Working on a POC for using Edition Based Redefinition for patching a 12c
environment. The client plans on weekly, perhaps more frequent, patching
and wants to avoid downtime. EBR *appears* to be the answer.
One main issue is the cleanup of old editions. For a simple POC (using the
example at oracle-base as the source), I create an edition (v1), then
another (v2) for a view and procedure. Once I have 'migrated' to V2, I want
to be able to drop V1. However when I try to drop that edition, the command
results in "ORA-38810: Implementation restriction: cannot drop edition that
has a parent and a child".
I find online information that indicates you can drop an edition, however
none of them show an actual example of the creation and subsequent drop of
an edition. And in looking at the architecture of editioning published by
Oracle (an edition is always the child of the most recent edition, causing
the previous edition to be a parent), it seems like no edition, other than
the most recent one, can ever be dropped.
Is this accurate or am I missing something?
Regards,
Daniel Fink
