Moving Cloud control up to 12.1.0.5



Yesterday we patched cloud control to 12.1.0.5 from 12.1.0.4. This patch was largely prompted by the fact that this version gives support for ie11 - prior to the patch you just get a cryptic message on the login screen and you can't actually get past that. There are one off patches to address is but we prefer to stick to major patchsets where possible.

The process went pretty well - the installer is very slick now and does a huge amount of extra checking for you to prevent issues - as long as you heed the advice.....

We ignored the message about the db compatible parameter (11.2.0.2) not matching the actual database version (12.1.0.2) as we didn't think it would matter - it had been left at 11 as we only recently moved to 12c.

The process happily ran along for quite a while until we hit this

ORA-39726: unsupported add/drop column operation on compressed tables
File:/oracle/12105_oms/oms/plugins/oracle.sysman.cfw.oms.plugin_12.1.0.3.0/sql/cfw/12.1.0.2.0/cfw_service_family_schema_upgrade.sql
Statement:ALTER TABLE
   CFW_SERVICE_FAMILY_HOME
ADD
   (IS_SOFTWARE_LIB_TAB NUMBER(1,0)  DEFAULT 0)


So it seems that adding a column to a compressed table is only possible in 12c if compatible is 12c....

At this point we had a minor panic thinking we'd have to restore and start the whole thing again - but actually we didn't - the process was just restartable.

So what we did was set compatible to 12.1.0.2 in the db, bounce the database and then just click the retry button in the installer window.

The process then just figured out what it needed to do to pick up from where it failed and then it just carried on.

It then ran to completion and we were successfully patched.

It's really nice to see this patching coped with the failure - in older versions this would not have been possible.

Nice job by the developers.

As a summary for others the process for a 75GB repo db with ~150 hosts and 400 databases  (a system that the cloud control management page classifies as 'Medium')  took about 1 hour end to end i think (ignoring the retry part we went through) - the majority of that being the repo database changes.

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