Did you ever wanted to find out the differences between two Oracle database releases? Today, I am super-super excited. Especially, since this was a long journey. And I have to thank our entire team, Rodrigo especially but also Bill and all the others working and helping here. THIS is the tool many of you have looking for since years. It is time now, ORAdiff is live – compare two Oracle Database and Patch releases.
What is ORAdiff?
This tool is made for you. It allows you to compare two Oracle releases to each other. And not only core releases but also patch levels with or without OJVM for those of you who have a Support contract. You will logon with your Oracle SSO user. And then you can start compare releases, e.g. 19.16.0 to 19.20.0.
Historically, the tool’s idea started from Rodrigo’s efforts on his blog dissecting Oracle patch releases. But that is a lot of information – and it was hard to compare things to each other. The idea got born to put this into an APEX app which allows access to almost everything, and find out about changes in between two Oracle (patch) releases. Especially Rodrigo put a ton of work into this – and we at Oracle use it internally already for a while.
Further down in this blog post I give you some typical examples. But there is much more you can do for sure.
Where do you start?
Simply access
– then logon with your SSO user. That’s it.
In addition, you will find a new tile in the What’s New page in the Oracle Database documentation soon.
What can you do with it?
Let me describe some typical scenarios.
Is this patch included in an RU?
This is a question I get at least once per week. And ORAdiff has the answer quickly for you. Just today I looked up for a customer whether 34910877 will be included in 19.20.0 since Support diagnosed this as the root cause for an issue.
Go to: INCLUDED FIXES ==> SEARCH FIXES and input the bug number, in my case: 34910877. Then hit RETURN. And there you go:
Good news, this fix is included in 19.20.0. And since RUs are cumulative, it will be in all future RUs for 19c as well.
Do privileges disappear? Or are there any new ones?
Another common question (and sometimes, pitfall) are privs disappearing, sometimes for security reasons. Ask ORAdiff, it will tell you.
Choose PRIVILEGES ==> SYSTEM PRIVILEGES. Then as next step choose your source and your target release, for instance 19.16.0 and 19.20.0 as you see below in the screen shot. And you will see by default System Privileges added. See also the source where this is coming from: DBA_SYS_PRIVS.
But that’s the privileges being added. But are there any removed?
Click on the “Removed” tab next to “Added” – and you will see that no privs got removed.
Any new parameters?
And what is the most often asked question you are having? Any new parameters with the new patch release. Let us just change to another menu item, PARAMETERS ==> INITIALIZATION PARAMETERS. Please recognized that your releases chosen before stay. You don’t have to adjust this.
Now click on the new parameter listed, xml_handling_of_invalid_chars, and it takes you directly to the Oracle documentation.
And there is so much more to query and play with.
Start and let us know what you think.
Will it get refreshed automatically?
Rodrigo automated almost everything. But since this is hosted in an enclosed environment in Oracle Autonomous Database, please expect a few days after a release update or patch bundle gets published until it is visible to you. No need to open an SR – we just need to wait for the official release to be available before we can do the magic.
Will it be extended?
Yes, this is not the end of the story. We plan to load also 9i and 10g information into the system as soon as time allows. And gradually, we may also add some new features. So please stay tuned and watch out on our blogs for news about ORAdiff.
Kudos and thanks a lot to Rodrigo and the entire team!!
Further Links and Information
–Mike
I love it. that will also help to learn new stuff on new versions. thanks to everyone who spend time on this.
Hi Mike,
I just checked it and its really a cool tool. Should be very useful.
Regards,
Thiru
Thanks – and we hope so 🙂
Cheers,
Mike
Quarterly RUs include ACFS/CRS(OCW)/DB/etc RUs. If you can show fixes separately for each patch type, it would be terrific. For example, Oracle included patch 34718455 in ACFS RU 19.19 causing soft lockup errors on some RHCK 8.7 systems: Postpatch errors applying 19.19 RU on RHEL 8.7 (kernel 4.18.0-425.10.1 and later) (Doc ID 2944243.1). It is one of the examples when the proposed enhancement can be useful.
Well, that would be wonderful – but patches are not labeled in such categories. We would really LOVE to do this – but it is not possible at this stage.
Cheers,
Mike
Thanks for this post. Also thanks to the team who developed this really useful utility. Just yesterday I had to find out if a one-off patch is now rolled into 19.20 and this utility made it so much easier than going through the entire bug fix list.
Very useful, great !
Now that in oradiff you have the inventory of all files in each release, it would be so nice if we could generate some kind of inventory of an existing oracle installation and upload it to oradiff. Then the tool should say if your installation is ok or not. Sometimes it happens that, after patching or after errors during patching or people messing around in an oracle home, that files are missing or ownerships or permissions are not correct anymore. Usually you notice this during the next patching cycle when things start to fail. If we could do a validation that guarantees that an oracle_home is 100% ok, that would give a lot of confidence. Especially on ODA, where you should not manually touch any files. But in pratice I often see people have been doing things on the ODA and the principle (when ODA was launched) that “all ODA’s in the world are identical” (if they are on the same patch level), is rarely true. If you have a reference in oradiff about how a valid oracle_home (db and grid) looks like, and we could compare our oracle_home with it, that would be so nice.
Hi Geert,
we have this internally already in beta stage. But rolling this out externally will be a challenge.
You would upload “your data” to an Oracle system, and an incredible amount of security and compliance audits need to be done on our side beforehand. In short, yes, we have this in our mind – but at the moment I can’t tell you whether we’ll be able to offer this as a service for customers directly.
Thanks 🙂
Mike
Hi Mike, Does this require any management packs and is the usage free without limitations against Standard Edition DBs?
No limitations, no license.
Cheers,
Mike