Oracle recently spammed me about Database Patch Set Updates (PSU’s), a new, simplified way to update your Oracle Home to include the latest recommended patches as well as security patches. In their initial rollout, it appears they are only offering this for RDBMS 10.2 on the most “popular” platforms. This list includes:
- HP-UX Itanium
- HP-UX PA-RISC (64-bit)
- IBM AIX on POWER Systems (64-bit)
- Linux x86
- Linux x86-64
- Sun Solaris SPARC (64-bit)
Conspicuously absent: any flavor of Windows! I find this amusing, as I truly can’t stand Oracle RDBMS on Windows.
Well regardless, I think PSU’s are a good idea, long overdue. Last night I changed hosts of a small database from and migrated it to 64-bit, so I had to reinstall the RDBMS. In doing so, I needed to confirm the DST patchset delivered with 10.2.0.4, and this 10.2.0.4.1 (PSU1). Well 10.2.0.4 was easy, it delivers DST patchset 4, but the PSU took a little digging to confirm that it didn’t contain any DST updates. Since it was on DST 10 on the old host, I put that patch on, then applied 8576156 (10.2.0.4.1). This patch applies similar to a CPU, as opposed to using Oracle Universal Installer. It requires a combination of opatch followed by catbundle.sql psu apply at the end (a CPU uses catbundle.sql cpu apply). Well I’m happy to report that all proceeded uneventfully, and the database came back up fine and by the lack of complaints today, I’d call it a success.
edit: There is a new PSU patch available as described here
Kevin Kempf's Blog 