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View Patch and Maintenance Window Information, Set the Patch Level

Autonomous Database uses predefined maintenance windows to automatically patch your database. You can view maintenance and patch information and see details for Autonomous Database maintenance history.

  • About Scheduled Maintenance and Patching
    All Autonomous Database instances are automatically assigned to a maintenance window and different instances can have different maintenance windows.
  • View Maintenance Event History
    You can view Autonomous Database maintenance event history for details about past maintenance events, such as the title, state, start time, and stop time.
  • View Patch Details
    You can view Autonomous Database patch information, including a list of resolved issues and components.
  • Set the Patch Level
    When you provision or clone an Autonomous Database instance you can select a patch level to apply to upcoming patches. You can also edit the patch level after an Autonomous Database instance is provisioned. There are two patch level options: Regular and Early.
  • View Maintenance Status Notifications
    The DB_NOTIFICATIONS view stores information about maintenance status notifications for your Autonomous Database instance.

Parent topic: Managing and Viewing Maintenance Windows, Patching Options, Work Requests, and Customer Contacts

About Scheduled Maintenance and Patching

All Autonomous Database instances are automatically assigned to a maintenance window and different instances can have different maintenance windows.

Autonomous Database uses these maintenance windows to patch the entire stack used to run your database, including the database software, database dictionary, operating systems, Exadata storage, firmware, and more.

Patches include bug fixes, security fixes, and new features. Critical security fixes are always applied as soon as they are available. Patches are deployed uniformly across all databases, so you do not need to track one-off patches. After a fix for an issue is implemented, for example an issue seen in one database, the fix is deployed to all Autonomous Database instances.

All patches undergo a rigorous testing and validation process that is part of a continuous integration and development pipeline. Fixes are validated in multiple stages and environments before they are deployed to Early patch level and Always Free databases, followed by Regular patch level databases. This pipeline allows regressions to be caught and fixed before the patch is deployed to all databases. In the unlikely case that patching introduces a regression, Oracle has processes to mitigate the problem, including actions such as the following:

  • Rolling back either a subset of the patch or the entire patch.

  • Setting database parameters to disable the patch that introduced the regression.

  • Applying an online patch to fix the problem without any downtime or connection disruption.


Description of autonomous-database-continuous-integration.eps follows

The Autonomous Database Details page shows the Patch level field and the Next maintenance field that includes the date and time for the upcoming maintenance window; the date is updated automatically when the next maintenance window is scheduled. The View history link provides details on past maintenance. The Target component field shows the component to be updated in the next maintenance window.

Description of adb_patch_level.png follows

When Autonomous Data Guard is enabled the console also shows maintenance information for a local standby database.

The Maintenance area includes the following information:

Maintenance Field Description

Patch level

Shows the patch level for the instance. There are two patch level options: Regular and Early. Click Edit to manage patch level settings.

See Set the Patch Level for more information.

Next maintenance

Specifies the time period for the next scheduled maintenance window. Click View history to see details on past maintenance.

See View Maintenance Event History for more information.

Target component

Lists the target components for the upcoming maintenance window. Possible values are:

  • Database: when the patch applies to the database home and executables.

  • Dictionary: when the patch applies to the data dictionary.

  • Infrastructure: when the patch applies to the Exadata hardware or to the Grid Infrastructure.

Next maintenance (local peer)

Specifies the time period for the next scheduled maintenance window for a local Autonomous Data Guard standby. Click View history to see details on past maintenance.

Target component (local peer)

Lists the target components for the upcoming maintenance window on the Autonomous Data Guard. Possible values are:

  • Database: when the patch applies to the database home and executables.

  • Dictionary: when the patch applies to the data dictionary.

  • Infrastructure: when the patch applies to the Exadata hardware or to the Grid Infrastructure.

Customer contacts

When customer contacts are set, Oracle sends notifications to the specified email addresses for Autonomous Database service-related issues.

See View and Manage Customer Contacts for Operational Issues and Announcements for more information.

Notes for scheduled maintenance and patching:

  • The Autonomous Database operations team never accesses your data unless you explicitly grant permission through a Service Request for a specified duration.

  • If your database is in the stopped state during the maintenance window, the database changes from the patch are applied when you start your database.

  • Your database remains available during the maintenance window. New connections to the database will always succeed. Your existing database connections may get disconnected briefly, depending on the component being patched; however, you can immediately reconnect and continue using your database:

    • For Database patches, existing connections may get disconnected if they are running for longer than the drain time after patching starts.

