I have been working on a couple of upgrades for some clients and have found that doing PeopleTools Upgrades to 8.53 from pre 8.48 that I have encountered an error while using SQL Server 2012 and the SQLNCLI11 native client during the upgrade.  The error occurs in the PTUPGCONVERT Application Engine while it is generating new Services for Integration Broker.

I reported the case to PeopleSoft but got nowhere with the problem.  After looking around with google, I found a common theme that made me try something that shouldn’t work but it did.  I changed the ODBC connection to the database to use the SQL Server 2008 Native Client SQLNCLI10.  I do not encounter this issue when I am running the upgrade on SQL Server 2008.  Once the ODBC is changed I reran the upgrade process and everything worked!

It reports a conversion error which appears to be a NULL gets converted to a long int 2097184 which it is trying to insert into a small integer field and therefore generated an error when it tries to insert the data into a table.

When doing an upgrade or any kind of patching you will often times want to compare the object you are importing with what is currently housed within your database.  PeopleSoft standard compare will generate a list of everything that is different between the data being imported and the data within the database.  You can get creative with these settings, but one thing that is SUPER helpful is to generate the output so that the compare reports can be viewed via the internet browser.

When in the compare options, if you select the Report Options tab you can select Generate Browser Reports, and the compare reports will be generated to the Report Output Directory which in the example is d:\temp\compares\{PROJECTNAME}.  If you want to change this directory you need to cancel out of the compare and going into the Tools Menu -> Options, and change the output directory.

After the compare is complete you will have a full set of output files in your output directory which you can put onto your PIA webservers public html document home directory:

%PS_CFG_HOME%/webserver/{domain}/applications/peoplesoft/PORTAL.war/

I typically make a compare folder here and insert the various compares there and then in the compare folder make a basic index page to link to the CompareViewer.html that was originally in the compare reports output folder root.

Lastly, you might find these reports don’t show up in the browser,  I find they are best viewed using Firefox, but IE works however, your security settings may cause you some issues.

I got a note from a client the other day saying that they were randomly sending out a lot of messages when Integration Broker failed to send a message.

It turned out that they had the Error Notification Integration Broker process turned on, which notifies everybody with the role APP_MSG_ADMINSITRATOR that an error has occurred. However, since this is workflow based if you look at the role under the security area, there is a workflow tab, and by default this role uses a query based workflow routing.  The base routing is Query: _ROLE_APP_MSG_ADMINISTRATOR, and if you dig into this you will find that everybody that has access to a web services (entry on PSAUTHWS table) will get notified.

In order to route the messages strictly to the administrators assigned to the role APP_MSG_ADMINISTRATOR, turn off the use query to route workflow in the role configuration.  PeopleTools -> Security ->Permissions & Roles -> Roles – tab WORKFLOW.

I have been working with a client on upgrading their PeopleSoft database from SQL Server 2000 to 2012.  Everything has gone great, except when we tried to setup a Linked Server back to their other SQL Server 2000 databases.  SQL Server 2012 uses the SQLNCLI-11 Native Client which has backwards compatibility for two release levels, so SQL Server 2008 and 2005 are supported by this client.  You can use the SQL Server 2008 Native Client SQLNCLI-10 which does support backwards compatibility to SQL Server 2005 and 2000.

When setting up the linked server using the SQLNCI-10 Native Client, it was failing with an odd error:

The stored procedure required to complete this operation could not be found on the server. Please contact your system administrator.

After a looking around I found this knowledge base document 906954 which explains that because of the SQL Server 2012 environment running on x64 and the SQL Server 2000 environment is running on x86 that there are some compatibility issues that require the SQL Server 2000 environment needs to be at SP3 or SP4 patch level.  PeopleSoft certification documents show that their support requires the SQL Server 2000 database to be at SP3a, and they do support SP4.