"The term rolling upgrade refers to upgrading different databases or different instances of the same database (in a Real Application Clusters environment) one at a time, without stopping the database.
The advantage of a RAC rolling upgrade is that it enables at least some instances of the RAC installation to be available during the scheduled outage required for patch upgrades. Only the RAC instance that is currently being patched needs to be brought down. The other instances can continue to remain available. This means that the impact on the application downtime required for such scheduled outages is further minimized. Oracle's opatch utility enables the user to apply the patch successively to the different instances of the RAC installation.
Rolling upgrade is available only for patches that have been certified by Oracle to be eligible for rolling upgrades. Typically, patches that can be installed in a rolling upgrade include:
Patches that do not affect the contents of the database such as the data dictionary
Patches not related to RAC internode communication
Patches related to client-side tools such as SQL*PLUS, Oracle utilities, development libraries, and Oracle Net
Patches that do not change shared database resources such as datafile headers, control files, and common header definitions of kernel modules
Rolling upgrade of patches is currently available for one-off patches only. It is not available for patch sets.
Rolling patch upgrades are not available for deployments where the Oracle Database software is shared across the different nodes. This is the case where the Oracle home is on Cluster File System (CFS) or on shared volumes provided by file servers or NFS-mounted drives. The feature is only available where each node has its own copy of the Oracle Database software."