RE: Oracle and DST changes

It looks like someone at Oracle was nice enough to post the following
today in a new FAQ note (402742.1) for DST issues and save me the time
of opening an SR - in section 221 of the aforementioned note it clearly
states that the database does NOT really have to be down for installing
the patches for utltzuv2.sql and the updated timezone files, even if
they are installed with opatch.  It clarifies that the README
instructions to shutdown are just a standard precaution, but not really
necessary in this case.  It also confirms that the timezone files are in
fact only read at startup, so a restart is necessary for the new rules
to take effect.
 
Hopefully this will save some of you from some unnecessary downtime!
 
Regards,
Brandon

________________________________

From: Mercadante, Thomas F (LABOR)
[mailto:Thomas.Mercadante@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 5:58 AM
To: Allen, Brandon; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Oracle and DST changes



Brandon,

Shutting down all instances before applying patches is the SOP.  I agree
with you in this one instance - there is no need to shut down the
instances to copy the files the way you did.  The only problem is that
the Oracle inventory on your machine does not know about the patch that
you manually installed.  Again, for this one patch, it may not matter
much.  But I will be running OPatch on my 10.2 instance to install the
patch just for this reason.


The other thing that I read was that the Oracle databases need to be
restarted to make these changes sticky within the database.  I think I
saw that these files are read at instance startup time only.  So that is
also a good reason to have the DB's shut down.

Tom

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From: Allen, Brandon [mailto:Brandon.Allen@xxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 5:51 PM
To: Mercadante, Thomas F (LABOR); oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Oracle and DST changes

I hope I'm not beating this subject to death, but it seems a lot of
people are interested in it so here is another thing I found
interesting.  The 10.2 patch (5601428) for installing the new
utltzuv2.sql and timezdif.csv files (which are just for checking to see
if you have affected data, not for actually fixing it) says the
following in the README.TXT file:

# Patch Special Instructions:

# ---------------------------

# Make sure all instances running under the ORACLE_HOME being patched

# are cleanly shutdown before installing this patch. Also ensure that

# the tool used to terminate the instance(s) has exited cleanly.

Now, why would you have to shutdown your instance just to install this
SQL script and CSV file?  Of course I didn't want to shutdown my
instance, so I just extracted the .sql and .csv files and put them in
the correct directories ($ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin &
$ORACLE_HOME/oracore/zoneinfo, repectively) and then I ran the script
and it worked just fine - returning no affected data, as expected.

I don't have a lot of experience with patching, so maybe I'm missing
something here.  Can someone please tell me if there is some reason why
I should install this patch instead of just manually extracting the
files, and if so, why this simple patch would require the instance to be
shutdown, or is that just standard procedure that you have to shutdown
for all patches, even if it's not really necessary?

Thanks,

Brandon



________________________________

From: Mercadante, Thomas F (LABOR)
[mailto:Thomas.Mercadante@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<mailto:Thomas.Mercadante@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ]


I saw that and reran the utltzuv2.sql file against my 10g database
(10.2.0.2) and it reports nothing to be concerned about.

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