MERGING APPS PATCHES IN ORACLE

EBS R12.2
by Vasu Balla
December 30, 2014
Posted in: Technical Track
Tags: EBS, Oracle

It’s public knowledge that the traditional patching tool in Oracle EBS

“adpatch” is replaced with “adop” utility. It’s also known that adop utility
automatically merges patches when more than one patch is specified in
the command line arguments. So whats the need for blog post on
merging patches when its taken care automatically?

This blog is for people who like to dig little deep into EBS to shave off
some downtime during the upgrades. We save some downtime if we
merge the patches ahead of time instead of letting adop do it during the
upgrade window. This is especially true when you are applying big
patches like 12.2.4.

Merging patches is done using same utility as in earlier versions called

“admrgpch”. Except that there are few extra steps needed after merging
the patches.

In EBS 12.2 after merging the patches using admrgpch, we need to copy
the actual unzipped patches that we merged also into the destination 
directory. This is required as adop utility seems to be looking for these
patches during the prepare phase. If you don’t copy the unzipped patch
directories, you can still apply the patches. But when you run
adop=prepare during next patching cycle,  it will fail as it will look for
actual patch directories inside the merged patch dir.

Here is how a sample merging procedure will look like in EBS R12.2
# merge patches 111111 & 222222
$ pwd
/u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch
$ ls
111111 222222
$ mkdir dest
$ admrgpch -s /u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch -d
/u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch/dest
$ cd dest
$ pwd
 /u01/R122_EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch/dest
$ ls
fnd u_merged.drv

# After admrgpch is finished, we need to copy patch

directories into the dest dir

$ cd ..
$ mv 111111 /u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch/dest
$ mv 222222 /u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch/dest
$ cd /u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch/dest
$ ls
111111 222222 fnd u_merged.drv

# Now you can the patches using adop=apply