    • For Infrastructure patches, existing connections may get disconnected if they are running for longer than the drain time after patching starts.

    • For Dictionary patches, existing connections may get disconnected if they are holding locks on the dictionary objects being patched. Otherwise, the existing connections will not be impacted. For example, if your application is running a procedure in the DBMS_CLOUD package during patching and the package needs to be patched, the session using that package may get disconnected.

  • You can use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Events to be notified when maintenance begins and ends. See Information Events on Autonomous Database for more information.

  • If you want to change the assigned maintenance window to a different 2-hour window on either Saturday or Sunday in the region's local time zone, file a Service Request at Oracle Cloud Support.

    If you want a specific time period for your maintenance window on either Saturday or Sunday in the region's local time zone, you can request the time period with the same Service Request. If you request a specific time period for your maintenance window, the change can only be made if the time period you request is available for your database.

  • If your database's allocated storage is 384 TB, you can choose a custom 2-hour window by filing a Service Request at Oracle Cloud Support (that is you can file a Service Request to request a specific day and time period on either Saturday or Sunday in the region's local time zone for your maintenance window).

View Maintenance Event History

You can view Autonomous Database maintenance event history for details about past maintenance events, such as the title, state, start time, and stop time.

Perform the following prerequisite steps as necessary:

  • Open the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console by clicking the navigation icon next to Oracle Cloud.

  • From the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure left navigation menu click Oracle Database and then, depending on your workload click one of: Autonomous Data Warehouse, Autonomous JSON Database, or Autonomous Transaction Processing.

  • On the Autonomous Databases page select an Autonomous Database from the links under the Display name column.

To view maintenance history, do the following:

  1. On the Autonomous Database Details page, under Maintenance, click View history.
  2. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console displays the Maintenance History page.
  3. (Optional) Use the State selector to filter events by state.

    For example, if you select Succeeded, the Maintenance History page shows only the maintenance events with the Succeeded state.

    Description of adb_maintenance_history.png follows
The Maintenance History page shows details for each maintenance event, including the following:
Field Description

Title

The name of the maintenance event.

Maintenance type

Planned or Unplanned.

Target component

 The type of the resource on which the maintenance event occurs: Database, Dictionary, or Infrastructure.

State

Succeeded, Failed, or In progress.

Start Time

Maintenance start time.

End Time

Maintenance end time.
Note

Maintenance event history is available starting with maintenance events after February 2021.

View Patch Details

You can view Autonomous Database patch information, including a list of resolved issues and components.

The DBA_CLOUD_PATCH_INFO view provides patch information related to reported bugs (bugs reported by a customer). You can use this information to determine if a bug you reported is fixed and the patch version where the fix was applied to your Autonomous Database instance. If there were no customer bugs in a patch, DBA_CLOUD_PATCH_INFO does not include any rows for that patch.

To view patch information for a specific patch, do the following:

  1. Select the Autonomous Database patch that you want to view. The Maintenance History page on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console shows the list of patches under Title.
  2. For the selected patch, query the DBA_CLOUD_PATCH_INFO view.

    For example, for patch ADBS-21.7.1.1, use the following query: 

    SELECT * FROM DBA_CLOUD_PATCH_INFO WHERE PATCH_VERSION = 'ADBS-21.7.1.1';
  3. For an issue of interest, query the view to obtain details for the issue:
    SELECT * FROM DBA_CLOUD_PATCH_INFO WHERE PATCH_VERSION = 'ADBS-21.7.1.1' and BUG_NUM = bug_number;

To view patch information for all available patches:

SELECT * FROM DBA_CLOUD_PATCH_INFO;

Notes for viewing patch information:

  • The view DBA_CLOUD_PATCH_INFO is available to the ADMIN user.

  • Patch information and details on resolved issues is available from ADBS-21.7.1.1 onwards (starting in July 2021).

  • The view DBA_CLOUD_PATCH_INFO has the following columns: 

    BUG_NUM, BUG_TITLE, COMPONENT_NAME, PATCH_VERSION

See View Maintenance Status Notifications for details about the patches applied during maintenance.

Set the Patch Level

When you provision or clone an Autonomous Database instance you can select a patch level to apply to upcoming patches. You can also edit the patch level after an Autonomous Database instance is provisioned. There are two patch level options: Regular and Early.

When you select patch level Early, patches are applied for the Autonomous Database instance one week before the Regular scheduled patch. The Next Maintenance field in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console reflects a maintenance window date and time based on the patch level.

