Reducing Patching Downtimes for Oracle Application R12

How to Reducing Patching Down times for Apps?

1. Merge multiple patches using AD Merge Patch:-

Merging patches saves time because the Auto-Patch overhead of starting a new session is eliminated for those patches that are consolidated.  Duplicate linking, generating or database actions are run once only.  If two patches update the same file, AD Merge Patch will save time by applying only the latest one.  Patches can -- and should -- be merged with their listed prerequisite patches.   

 

2. Run AD Patch in non-interactive mode:-

Applying a set of patches using AD Patch in non-interactive mode eliminates the delay between successive tasks.

3.Check below things before Applying Patch:-

Avoid resource-related bottlenecks.  Patching can grind to a halt if you bump into the ceiling on your system.  Before patching, make sure that you’ve enabled automatic tables-pace management, and that you have sufficient hardware and free disk and temp space.

4. Use a shared application-tier file system:-

If you have a pool of application-tier servers set up for load-balancing, make sure that all of the individual servers share a single application filesystem. Patches applied to this central shared filesystem are instantly available to all application-tier servers. I’ve previously given an overview of this technique in this article.

5. Distribute worker processes across multiple servers:-

When applying a patch that includes a large number of processes, you can reduce the downtime even further by distributing the worker processes across multiple servers on multiple nodes. Using the Distributed AD feature of Auto-Patch and AD Controller, you can assign workers to run on the primary node and on other nodes that share the filesystem.

6. Defer system-wide database tasks until the end:-

Using adpatch options=nocompiledb,nomaintainmrc defers system-wide database tasks such as “Compile APPS schema” and “Maintain MRC” until after all patches have been applied. As of AD.H, AutoPatch automatically compiles the APPS schema and maintains MRC when applying standard patches.