RE: Oracle EM Provisioning/patching pack
- From: "Matthew Zito" <mzito@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Niall Litchfield" <niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 5 May 2009 09:46:06 -0400
Niall,
Thanks for the info - just to be clear, I'm really not subtly pitching my
product, nor complaining that people think about using OEM for these things.
I'm just curious whether there's anyone using OEM to do this stuff, or if
they've even given it a shot, especially since Oracle is pushing OEM pretty
hard (re: one of the posts in the previous thread).
We see an interesting mix of people, where as you say, some have patching
mandates, and others just patch as they hit bugs. Some shops seem to do big
sweeps, where once a year, they gird for battle and apply one CPU and some
recommended bug fixes they'd run into in specific areas across the board.
Thanks,
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: Niall Litchfield [mailto:niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tue 5/5/2009 9:23 AM
To: Matthew Zito
Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Oracle EM Provisioning/patching pack
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 <http://www.gridapp.com/>
--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info
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