If you’re using Oracle Discoverer to analyze your E-Business Suite data, you know that we have always taken a very selective approach to the certification of Discoverer patches.  Our historical strategy has been to specify the smallest number of essential patches needed to use Discoverer with the E-Business Suite. With the introduction of Cumulative Patchsets for Discoverer, things have changed in an important way.

Discoverer 10g Architecture:


What Are Discoverer Cumulative Patchsets?

Release vehicles for Discoverer bug fixes have evolved.  The latest iteration is the introduction of Cumulative Patchsets for Discoverer 10g.  As you might infer from their name, Cumulative Patchsets include the latest versions of all patches produced since the last major Discoverer release.  In other words, they include:
  • Patches contained in prior Cumulative Patchsets 
  • Latest versions of essential patches needed for compatibility with the E-Business Suite
How Are Discoverer Cumulative Patchsets Different?

The key difference boils down to the quality assurance stage.  One-time emergency patches for Discoverer are tested only to ensure that they fix a specific problem.  Very limited testing (if any) is performed to ensure that a given emergency patch doesn’t introduce other issues in other areas.  Virtually no testing is done to check whether a given emergency patch conflicts with other emergency patches.

Discoverer Cumulative Patchsets receive more systematic testing across the board to ensure compatibility with other emergency patches.  All of the released emergency patches are tested together as part of the release process for Cumulative Patchsets. 

What About Compatibility with the E-Business Suite?

As of today, E-Business Suite + Discoverer users have two certified options:
  1. Apply only the specific emergency patches needed for integrating Discoverer 10g in your E-Business Suite environments
  2. Apply the latest Discoverer 10g Cumulative Patchset. 
This new certification policy applies to both E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12 environments.  You can apply Discoverer 10g Cumulative Patchset 3 or higher to your Apps environments. 

The key phrase is, “or higher.”  My E-Business Suite certification team will continue to certify selected Discoverer 10g Cumulative Patchsets, but you will no longer have to wait for our certification to be completed before applying a patchset that includes a fix for a bug that you’re encountering.  The use of any Discoverer 10g Cumulative Patchset from 3 onwards is now fully supported with your E-Business Suite environment.

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