Why people rarely patch. An E-Business Suite Tale

Oracle's Steven Chan posted a little while back about his surprise that few attendees at IOUG had kept their Apps installations up to date. We are currently applying ATG.RUP.5 prior to applying all the CPU patches we have not yet applied as a pre-requisite for an external deployment of part of EBS. We are relatively up to date so only actually had to apply a couple of pre-requisites, ATG5 then got applied, this took about 9 hours on the first attempt (but I suspect that can be improved with practice). Now we move to the post application stage. There are 22 patches that may or may not have to be applied depending on your release (p33 of 50 of the ATG readme). Each of these may have pre-reqs, and some vary conditionally within releases.

Then there are issues like the one I've just encountered where the post install states that I need two BI patches, the readmes for these state that they have been superseded by Oracle Fusion BI (and some intermediate releases of DBI as well). The readme for the fusion BI patch states that it is separatey licensed, but it is unclear as to whether the license is separate entirely from the DBI licensed product in EBS 11i or covered by it since the patch supersedes DBI. So in summary then in order to update our tech stack from ATG 3 (which we need to do for the security updates) we need to review a 50 page readme, review over 25 other patches for relevance and consult our account manager about which of a couple of alternatives we are licensed for.  

I still of course have the CPU readmes to read after all this.