I don’t use the automated patching functionality provided by EM12c. I do, however, get value out of the patch recommendations since they serve as a good reminder when I’ve missed a patch that should be applied to one of my targets. For this reason I was disappointed when, after upgrading from EM12cR1 to EM12cR2, the patch recommendations it gave me became stale and stopped getting updated when I loaded the em_catalog.zip file.
If you DO use the automated patching functionality, you have probably already followed all of the advice and installed the required patches documented in MOS note 427577.1, “Enterprise Manager patches required for setting up Provisioning, Patching and Cloning (Deployment Procedures)”. In that case you already have this patch installed and don’t need to read any further, but if not, read on.
After upgrading to EM12cR2, I also upgraded several databases from 10gR2 to 11gR2. Months passed, and yet the patch recommendations EM12c gave me continued to refer to 10gR2 patches which I knew weren’t applicable as I was running 11gR2. I tried several things, like setting EM12c to offline mode, to online mode, loading em_catalog.zip, re-running the various “Refresh From My Oracle Support” jobs, all without ever receiving fresh patch recommendations.
So to sort this out, I did what I usually do, and asked about it on Twitter. Big thanks to Sudip Datta, Vice President of Product Management at Oracle, who pointed me to bug 14822626 and its associated patch. The bug does not appear to be public, but MOS note 1522918.1, “12C – Patch Recommendations Not Updating After Upgrade To 12.1.0.2 Cloud Control – ‘…Patch Recommendations Computation is disabled … skipping …'” documents the problem as a known issue after upgrading from 12.1.0.1 to 12.1.0.2 and clearly matches the behavior I saw.
As soon as I applied patch 14822626, the old stale patch recommendations were cleared out, and once I loaded the current em_catalog.zip file, I had accurate patch recommendations for my environment that I can now use to make decisions going forward.
Thank you, Sudip!
Pardy DBA 