmany one-off patches online. There is also a subset of online upgradeable patches for RealApplication Cluster environments. Oracle plans eventually to enable the online patching of itsperiodically released critical path updates.