Just a quick post to make you aware of a fantastic option I recently discovered in opatch.
I look after a large number of database systems, some having multiple Oracle homes on the same drive (I know I know, but when you’re limited on drives…).
These homes consist of things like Oracle RDBMS (obvious one), Oracle 10g EM Agent and finally Oracle 10gAS (and 10g OEM if you like to think that OMS is separate, but it’s a 10gAS so I didn’t).
Generally the Oracle home for a 10gR2 RDBMS Enterprise Edition binary codeset seems to be around 1GB in size.
Apply a couple of opatches and you could be looking at 2GB!
All of a sudden, the partition is looking quite full (it used to be 9i on there when it was originally designed!!).
Lets bring in a new opatch command that came in as part of an opatch upgrade in 10gR2 (opatch patch 6880880).
The command is part of the “opatch util” command and is a sub-command called “cleanup”.
It supposedly removes the duplicated binary files taken during an opatch patch application.
Oracle doc 550522.1 states “Starting with 10.2, Opatch does not backup only the affected modules, it also takes a backup of the complete affected libraries to $ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage//backup//.“.
The cleanup command only removes files that are not required as part of a patch rollback.
Syntax: “$ opatch util cleanup“.
You will be prompted to select the oracle home and confirm the cleanup. It will also inform you of the amount of space saving.
Enjoy the space you get back, while you can!
