How to use Patch wizard in Oracle EBS environment

Patch Wizard is a tool provided by Oracle on finding the impact of Apps patches on the Environment.It is very useful tools and shows all the impacted files and appropriate action can be taken based on that information. It is extremely important tool and here i will explain how to use patch wizard, how to do analysis .

How to use Patch wizard 

You can submit a specific patch analysis request through the Patch wizard to determine the impact of a patch on your system. Patch Wizard Impact Analysis provides reports on:

• The total number of files in the patch
• The number of files the patch will install
• The products that will have updated files
• The files that will be introduced by the patch
• The files on the target system that will be changed by the patch
• The files with dependencies on patched files

How to submit the patch wizard analysis

First time You need to  set the stage area where to download the require patch through option “Patch Wizard Preferences”.  you need to set your oracle metalink credentials also to download the patches

You may set filters from option “Define Patch filters”, if everything is set you are good to go for analyzing.

Now Click on tasks icon under Recommend/Analyze Patches to analyzed specific patches

Choose Analyze Specific Patches and enter the patch you want to analyze

Click OK.
Click on Patch Wizard.

On clicking OK , a concurrent request will be submit to analyze the patch and you can check the status of the request on the same Patch wizard

Following tables are used internally to manage the whole Patch wizard system in OAM

About infobundle which is used to generate Patch recommendation

URL for InfoBundle.zip
The URL for the infoBundldle is http://updates.oracle.com/download/InfoBundle11i.zip. You must enter your Oracle MetaLink user name and password to download the InfoBundle.

The InfoBundle is a Zip file that contains patch metadata information for the currently-recommended patches in an Oracle Applications release, along with the readme and patch metadata LDT file for each recommended patch.

It is generated daily by the ARU system, and is available for download from MetaLink.

The InfoBundle only contains information for a specific Oracle Applications Release. To support multiple Oracle Applications releases, we call it InfoBundle<release_name>.zip.

The Release 11i InfoBundle is called InfoBundle11i.zip.

To sum up,We cannot rollback an application patch easily and certain patches cannot be rollback at all.So it is necessary we properly analyze the patch before installing on the system. Test it thoroughly in Development instance before applying it to Production.