April 2025 Patch Bundles and a new OPatch

Where are they? I saw some so-called “social” media rants this morning already about the missing April 2025 bundles, and people comparing file sizes of opatch wondering what has been forgotten to be included. So let me write a few words about April 2025 Patch Bundles and a new OPatch.

Photo by TOMOKO UJI on Unsplash

OPatch 12.2.0.1.46

As usual, there is a new Opatch available to install the new bundle patches. And it may be no news to you when you have been to one of our workshops or you watched one of our Virtual Classroom Seminars about Patching: Always use the most recent Opatch. AutoUpgrade does a great job fetching the newest opatch for you. So, in case you are tired of downloading it always by yourself, let AU do the job for you. Scroll down a bit for an example.

Anyhow, back to opatch  12.2.0.1.46, the April 2025 release. And of course, there is an 11.2 version available as well for those of you who haven’t moved to 19c yet.

• For all RDBMS 12*/18*/19*/21* – OPatch 12.2.0.1.46
• For RDBMS 11.2* – OPatch 11.2.0.3.50

What is new in this release?

• Performance and memory optimization
• Validation to check incompatible OPatch version
• Handle symlinks during patch rollback
• OPatchAuto implemented drain timeout option during  srvctl stop action
• OPatchAuto to allow (n-1) parallel patching (non-rolling mode) in multi-node environment

Daniel commented this morning that especially the drain timeout option is quite interesting since it gives you control in the OPatchAuto run for draining you didn’t have before. Check opatch’s “help” option for more information, and how to use it.

-drain_timeout <drain.timeout>

Drain timeout is the maximum time the service waits before exiting (in case of srvctl stop service or srvctl stop instance) or proceeding to stop database (srvctl stop database), until the draining of sessions is completed.
If session draining completes in 10 seconds and the drain timeout value (on CLI or resource attribute) is 100 seconds, then SRVCTL moves on after 10 seconds. It does not wait for the remaining 90 seconds.

The zip file is much smaller than before, and some people suspected that “we” forgot something to include. This is not the case, we downloaded it and unpacked it. The zip file indeed is smaller with 69MB but when you unpack it, it unfolds to the usual 19c size of a little bit over 145MB on disk. I guess a new compression algorithm has been used. In addition, the OPatch for 23ai is much smaller than the one for 19c.

OPatch 12.2.0.1.46 Download for Linux x86-64 on My Oracle Support

As usual, you can download OPatch via patch 6880880.

Download OPatch with AutoUpgrade

Or, smarter move, you use AutoUpgrade.

Please see Daniel’s Blog Post about how to easily download patches with AutoUpgrade:

global.global_log_dir=/home/oracle/autoupgrade/logs
global.keystore=/home/oracle/autoupgrade/keystore
global.patch=OPATCH

patch3.platform=LINUX.X64
patch3.folder=/home/oracle/autoupgrade/patches
patch3.target_home=/tmp/na3
patch3.target_version=19

This will fetch OPatch for 19c as Daniel wrote here.

Where are the April 2025 Bundle Patches?

Some people ranted already – but it looks as if the Bundles on Linux have been delayed by 2 days until April 17, 2025. When you at the Critical Patch Updates for Oracle Database – April 2025 and access the Database link for the Patch Availability Document, then you find quickly under 2.2 Post Release Patches that fixes on Linus are delayed by 2 days, other platforms are scheduled to be available on April 30 in two weeks. See also my older blog post here for further explanations.

Further Links and Information

• OPatch Download: Patch 6880880
• Critical Patch Advisory – January 2025 – Oracle
• Critical Patch Updates for Oracle Database – April 2025
• Why is my patch not available (yet)?
• Daniel’s Blog Post about how to easily download patches with AutoUpgrade

–Mike