thank you very much for your contribution. I am not aware of any specific patches. Somehow we have to trust Oracle that they “flag” important patches with “recommended”. Before PSUs, I checked the list of recommended patches in MetaLink for a specific platform and release but there is no guarantee that all needed, critical patches are listed.

In my opinion, Oracle will include these important interim patches in future patchsets, patchset updates or other recommended patches if they are relevant to a high number of customers.

There are many customers who do not install interim patches, patchset updates or recommended patches on production systems before they hit a specific bug. In my opinion, that does not make sense as there are so many bugs and it is only a matter of time, until they hit one.

On the other hand, PSUs give us an optimal and easy way to get most of the critical bugfixes on a regular basis. However we have to be aware that not all bugfixes are included and there is still the possibility of hitting a critical issue, although the probability is much lower than without PSUs.

Best regards,
Martin

thanks for this useful info.

Are you aware of any important one-off patches on top of 10.2.0.4.0 that are not included in this PSU nor fixes are provided for them on top of 10.2.0.4.1?

I’ve done a search using Metalink and it reports more than 500 bugs on top of 10.2.0.4.0 which is way too long for checking and it’s not a complete list(I’m not able to get a list of all known bugs affecting 10.2.0.4.0, it’s only a random one that consists of 500 entries).

I’ve posted about one such one-off patch needed to be applied on top of 10.2.0.4.0 before applying the PSU – http://jhdba.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/applying-the-10-2-0-4-1-patch-set-update-psu/
which I think is an important issue because it can lead to unexpected primary db downtime.

Thanks in advance