Oracle-Ninja.com Andy Colvin's Oracle Blog

What’s New With Exadata – September 2011

Over the past few weeks, I've been working on some new (and older) installations of Exadata, and came across a few items that piqued my interest.  Each of these things had been on my mind for a while, but it's nice to see them finally resolved.

The first is a small change to the installation tree of the Oracle homes on Exadata.  With the release of 11.2.0.2, Oracle created a new "best practice" of performing all patch sets out of place into a new home.  While this makes it really easy to roll back a patch, the default naming convention for Oracle homes on Exadata became a bit of a sticky situation. If your 11.2.0.2 Grid Infrastructure home was at /u01/app/11.2.0/grid, where would you put your 11.2.0.3 home when it's ready to come out?  This was the topic of more than a few discussions around the Enkitec office.  Do you extend the version out another digit to 11.2.0.3, or version the home (/u01/app/11.2.0/grid_11.2.0.2, etc).  Well, Oracle has put this discussion to rest....Your new Oracle home directories on Exadata are:

Grid Infrastructure - /u01/app/11.2.0.2/grid
Database - /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0.2/dbhome_1

read on for another change (it has to do with bundle patches)