Downtime Reduction during Patching in R12.0/R12.1

(1) Oracle now supports the Shared Application-Tier System. If you have multiple Application Servers using Load Balancing, then all the servers can share one single shared Application-Tier. Use Metalink Note: 233428.1 for 11i, and 384248.1 for Release 12. Patches  applied to shared application tiers are instantly available to all application tiers

(2) Shared application tier systems, distributed AD (Note:236469.1) can be used to run adpatch and adctrl on multiple nodes, that share the application tier file system

Distributed AD

(3)Staged Application Systems  Metalink Note: 242480.1, where patches are applied to a stage area, before the production upgrade, and then only the database portion is applied on the Production Instance thus reducing downtime

Stages APPL_TOP in R12

(4) Merge multiple patches into smaller number of patches using AD Merge

AD Utilities(adadmin, adrelink , adident, ADMRGPCH)

(5) AD Patch can be run in non-interactive mode, by creation of defaultsfile, and then creating batch programs which will runs series of patches one after the other without asking any questions.

Oracle patching: Adpatch Complete Overview

(6) Use options like “nocompiledb”, which will not compile all objects every time it applies a patch. Only the last patch can have the “compiledb” option.

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