OraTransplant

Our patch and upgrade policy

18 March 2006 at 10:45 CET | In AppServer, Database, Oracle, Patches and upgrades |

Eurotransplant allocates organs available for donation in 6 European countries. Whenever an organ donor is available in any of these six countries, Eurotransplant is notified. We collect data about that donor and start the matching to all recipients on the waiting list. This process relies heavily on IT. It’s also a very time critical process and has to be available 24×7, as you can imagine. It can be a matter of life and death for the recipients on the waiting list. That’s why we cannot take a lot of risks with installing new patches and upgrades to our (Oracle) software.

We release a new version of our system every 1.5 to 2 months. During that period, changes to the system are continuously tested. Developers finish the release at least one week before the release date. That last week is used for final testing of all critical components.

With this in mind, we defined our policy for patches and upgrades to the Oracle software. Let’s start with one-off patches. Upgrade and patch sets have to be installed on the test and development environments before the start of the next development cycle. If all goes well, the upgrade or patch set is installed on production at the end of the release cycle, when the new release goes live. So, all tests and the final critical test are done with the patch set or upgrade in place.

Larger upgrades might take even longer and will have separate test environments. A good example was our recent upgrade from database 8.1.7 to 10.2.0. Developing and testing this upgrade was so much work that is was done outside the normal development cycles.

We’re a bit more flexible with installing one-off patches. These patches are limited in scope and thus less risky than full upgrade or patch sets. Also, these tend to be more time critical since they target specific bugs we’re suffering from. A one-off patch also gets installed on test/development first. It doesn’t really matter when it’s installed as long as it is before the start of the final week of critical tests. That way the one-off patch can be installed on the production environment with the next release.

In very exceptional circumstances we can decide to install a one-off patch on production outside normal release dates. But we would only do that if we’re hitting a truly critical bug.