Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Exadata Fleet Update Overview

Exadata Fleet Update provides you with a way to automate database cloud fleet updates without custom development. It also orchestrates updates across the stack in a single maintenance window.

Exadata Fleet Update leverages the fleet update capabilities of Fleet Patching and Provisioning (FPP). Exadata Fleet Update offers a simple and uniform "look and feel" for operations across:

  • Multiple database versions: All Oracle Database versions supported in the Cloud.
  • Multiple database types: Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC).
  • Dynamic runtime environments: Exadata Fleet Update adjusts to shifting runtime environments such as instance failovers to other nodes, service failovers, unavailable nodes, and so on.
In addition, two key specialized characteristics of Exadata Fleet Update offer major intrinsic benefits:

  • Resume: When patching across a cluster of nodes and/or a set of distributed database instances, if a failure occurs, it is difficult for the Fleet Administrators or Database Administrators to not only determine the cause of failure and resolve the issue such as /tmp space running low, but to figure out how far the patching has progressed and at what step the patching needs to be resumed in order to finish up the rest of the patching.

    Exadata Fleet Update comes to the rescue of Database Administrators. Internally, Exadata Fleet Update keeps checkpoints of every step of the patching process it performs, and records the results. You can retry the same operation from the console or by running the same CLI/API call after the original failure is resolved. Exadata Fleet Update tracks through these checkpoints, skips all of the successful steps, and resumes actions from the last failure point observed.

  • Rollback: When there is a failure in patching for various reasons, you may want to revert to the original software home. Exadata Fleet Update offers a very convenient and intuitive way of allowing you to perform a rollback operation by simply interchanging the source and target on the API. Exadata Fleet Update is able to internally determine that a rollback is needed and executes the required actions automatically.