Next Tuesday (13 January) promises to be a busy day for hard-pressed sys admins.

Although Microsoft's regular monthly Patch Tuesday update promises only one bulletin, a critical fix for Windows¹, Oracle's quarterly batch weighs in at 41 fixes.

Highlights include nine critical bug fixes for Oracle Secure Backup, all of which might lend themselves to remote exploitation, and two critical fixes for Oracle Application Server. There's also five critical updates for Oracle BEA WebLogic server software packages.

Ten of the remaining (less critical) bulletins address lower-risk flaws in various versions of Oracle's database server software.

Oracle's pre-alert, which explains the planned patches in much greater depth, can be found here.

¹ Microsoft light sprinkle of patches means that a flaw in SQL Server, which became the target of exploit code soon after the December 2008 patch Tuesday update, will remain unaddressed for at least another month. ®

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