12 Days of #Cloud: Day 9
I have a 12.1. Database Cloud Instance, which comes with several patches including July 2016 PSU.
The dbaascli cloud tool can be used to query and apply patches. Before we use dbaascli, let’s check what the Cloud interface shows.
Choose the DBaaS instance and view details. The “Administration” tile shows one patch available. Shows the October 2016 PSU is available to apply. I guess PSU is the only patch Oracle strongly recommends everyone to apply.
The patch menu has two options – “Precheck” and “Patch”.
The precheck failed, not sure why.
Per documentation, updated the psunum= value with 12.1.0.2.161018 and executed the prereq check using dbaascli (command line on Linux VM), in the hope to get more information.
My troubleshooting did not go far, contacted cloud forum for help.
Based on the forum recommendation, updated the DBaaS tools to latest version to fix the issue.
To find out the current version and if there are any newer versions available, run “dbaascli dbpatchm –run -list_tools” command as root user.
The output does not show much information, but the log file does.
The version that came with DBaaS needs update.
[root@CLDB121 opc]# rpm -qa|grep -i dbaastools
dbaastools-1.0-1+16.4.5.0.0_161107.1102.x86_64
The latest version is 16.4.5.1_161213.1526.
Updating the tools was easy (BTW, I strongly suggest and expect Oracle to keep the cloud tools updated on my VM as I am subscribing to DBaaS service. It is not really my responsibility to manually update the cloud tools).
Once the dbaascli tool was updated to latest version, the precheck completed successfully.
Tried the same from front-end GUI also.
Applying the patch is a click of a menu item.
When the patch process begins, the database service is placed in maintenance status.
The log files are written to /var/opt/oracle/log/dbpatchm directory. You can monitor the patch progress through the log file (there is no progress indication, or log file access or error reporting detail through the GUI).
The log file shows details such as downloading the patch, unzip, stop services, apply patch, start services, run utlrp, etc.
The DBaaS service was down to apply the PSU patch for about 40 minutes, which is really good assuming no interference from DBA to apply the patch. I wish there was an option to schedule the patch through the cloud front-end management console.
Running the $ORACLE_HOME/OPatch/opatch lsinventory shows the patch apply status.
PSU can be applied using the dbaascli dbpatchm command or using the Cloud Interface. For all other one-off patches, use opatch.
