Patch Recommendation

MRP3 for Oracle 19.17.0 adds an interesting surprise

You may have read my previous blog posts about MRPs (Monthly Recommended Patches). And today I did a quick check with Rodrigo. We both were a bit surprised to have the MRP3 for 19.17.0 add a lot of fixes to a standard RDBMS installation. So we were investigating a bit further. As a teaser, read on to see that MRP3 for Oracle 19.17.0 adds an interesting surprise.

 

How did we find out?

The MRP3 for Oracle Database 19.17.0 got released just a week ago. You can navigate to it via MOS

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Oracle Security Alerts for July 2019 got published

It’s patching day. And I’m already downloading the patch bundles for all my installations (11.2.0.4, 12.1.0.2, 12.2.0.1, 18c and 19c). The Oracle Security Alerts for July 2019 got published today.

Oracle Security Alerts for July 2019 got published

Patch Advisory and Risk Matrix

You can find the July 2019 Patch Advisory here. I checked the risk matrix for the database. It contains 8 new fixes for the database server. Please pay attention that 3 of the vulnerabilities may be exploitable from a client without an Oracle Database server being installed. The highest score is 9.8.

Please check the risk matrix by yourself:

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Special characters show junk in CLOB columns after upgrade to Oracle 12.2.0.1 with JDBC

Special characters show junk in CLOB columns after upgrade to Oracle 12.2.0.1 with JDBCThanks to my support colleague Roland Graeff who told me about this issue at a customer today. And I consider this a pretty serious issue. It can happen that Special characters show junk in CLOB columns after upgrade to Oracle 12.2.0.1. with JDBC.

This is as bad as it sounds. Roland told me about a case where the application showed weird characters instead of German umlauts (ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö, Ü) after an upgrade from Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 to 12.2.0.1.

Special characters show junk in CLOB columns after upgrade to Oracle 12.2.0.1 with JDBC

Roland explained to me that …

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Differences between PSU / BP and RU / RUR

Since Oracle Database 12.2.0.1 we change our patching model as well, switching from Patch Set Updates (PSU) and Proactive Bundle Patches (BP) to Release Updates (RU) and Release Update Revisions (RUR). But what are actually the differences between PSU / BP and RU / RUR patch bundles? Is there any or is it just a renaming of well known patch bundles?

No change on MS Windows

First of all, let me say that there won’t be any changes on the Windows platform. If your preferred operating system is MS Windows then stop reading here. On Windows you’ll see …

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Download Assistant for RUs, RURs, BPs, PSUs, Patch Sets and Releases

How often did I launch a search in MyOracle Support (MOS) for a specific Bundle Patch or Patch Set Update. And usually the MOS search results don’t get me what I’m looking for no matter how clever I search. But there was relief. A MOS Note combined all PSUs and BPs and much more into table format including the links. But what if there would be a Download Assistant for RUs, RURs, BPs, PSUs, Patch Sets and Releases?

I did blog about the previous magic note a while back:
Where is the Jan 2017 PSU for Oracle Database 11.2.0.4?

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_rowsets_enabled – Apply patch and use the default

I while back I blogged about issues with “rowsets“, a new Oracle 12c feature which unfortunately had two known wrong result (WQR) bugs:

What does “rowsets” actually mean?

I’d like to thank Sankar, our Development manager for providing this explanation which sheds some light on how important this feature actually is:

“Rowsets is a SQL execution performance enhancement introduced in Oracle RDBMS release 12.1 and further extended in a future release of the Oracle Database.

Prior to 12.1, data processing in the SQL layer were

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Patching does not work – Journey to the Cloud VI

What happened so far on my Journey to the Cloud?

DBaaS Oracle Cloud

Patching in the Cloud

I would like to patch my Oracle DBaaS Cloud today. It was so simple a …

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Switch off “_rowsets_enabled” in Oracle Database 12c

Please find a recent update here:

and more important:


Twitter is a good thing. I get alerted on things I haven’t seen before. And sometimes some things are more than interesting.

This one is actually proven by Jonathan Lewis – and you can read all the details in Jonathan’s blog post here:

There seems to be a realistic chance to get wrong query results displayed (regardless of using SQL*Plus or a JDBC or any other client – see the comment by Stefan Koehler below …

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Oracle PSU and BP April 2015 is available

As of April 14, 2015:

The April 2015 PSU/BP is available!

Here’s the most important information:

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