Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I just saw a post by justin kestelyn to the OTN at open world blog that talks about Mary Ann Davidsons guru chat at Oracle Open World today. Justin tells us that the room was standing room only and quite informative.

Mary Ann talked about the reasons for the choice of quarterly patch schedule and then took a series of questions from the floor, predictably the main subject being the problems of patching. Justin makes a great point that the OEM team need to carefully consider a more robust and proper patch management tool in future. I have said this before as well. What we need is a tool that can detect which patches (exactly which patches) have been applied; it should allow multiple patches to be applied on top of each other (or not) and reversed if needed. It should even also be capable of remotely pushing out patches to large numbers of databases across the network (ideally without stopping them - Is that asking too much??) - And i don't mean remotely from an Oracle website in the same manner as Windows OS patches.