Agreed. My usual practice is to create a new Oracle home, patch it with
the last patch set and then do the upgrade to the fully patched
version. I see no reason why someone would upgrade to the bare,
unpatched version.
Regards
On Fri, 2021-01-08 at 16:25 +0100, Frits Hoogland wrote:
What this says to me, is that vendor is trying to see if an unpatched
home will work, and might lead to not patching at all, because it
works, patching would mean an extra risk.
If not, I cannot see any valid reason for trying/testing or otherwise
running on a version you never intent to run on.
It might come from the old (approximately 15 years old that I’ve seen
it) practice of installing software and configure it to run, and then
leave it be. I don’t think it ever was the best way of doing it, but
it was really common the aforementioned time ago.
In todays world, there is not a single reason to create a patching
strategy that fits your company and stick to that.
Security is really prominent for the past 10 years or so.
But also for supportability: if you run into an issue or a bug, one
of the first things support will ask is to patch it to current and
see if the problem persists.
You could argue if that is a good practice, but I think it’s sensible
to apply patches to get issues solved and vulnerabilities fixed you
might have never suffered, but as a result will not run into. Of
course there is a downside too: things might work differently.
