Oracle Database Patching: Industry-Specific Use Cases for Businesses

Emerging technologies and increased support for databases have helped businesses achieve better outcomes by considering maintaining the integrity, security, and performance of Oracle Databases.

Oracle Database Patching is a beneficial factor in reducing the possible vulnerabilities and offering multi-level support for your database. It is applied based on the needs of an organization and covers the level of support such as Critical Patch Updates (CPUs), Patch Set Updates (PSUs), and Interim Patches.

It ensures to provide a secure database by offering additional services like risk management, monitoring, and reporting. Let’s discover the businesses that have successfully applied Oracle Database Patching.

Nationwide is an organization that offers insurance and financial services to its customers. It comes under the list of Fortune 100 companies. They have revenue generation of more than 34 billion and assets of more than 170 billion.

Their problem was regarding software currency for Oracle databases, and they have chosen it to be top priority work that includes security, stability, consistency, supportability, and cost-efficiency. The difficulties they were facing were various types of clustering, rapid multiplication of database versions, and a 99% success rate.

Additionally, the traditional method of Oracle Database Patching (Opatch) was leading to manual, time-consuming operations, and they wanted to have Oracle enterprise-level solutions.

How did Oracle help them?

Here’s the comparison between patching technique alternatives.

• Scripted Patching
• In deploy homes, it was taking more than 60 minutes, a single home at a time, and more patching time.
• Regarding switching, it required 30 minutes, a single database at a time, and experienced DBA.
• Oracle Enterprise Manager Fleet Maintenance
• In deploy homes, it performed all the patches in 20 minutes, offered scalability, and enabled concurrency.
• For switching, it takes 7 to 15 minutes, offers scalability, and enables concurrency.
• Fleet maintenance enabled them to patch the entire database fleet semiannually.
• It provided them with reduced downtime, few patching windows (events), and an increased success rate.
• The additional fleet capability allowed for viewing quarterly.

Nationwide used Oracle Enterprise Manager to standardize patching of OCI, AWS, and on-premises databases. As a result, they experienced 70% decreased DBA time during 5X faster patching and 3x times databases with a success rate of 99%.

Comcast is a global technology and entertainment company that was facing difficulty with database provisioning times, which have taken more than a month because they have hardware procurement backlogs. Usually, hardware is underutilized once it is moved into production. Moreover, they needed help with control configuration and routine patching of their estate with 2,100 databases.

How did Oracle help them?

The deployment of Oracle Enterprise Manager, a database lifecycle management, helped Comcast in deep performance visibility into their multitenant database fleet for automated database provisioning, increased utilization, standardized database configurations and patching levels, and self-service-enabled provisioning.

Let’s discover the outcomes Comcast has received with Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM).

• It helped to minimize the provisioning times to a few minutes, as earlier it was taking 2 to 3 months.
• It made it easy to automate the patching of 2,100 databases; previously, on-demand database patching was a challenging task for Comcast.
• It offered decreased database maintenance downtime.
• Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) helped to overcome Oracle Database performance issues.
• It offered monitoring and alerting of 12,000 targets through monitoring templates, metric extensions, and notifications.
• OEM analytics and reporting capability assisted in compliance, capacity management, and problem management.
• DBaaS self-service portal offered the provision of pluggable databases on a private cloud.
• With its automation capability, Comcast was able to simplify complex tasks like patch management, agent deployment, and many more.

Conclusion

Astute Business Solutions helps businesses with a team of professional experts who are well-versed in Oracle Database Architecture. We cater to their specific requirements with our customized patching strategies.

You can contact us if you need any assistance in Database Patching Services.

Our comprehensive service offering and proactive security measures will help you to run your business operations effectively.