datapatch and OPatch documentation and MOS note

Did you ever ask yourself whether there is documentation available for OPatch and for datapatch? It is not easy to find. And you won’t find it under “Database” in the Oracle Bookshelf. So today I would like to guide you in this short blog post to the datapatch and OPatch documentation and MOS note.

Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash

OPatch? Datapatch?

Just to recap: You use OPatch (or opatchauto) to apply the binaries to an Oracle installation. As a result, you change the second or the third number of the release from Oracle 19.5.0 to Oracle 19.8.0. But once you start your database, you need to apply changes to the open database. And these changes get applied since Oracle 12c via datapatch. All pluggable databases must be up and open. And datapatch takes care on the PDB$SEED as well.

You can see OPatch and datapatch in action in my quarterly blog posts such as:

• Patching all my environments with the July 2020 Patch Bundles

In addition, you might watch the replay of our June 2020 web seminar:

• Oracle Database Release and Patching Strategy (Seminar 1)

for more insights.

OPatch Documentation

Yes, there is opatch documentation available. But for whatever reason, it is not part of the database documentation. It is part of the Enterprise Manager Documentation.

• OPatch 13.2 User’s Guide
• Master Note for OPatch

The newest available version is the 13.2 User’s Guide whereas 13.2 does not refer to the OPatch version but to the EM version the book is part of.

datapatch documentation

We made the datapatch documentation available via a MOS note.

• MOS Note:2680521.1 – datapatch User’s Guide

In the note, you won’t find only a command reference but also a list of important logs, a flow chart about which information gets written where and how to query it – and much more.

Have a look – this is the list of contents:

MOS Note:2680521.1 – datapatch User’s Guide – Contents

Further Information and Links

• MOS Note:2680521.1 – datapatch User’s Guide
• OPatch 13.2 User’s Guide
• Master Note for OPatch
• Patching all my environments with the July 2020 Patch Bundles
• Oracle Database Release and Patching Strategy (Seminar 1)

–Mike