Today I'll upgrade my single instance database from 11.2.0.1 to 11.2.0.2. As you know patch sets are full installations so procedure will  be like installing for the very first time except choosing upgrade options.

My database takes advantage of ASM. Therefore we'll start with upgrading Grid Infrastructure. Unzip the 3. of the installation zip files to an appropriate directory such as /tmp. Since 11gR2, upgrades must be done as "out-of-place upgrades". So create the directories for grid and database upgrades.

$ mkdir -p /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0.2/grid
$ mkdir -p /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0.2/dbhome_1

If you don't show an empty home to installer you get the following error:

I will use graphical interfaces. To use UI, you can take a look at my blog about displaying x client on Oracle Linux. Run the installer:

$ ./runInstaller
Skip software updates.
 Select upgrade option.

Select language(s)
Leave groups as default

Select the new directory as software location. After prerequisite check (nothing came up hopefully)  installation will begin and you will be prompted to run root script:

Output of the root script should be like the following:


Grid Infrastructure upgrade is completed when the script is finished. You can check the new version by:

$ cd /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0.2/grid/bin/
$ ./crsctl query has softwareversion
Oracle High Availability Services version on the local node is [11.2.0.2.0]

Next step is upgrading the database. Unzip the first and the second of the installation zip files and run the installer.


Skip software updates.
Select upgrade option.
Select language(s)

Select the edition you  want to install.
Select the new directory as software location.
Leave groups as default
 After prerequisite check (nothing came up hopefully)  installation will begin and you will be prompted to run root script:
Output of the root script should be like the following:

When you click "OK" when the script succeeds, Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA) automatically starts.

 Select the database to upgrade.
 
If Oracle finds out any warnings, you are prompted to correct them. You can run the recommended commands as fix and keep going.
Select an appropriate number of parallelism and turn off archiving otherwise some amount of redo log will be generated.
You don't want to move database files so leave as default
Select ASM disk group for FRA if not discovered
A summary report is generated.
Upgrade process when you click on finish.
Upgrade may take quite some while depend on your configuration.

At the end a result report  is generated.

The whole procedure is pretty much straight forward and goes smoothly.