Download Opatch

[Patrizia Leones]

Corporateusers and administrators appreciate the lightness and simplicity of 0patch, as it is shortening the patch deployment time from months to just hours. Reviewing tiny micropatches is inexpensive, and the ability to instantly apply and remove them locally or remotely significantly simplifies production testing.

0patch Agent, our mighty little patching machine, watches over all processes running on the computer. When any one of them is found to have a patch available, that patch is immediately applied to the process in memory without disturbing that process.

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I'm trying to apply a patch using opatch but I'm getting this error: "OPatch was not able to find OUI jars to load them runtime. Please provide valid oui location using 'oui_loc' option. OPatch failed with error code 255".

The red entries describe the patch being obsolete, and not downloadable. IMO, they should not be there.

The blue entries are non-database opatch releases. I would beg oracle to publish non-database opatch releases under their own patch number.

That begs the question whether the 12.1.0.1.0, 12.2.0.1.0 and 18.0.0.0.0 opatch versions is actually the same opatch version. I got these versions downloaded, with the opatch version included in the name:

To be honest, the original intention of this blog article was to describe the some specific usage of opatch, and I now already got enough content for a post, and will retain the original intended content for a next blogpost.

I suspect that once 12.1 goes into extended support, the opatch version will freeze, whilst the opatch version for version 12.2 and 18 will be improved and increase in version. So the only way to download the correct opatch version is still by choosing the actual database version it is intended for.

This brings me to another important thing to realise: the actual opatch version that is downloaded. At the time of writing the current and only available opatch release for Oracle database versions 12.1 to 18 is 12.2.0.1.14. Once oracle brings out a newer opatch version, the previous version will not be available anywhere anymore (as far as I know). To me this means that if you patch databases per tier (from test, development and so on up to production), you have to stage opatch in order to be able to use the same opatch version consistently in the future. Of course Oracle advises to use the latest opatch version, but the patch will check for a minimal opatch version, and if you tested your database software version, opatch version and patch to be working correctly together, in my opinion the most important thing is consistency.

thanks for the reply. I found out that the Oracle guys have the path

hardcoded in the opatch.bat. SO no matter how I use the PERL5LIB,

opatch expects Perl in the folder where the HTTP server installation

from ORACLE

would put it: oraclexxx920ApachePerl5.00503binMSWin32-x86

Also I read that OPATCH needs a higher version of PERL, so I wiped out

PERL 5.00503

and installed 5.8 from ActivePerl (msi file).

Again I set the PERL5LIB variable, path was set during install.

I am trying to write a script that automates opatch, but before I get into the actual scripting I want to test the commands directly through the command prompt. My oracle home is C:\oracle\Middleware, and my patch 23094292 folder is located in the Middleware folder. Here are the commands I am using to apply the patch:

ZOP-51: The patch location is not valid for apply, because it doesn't have correct metadata, or it points to a patch directory.Argument(s) Error... Patch location is not valid for applyPlease check the arguments and try again.OPatch failed with error code = 135

Shouldn't oracle home be the valid patch location? I am not too familiar with Oracle's product's, so I'm not certain. Please let me know if I can provide any further information. Any help explaining what I am doing wrong would be greatly appreciated.

check PATH ... think this should not contain java5 references, and is most likely the reason why opatch fails. We use java14_64 as far as I remember. There is a special note saying which java to use on AIX.

This is indeed true, but in reality, I wanted to post this as another example of how you can leverage the features of external tables to perform non-database style operations from within the database. Taking a look at another picture from the tweet, you can start to get a glimpse of how this opatch check is being tackled

This is a great for Sys Admins who would like to make a subset of OS commands available to DBAs, or for DBAs that would like to make some OS facilities available to Developers. Let us explore how OPatch can be kept dynamically up to date using the run_os_patch.bat file above, and thus the external table.

Patches on MOS have an XML description which describe details of the patch and where it fits in the overall scheme of patches for the database. We can download that to discover the version of OPatch on MOS and the full download URL for the database platform we are working with.

Be aware that you probably want to take some additional care here than what the script contains, for example, ensuring that no-one is using OPatch at the time, or perhaps just warning about a version mis-match rather than directly upgrading it etc. But the script should be enough to get you on the journey. My personal hope is that an update OPatch always got shipped with every patch you download, and applying any database patch would automatically take care of OPatch as part of the process. Maybe one day that will come to fruition.

The OPatch utility is a tool that allows the application and rollback of interim patches to Oracle products. This chapter provides information on using OPatch to apply patches.This chapter includes the following topics:

Patches are a small collection of files that are copied over an existing installation. They are associated to particular versions of Oracle Products. Patches, when applied to the correct version of an installed product, results in an upgraded version of the product.Interim patches are bug fixes that are made available to customers in response to specific bugs. They require a particular base release or patchset to be installed before they can be applied. They generally address specific bugs for a particular customer. These patches are not versioned and are generally made available in a future patchset as well as the next product release.

OPatch 10.2 supports maintaining versions of patches. You can have two or more different versions of the same patch (with the same patch ID). This version information is stored in the OPatch metadata. The metadata has a tag date_of_patch, that stores the patch version information. The sample of the tag is as follows:

OPatch will consider this version of the patch to be created on December 24th, 2003 at 04:57:13 hrs.When you apply an interim patch to an Oracle home, OPatch stores the patch information in $ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage directory. Inside this directory, there are separate directories created for each patch applied to the Oracle home. You can only have one version of the patch applied in the system at a given time.

You can determine the location of the patch information directory by executing the opatch lsinventory -detail command and looking for the patch location storage area information in the output. The sample is as follows:

OPatch is an Oracle supplied utility to assist you with the process of applying interim patches to Oracle's software. OPatch is a Java-based utility which requires the Oracle Universal Installer to be installed. It is platform independent and runs on all supported operating systems.

The library path must be set correctly for Oracle Real Application Clusters environments. OPatch uses some APIs to detect if the system is Real Application Clusters. Ensure that the library path is set correctly as follows:

Reliability: OPatch is reliable and protects the Oracle home and inventory. It can bring the Oracle home back to a stable state from patch application failures. It can also easily detect patch conflicts.

OPatch verifies if the Oracle home is present. You must ensure that the ORACLE_HOME environment variable is set to the Oracle home of the product you are trying to patch. Check the respective vendor documentation for the details to set the environment variable.

OPatch 10.2 uses the jar utility that comes with JDK for its jar, war, and ear operations. Opatch will look for JDK inside the Oracle home specified. In case the Oracle home does not have JDK, the user has to use the -jdk option in OPatch to provide an alternate location. OPatch will display an error, if there is a jar/war/ear operation and is unable to locate Java SDK location.

When OPatch processes the script for the installation of a patch, it simultaneously generates a rollback script and saves a copy of every file edited or deleted during the patching. OPatch also backs up the inventory information. So, Oracle recommends that you have sufficient system space to accommodate the patch and the backup information.

OPatch supports a set of properties that are used for various operations of the software. You can use these properties to control the internal operations of OPatch. By default, OPatch uses standard Java property format to specify the properties. An exhaustive list of the default properties and their values are as follows:

You must ensure that the cluster machines should have user equivalence set for the user installing Oracle Clusterware/ Real Application Clusters. On UNIX, this means rsh or ssh or both should be setup on the cluster machines. On Windows, this means the same \ should have administrative privileges on all the cluster machines and the machines should be a member of the .

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