You’ve got a lot in the question and I can’t quickly speak to the Oracle tuning recommendations, but UPD17 seems mostly OK.  We are in process of testing from a MUCH earlier UPD level.

We had a few custom objects and views simply disappear, which was weird, and at least one of the core views we use for Purchase Order reports was renamed which broke our custom plugin layout until we found the root cause, but other than that we’ve had no major impacts.

Stating the obvious… Just be sure to plan and execute full business process validation in Test to ensure it looks good before rolling into Prod.  The little things are the items that we saw get in the way.

Nick;

Thank you for the comment.

Fingers crossed - all goes well.

Hi @CUCSOLUTIONS ,

As nick has stated, there is no easy or one way of doing this, but if you are facing a recent lag in performance, try to analyze whether it is an overall performance drop or certain forms/processes are the culprits. I believe it’s better if you can take an AWR report or a stats pack report depending on the oracle licenses you have, which would give you a better picture of what has happened to the system. 

I know about the stats pack - what is the AWR? We are running Oracle 12.1 Standard, so have no Oracle monitoring tools we can use. Our Oracle support is through IFS.

Thx again for the feedback in this conversation.

Hi @CUCSOLUTIONS ,

it stands for Automatic workload repository.

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/manageability/diag-pack-ow09-133950.pdf

Be careful with AWR - if you have Standard Edition I believe you may not have the right to use AWR.  I think that requires Enterprise Edition but you should confirm and ensure that you remain compliant.

Nick