Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

Recently while applying a WebLogic PSU Patch in an Oracle Hyperion-Essbase 14.x environment we encountered a weird issue where the patching utility was exceptionally slow while doing a rollback. We were using BSU (BEA Smart Update) utility to patch middleware homes and It took almost 95 minutes to rollback a patch in one of the lower environment. The slowness was most noticeable when its checking for conflicts in the system. It was surprising, I mean though BSU is an old utility (pre OPatch) but still is still the times are quite high to rollback a patch and was not acceptable.

I have even increased the memory for the BSU and few more things, but none of them worked and was dead slow. I was lucky that I found an old metalink note (ID 2271366.1) which is about the same issue where the WLS BSU (Smart Update) may take a very long time to apply patches. This is especially true with larger patches such as the Patch Set Update (PSU).

As per recommendation, we’d applied two of below mentioned smart update utility patches and next time it took hardly 5 minutes to rollback the same patch in a different environment. Both of the patches updates some of the critical BSU program modules (patch clients, patch common and common dev modules) and corrected their codepatch issues by applying a smart update V4.

Patch 12426828 (SMARTUPDATE 3.3 INSTALLER PLACEHOLDER)
Patch 31136426 (SMART UPDATE TOOL ENHANCEMENT V4)

Hope It Helped!
Prashant Dixit