Every quarter I download the latest patch set from Oracle’s support site by using the Recommended Patch Advisor. But the January 2020 patch sets did not show up. The RPA still recommends the October 2019 patch sets. The Recommended Patch Advisor is one of the options under the Patches and Updates tab in Oracle’s support site. I tried searching Oracle’s support site and Googling but did not find any answers. I am sure that the information is out there somewhere but the way I was searching for it did not find it. So, I thought I would post a quick note about it. The short answer is that you should use this Oracle support document to find the latest patch sets and not the Recommended Patch Advisor:
Master Note for Database Proactive Patch Program (Doc ID 756671.1)
To find this out I had to open an SR with Oracle Support. They quickly identified this document which explained the situation:
My Oracle Support: Patch and Health Recommendations No Longer Supported (Doc ID 2644769.1)
Note 2644769.1 seems to say that the Recommended Patch Advisor will continue to refer to the October 2019 patches until Oracle removes the RPA from their support site in May.
The funny thing is that I knew we had an internal document that a coworker and I had both contributed to that describes how to download the latest patch set and apply it to a database to create a tar or zip that we could use to deploy a new database. I decided to modify that document to refer to note 756671.1 and remove references to the RPA. To my surprise my coworker had already included note 756671.1 months ago in our instructions and not the RPA. I think that Oracle support must have recommended the note some time ago, but I was still using the advisor. I guess you learn something new every day.
Anyway, note to self: don’t use the Recommended Patch Advisor to find the quarterly patch updates. Use note 756671.1.
Bobby
