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Oracle has a belated reply to a survey a few weeks back on how database administrators have never installed one of the company’s critical patch updates. In a blog post Oracle’s Eric Maurice faults the survey for relying on a small sample size–not that it stopped us from reporting it. But Maurice then takes an interesting detour to the psychology of patching. In short, patching stinks, but it may not be nearly as bad as you think. The problem is that there are unintended consequences to patching. The biggest fallout can be a bunch of broken applications. That risk is weighed against being vulnerable to attackers. Maurice writes: It is generally in human nature to find known and immediate difficulties…