Patching is a required post-installation task. To get the patch follow the instructions in Chapter 4 of The Oracle Database Installation Guide. You will have a zip file with a name similar to p4505133_10105_LINUX.zip. Unzip the patch file to a temporary directory. The unzip operation creates a directory called Disk1 and an html readme file. The readme contains the instructions on how to apply the patch. Switch user to root, change the user and group ownership of the temporary directory to oracle and oinstall respectively and move the directory to the oracle home account.
Before applying the patch, backup the $ORACLE_HOME/root.sh script. You ran this script during the installation. The patch installer will overwrite this file.
What follows is a description of applying a patch.
- Identify the existing database installation by browsing the /etc/oratab file. The line of interest is *:/app/oracle/product/10.1.0/Db_2:N. This line contains three colon-delimited fields: $ORACLE_SID:$ORACLE_HOME:<N|Y>. The comments do not specify a meaning for the asterisk in the first field. No database has been created yet. After you create a database, you will see that the asterisk has been replaced by the SID that you specified when creating it. The ‘N’ indicates that the dbstart utility will not restart the database after a system reboot.
- Use the information from the oratab file to set the ORACLE_SID and ORACLE_HOME environment variable. In this case ORACLE_SID is not set since no database exists.
- Shut down the Oracle databases. There are none to shut down.
- Stop all listener processes. Check for listener processes. ps -ef | grep tnslsnr. None have been configured yet. If you had, you would stop it using lsnrctl utility. This utility is in the $ORACLE_HOME/bin directory.
- Check for the Oracle Cluster Synchronization Service processes. The ps -ef output in this exercise shows /bin/su -l oracle -c exec /app/oracle/product/10.1.0/Db_2/bin/ocssd and /app/oracle/product/10.1.0/Db_2/bin/ocssd.bin.
- Stop the two Oracle Cluster Synchronization Service processes. The /etc/init.d/init.cssd stop. The result is that the CRS daemon, the EVM daemon, and the CSS daemon are shut down.
- Backup the databases. None exist.
- Switch user to the oracle account, change to the Disk1 created by unzipping the patch file and launch the installer: ./run_installer.
- In the Specify file locationsscreen the installer asks you to specify a name and a path. The path must be the value of the ORACLE_HOME environment variable.
- The installer displays a dialog box asking you to run root.sh script as root and to resume installer execution after the script terminates.
- The script asks permission to overwrite three files in /usr/local/bin: dbhome, oraenv, and coraenv.
- The script restarts the Oracle CSS processes.