Merging Apps Patches in Oracle EBS R12.2

It’s public knowledge that the traditional patching tool in Oracle EBS “adpatch” is replaced with “adop” utility. It’s also known that adop utility automatically merges patches when more than one patch is specified in the command line arguments. So whats the need for blog post on merging patches when its taken care automatically?

This blog is for people who like to dig little deep into EBS to shave off some downtime during the upgrades. We save some downtime if we merge the patches ahead of time instead of letting adop do it during the upgrade window. This is especially true when you are applying big patches like 12.2.4.

Merging patches is done using same utility as in earlier versions called “admrgpch”. Except that there are few extra steps needed after merging the patches.

In EBS 12.2 after merging the patches using admrgpch, we need to copy the actual unzipped patches that we merged also into the destination  directory. This is required as adop utility seems to be looking for these patches during the prepare phase. If you don’t copy the unzipped patch directories, you can still apply the patches. But when you run adop=prepare during next patching cycle,  it will fail as it will look for actual patch directories inside the merged patch dir.

Here is how a sample merging procedure will look like in EBS R12.2

# merge patches 111111 & 222222

$ pwd
  /u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch
$ ls
  111111 222222 
$ mkdir dest
$ admrgpch -s /u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch -d /u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch/dest
$ cd dest
$ pwd
  /u01/R122_EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch/dest
$ ls
  fnd u_merged.drv 

# After admrgpch is finished, we need to copy patch directories into the dest dir

$ cd ..
$ mv 111111 /u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch/dest
$ mv 222222 /u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch/dest
$ cd /u01/EBS/fs_ne/EBSapps/patch/dest
$ ls
  111111 222222 fnd u_merged.drv

# Now you can the patches using adop=apply