Patching and Upgrades
John Clarke · Apress eBooks · 2013
As Exadata is engineered as a complete and integrated system, Oracle periodically releases certified Exadata patches to facilitate patch and upgrade management on Exadata. Similar to other Oracle-engineered systems (and unlike traditional, disparate vendor solutions), Oracle’s Exadata patches are pre-tested sets of patches designed to applied in a non-disruptive, rolling fashion and yield a comprehensive, validated end result. The goal of the Exadata patching is to remove uncertainty and non-compliance; for example, an Exadata DMA wouldn’t download “one-off” patches for a database tier or storage server firmware. Exadata patches are intended to be all encompassing and typically include fixes for both the storage servers and compute servers, and optionally InfiniBand switches. In the real world, patching Exadata is typically one of the chief concerns of the Exadata administrator. The patches have a high likelihood of “touching everything,” so properly planning and executing patch application is paramount to the availability of Exadata. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.