Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

Alex just pointed out to me that when you go to download the April CPU 2006 patches there is a note that tells you that the patches are not available for a lot of platforms until May 1st (many versions and platforms) and for some platforms the ETA is 15th May (e.g - 10.1.0.3 on Solaris for x86). I also notice that 10.2.0.1 is available for Unix, Linux and Windows but 10.2.0.2 is not. I thought the policy was to fix the later verisons first?

I think it is bad form that Oracle release an advisory telling customers to patch their databases but for many customers they will have to wait around 13 days and some almost one further month for the patches to be available. I remember that the January CPU had many more fixes but I don't remember that as many platforms had delayed patch releases.

It is not really a quarterly patch schedule if the patches are not available quarterly for some customers. I think Oracle should have delayed the release of the advisory as roughly 50% of the patches / platforms listed have delayed ETA's. It is hard to comment further without detailed knowledge of how many customers are on each platform / version.