Re: Oracle EM Provisioning/patching pack
- From: Niall Litchfield <niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: mzito@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 5 May 2009 14:23:22 +0100
Patching, we don't need no stinking patching!
Or more seriously, most of our clients don't patch database systems in a
policy driven manner, but on an 'as-needed' basis. 'As-needed' usually being
driven by support, business users or occasionally enlightened infrastructure
folks that think running infrastructure systems that have publicly available
exploits is a bad idea. I'll confess to being unfamiliar with your
particular product offerings, but the OEM patching stuff seems to match
clients that say 'We want to patch all our databases from 9.2.0.4 to
9.2.0.8', or else 'we want to apply all CPU patches withing 2 months of
release'. We don't have many customers that a) have such a policy and b)
have so many systems that overtime for the dba team is excessively
expensive.
I'm not even going to touch the system test before patching issue here, it
exists though. I will offer that most MS shops do have an OS patching policy
and it is easier to engage with management of such shops on patching/update
requirements than it is with *nix shops. This is only partly a technical
issue, it's mostly cultural.
Niall
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Matthew Zito <mzito@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hey all,
>
> The recent thread on OEM's pluses and minuses got me thinking, but I didn't
> want to completely hijack the thread, so I figured I'd start a new one. It
> seems like most people use OEM/GC for day-to-day DBA activities -
> monitoring, checking utilization, running basic database commands, and for
> performance tuning, basically the tuning and diagnostic pack.
>
> I'm curious as to why no one mentioned the provisioning pack, which Oracle
> markets as a solution for patching, database creation, cloning, etc. Is it
> too expensive? Does it not work? Are patching and deployment just not a
> problem for the folks on this list? What about RAC - it's supposed to be
> able to do RAC deployment, has anyone tried that?
>
> As full disclosure, my company makes a software product that, among many
> other things, patches database, deploys RAC clusters, automates upgrades,
> etc. The reason I'm asking is when we're meeting with companies at trade
> shows, etc., a commonly heard refrain is, "Oh, OEM provisioning pack does
> all that stuff". Once we dig into it a bit, though, they've usually never
> tried it, or don't run OEM at all.
>
> So, I figured I'd ask the list- have you ever used the provisioning pack,
> and what did you think? If you don't use it, why not? If people would
> prefer to email me off-list, I'll aggregate the info, anonymize it, and send
> it back to the list?
>
> Thanks,
> Matt
>
> --
> Matthew Zito
> Chief Scientist
> GridApp Systems
> P: 646-452-4090
> mzito@xxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.gridapp.com
>
>
--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info
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