Chapter 10: Patching

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Now that you have become acclimated to your new desert environment and you are starting to recognize the lay of the land, the unique rock formations, gullies, temperatures, and flora and fauna of your particular environment, it is time to start looking at the next part of your adventure. You will now find that a considerable amount of your time will be spent dealing with patches and with patching your environments. Downloading, researching, planning, installing, fixing, testing, and documenting patches will take much of your time. I have heard it said that a monkey can be taught to install patches, but only a particularly talented monkey can learn what to do when a patch breaks.

This chapter explains the particulars about patches, how to install patches, and how to figure out what went wrong when a patch breaks.

What are Patches?

Http://www.dictionary.com defines a patch (in reference to computer science) as a piece of code added to software to fix a bug, especially as a temporary correction between two releases. This definition is correct as far as it goes. However, when looking at patching Oracle E-Business Suite, it does not completely describe what patching entails. To begin to understand the patching of a multi-GB application, you first have to get an idea of what kinds of patches there are.

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