It’s a trend. Years ago there were no patches finished after the main document. Then, it started appearing, to the point that they created a section warning about late patches. It was ok, because probably 99% of their clients must be on top of Linux x86-64. So, these patches were always available in time. This time, not even this patch was available. It was delivered a day later. Others, are scheduled for a week later, and sometimes, they reschedule.

I don’t have inside information. I only see the trend.

Years ago, patching a database was a big task, basically having to rebuild the dictionary. Then, they automated and changed stuff and things got super simple. Suddenly everything went downhill, to the point that last time I had to patch the patch.

I thought they were doing this on purpose to push us to their cloud service, but layoffs are a much simpler explanation. Occam’s Razor.

All hail the THORN Þ

Last week we received the CPU (Critical Patch Update) for Oracle products, which is a list of strongly recommended patches. They issue 4 per year (end of January, April, July and October). ALL patches were late.