Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I made a post here yesterday titled "Ed has another post in the catpatch.sql series" about Edward Stanglers comments in his blog about running catpatch.sql after upgrades. His latest post talked about the need to run catpatch.sql after creating a database with the DBCA. This was because the seed database files are created for 9iR2 at least with 9.2.0.1 rather than 9.2.0.3.

I got an email from Paul this morning making some comments on my post. Paul said that he always creates a database from scratch. He said that this gives him a warm fuzzy feeling as he then knows that the installed binaries and patches are in good shape. He follows, that he knows he doesn't need to re-patch or run catpatch.sql and also it puts the hardware through its paces. He also said he is not against cloning in general but he just doesn't start on a new database server.

I liked the title of Paul’s email to me "catpatch and rm -rf /opt/oracle/product/10.1.0/db_1/assistants/dbca/templates/*.dfb" - It is good advice to delete the templates for many reasons that include space or security of the files as they can contain sensitive data.

Thanks for the email Paul and the good insights.