The default patch level for provisioning an Autonomous Database instance is Regular. The default patch level for cloning is the patch level specified for the source database.

Provisioning or cloning an instance and setting the patch level to Early allows you to use and to test upcoming patches before they are applied to all systems. Oracle recommends you select the Early patch level for your development and test databases if you want to test the upcoming patches before the patches reach production. You can also test your workloads using Oracle Real Application Testing to capture a workload on a production system and replay it with Early patch level. See Test Workloads with Oracle Real Application Testing for more information.

To set the patch level while provisioning or cloning an instance, do the following:

To change the patch level for an existing Autonomous Database, do the following:

  1. On the Autonomous Database Details page, under Maintenance, in the Patch level field click Edit.
    Note

    The Edit button may be disabled under the following circumstances:
    • If early patch level is not available in your region for your database version.
    • If your database has Autonomous Data Guard enabled.
    • If your database is on early patch level and it is not feasible to move it to regular patch level. In this case, you should try again after the next maintenance window.
  2. Select the patch level, Regular or Early, and click Submit.

    The time it takes to change the patch level depends on the size of your database. You may see brief connection drops during this time.

Reporting Patch Issues to Oracle Support

When you report an issue for an Early patch level database, Oracle Support takes the necessary actions to prevent the problem from propagating to Regular patch level databases. A few examples of the possible actions are:

  • The patch that caused the problem is removed before the regular patch level databases are patched.

  • The patch that caused the problem is disabled using database parameters when it is being applied to the regular patch-level databases.

  • Patching of regular patch level databases is paused until corrective action is taken.

If you have an issue to report, file a service request at Oracle Cloud Support or contact your support representative.

Oracle provides a service level objective of zero regressions in your production database. See Zero-Regression Service Level Objective for more information.

Notes for patching level:

  • The option to set the patch level is not available in every region. In some regions all Autonomous Database instances are provisioned or cloned at the Regular patch level.

  • Autonomous Data Guard is only available for instances with patch level Regular. When you configure an Autonomous Database instance with patch level Early, you cannot enable Autonomous Data Guard.

  • Always Free Autonomous Database instances do not provide the Early patch level option.

  • When the patch level of a source Autonomous Database instance is Regular, in regions that support the Early patch level you can set the patch level of a clone to Early.

View Maintenance Status Notifications

The DB_NOTIFICATIONS view stores information about maintenance status notifications for your Autonomous Database instance.

To show notification information:

  1. Connect to your Autonomous Database instance.
  2. Use the following query to view maintenance (patching) information.
    SELECT * FROM DB_NOTIFICATIONS WHERE TYPE = 'MAINTENANCE';

The following provides details about the DESCRIPTION field values.

  • Maintenance run has ended: Specifies maintenance has completed. The MAINTENANCE_STATUS shows the value COMPLETED with the start and end timestamps for the completed maintenance in ACTUAL_START_DATE and ACTUAL_END_DATE.

  • Maintenance run is scheduled for the instance: Specifies a new maintenance has been scheduled. The MAINTENANCE_STATUS shows the value SCHEDULED with the expected start and end timestamps for the scheduled maintenance in EXPECTED_START_DATE and EXPECTED_END_DATE.

  • Maintenance run has begun: Specifies the maintenance is in progress and provides the start timestamp for the active maintenance. The MAINTENANCE_STATUS shows the value IN_PROGRESS and ACTUAL_START_DATE stores the start timestamp.

The following table shows the DB_NOTIFICATIONS columns and datatypes.

Column Datatype Description
TYPE VARCHAR2(128)

Specifies the type of the notification.

Valid value is: MAINTENANCE.

TIME TIMESTAMP(6) WITH TIME ZONE

Time when the notification entry was added.
EXPECTED_START_DATE TIMESTAMP(6) WITH TIME ZONE

Scheduled maintenance start time.
EXPECTED_END_DATE TIMESTAMP(6) WITH TIME ZONE

Scheduled maintenance end time.
ACTUAL_START_DATE TIMESTAMP(6) WITH TIME ZONE

Actual maintenance start time.
ACTUAL_END_DATE TIMESTAMP(6) WITH TIME ZONE

Actual maintenance end time.
MAINTENANCE_PRODUCT VARCHAR2(128)

Product/component for which maintenance is scheduled/ongoing.
MAINTENANCE_STATUS VARCHAR2(128)

Current status of the maintenance.
DESCRIPTION VARCHAR2(128)

The notification message details.
PATCH_ID VARCHAR2(128)

Patch version.

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