When looking for the latest PSU's for 12.1.0.2 this week i noticed that the names have been changed (to protect the guilty...?).
What we'd all got quite used to with the 5th digit changing to reflect the PSU that was present (though annoyingly this never actually changed v$version etc) has now been changed to be a 'date'.
So for example the last PSU i applied was
12.1.0.2.5 and i was expecting 12.1.0.2.6 this quarter - what i have instead is
12.1.0.2.160119 (that's 19th January 2016 - i hate that date format by the way oracle......)
This apparently is to make things easier and i guess it is useful to have the date when comparing multiple bits of the software stack. I initially don;t like it but it's just a case of getting used to it i guess.
We now need to change our ORACLE_HOME's though as we roll this out as we actually name each home with the PSU version - this makes it easier to manage for us. When we want to apply a PSU we just switch the DB to a new home rather than patching in place.
Now we'll just end up with homes called /oracle/12.1.0.2.date from now on - hopefully there is no impact on any scripts etc by having this new longer name.....
There is more info here:
https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=2061926.1
and also on Mike's excellent blog here:
https://blogs.oracle.com/UPGRADE/entry/january_2016_psu_bp_available