DBA_REGISTRY_HISTORY vs DBA_REGISTRY_SQLPATCH

At the DOAG Conference in November in Nürnberg in November 2016 a customer asked me right after my talk about “Upgrade to Oracle Database 12.2. – Live and Uncensored” why the DBA_REGISTRY_HISTORY does not get updated when he applies a Bundle Patch and follows all instructions including the “./datapatch -verbose” call.

I was wondering as well and asked him to open an SR. Which he did. And he received the message from Support that it is not supposed to appear in Oracle 12c anymore this way but only in DBA_REGISTRY_SQLPATCH. Now I dug a bit deeper internally to get a clear statement (thanks to Carol (my boss) and Rae (my teammate) and Scott (the man who owns datapatch) for following up!).

Patch Query in Oracle Database 11g

Tim Hall has published this simple and quite helpful script to query applied PSUs and BPs in Oracle Database 11g:
Script to monitor DBA_REGISTRY_HISTORY

And the output in my environment looked like this:

ACTION_TIME           ACTION  NAMESPE VERSION  ID      COMMENTS             BUN
 -------------------- ------- ------- -------- ------- -------------------- ---
 01-JUL-2016 15:24:56 APPLY   SERVER  11.2.0.4 160419  PSU 11.2.0.4.160419  PSU
 21-OCT-2016 17:40:32 APPLY   SERVER  11.2.0.4 161018  PSU 11.2.0.4.161018  PSU

But running the same script on Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 returnes (as for the customer) “no rows selected“.

Patch Query for Oracle Database 12c

Since Oracle Database 12.1.0.1 we use DBA_REGISTRY_SQLPATCH instead of DBA_REGISTRY_HISTORY to track PSUs and BPs applied to the database. I used this script: check_patches.sql.

My output in Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 looks like this:

ACTION_TIME          ACTION  STATUS   DESCRIPTION          VERSION  PATCH_ID BUND
-------------------- ------- -------- -------------------- -------- -------- ----
21-OCT-2016 17:29:36 APPLY   SUCCESS  DBP: 12.1.0.2.161018 12.1.0.2 24340679 DBBP

when using this tiny script:

SET LINESIZE 400
SET PAGESIZE 100
COLUMN action_time FORMAT A20
COLUMN action FORMAT A10
COLUMN status FORMAT A10
COLUMN description FORMAT A40
COLUMN version FORMAT A10
COLUMN bundle_series FORMAT A10

SELECT TO_CHAR(action_time, 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS') AS action_time,
 action,
 status,
 description,
 version,
 patch_id,
 bundle_series
 FROM   sys.dba_registry_sqlpatch
 ORDER by action_time;

But the question remains if – as in Oracle Database 12.1.0.1 – both views should get updated.

Explanation

In 11.2.0.4, we used the script catbundle.sql to apply bundle patches.  It uses DBA_REGISTRY_HISTORY only.  For 12.1.0.1 with the introduction of datapatch, we now have the (much better) DBA_REGISTRY_SQLPATCH.  This is used for both, bundle and non-bundle patches.  In Oracle Database 12.1.0.1. for bundle patches we actually called catbundle internally, so in 12.1.0.1 both registries were updated for bundle patches.
Starting in 12.1.0.2, however, only DBA_REGISTRY_SQLPATCH is queried and updated for bundle and non
bundle patches.

Update [Dec 23, 2016]

After discussing this and other issues with the owners of datapatch my teammate Rae logged a bug for this issue as we believe both views should be updated as it happened in 12.1.0.1. Bug# 25269268 tracks the issue.

–Mike