It appears that most Oracle DBAs don't apply patches to their systems. Over 2/3, according to a survey, don't apply security patches to their database servers.
Now I'm always skeptical of surveys, since the wording can have a huge impact on how people answer. But I had to mention this and pick on the Oracle guys a bit. :)
I don't necessarily think that SQL Server DBAs would patch more often, though with regular Windows patches coming every month, maybe they would. Instead I think that there's been a lack of security patches that have been released for SQL Server. There are the every other month cumulative updates, but you have to request the downloads, and I bet that many users aren't necessarily affected by the bugs, so they're not applying them regularly.
Patching is a tough battle. I've been out of the corporate world for a few years, but my last position was managing DB2, Oracle and SQL Server DBAs and I definitely found that the DB2 and Oracle DBAs were less likely to tolerate downtime. Though they did somehow need a cold backup of their databases before upgrades or patches, or even index rebuilds. The SQL Server folks were less likely to worry about a few minutes of downtime.
It's not just downtime, however. There's lots of testing that goes into ensuring that patches won't cause problems. And as a former administrator, I have no problem performing tests, but I have had lots of trouble getting users to actually help me test things and ensure that the new system is stable. They've got their own work to do and duplicating that work during breaks or after hours, isn't something they're interested in.
What is scary about this survey is that 2/3 of the people had never installed a critical update. I'm almost sure that number is much, much lower for SQL Server DBAs, who often get involved with the Windows folks for critical patches.
Maybe having patches come out regularly isn't necessarily a bad thing. At least you get to practice your update skills :)
Steve Jones
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