PeopleBooks Guides: The Search for Install & Upgrade Guides

Almost on a daily bases questions arise as to what upgrade paths are supported and often the answer to that question changes.  My Oracle Support (MOS) has the answer, however, that answer can be extremely difficult to find.

A little hidden gem of the PeopleBooks Online Reference homepage is they have a link to the current PeopleBooks Guides for Install and Upgrade pages.

Simply expand the category you want and it will link you to the MOS support page associated the guide you are looking for.

What do you mean the Web Server can’t start

There is nothing more fun then logging into your windows servers and there are more new patches to install to fix security problems and as per usual Windows must reboot.  I have Redhat servers that have never been rebooted but my Windows machines regularly have to rebooted just because.  Nothing frustrates me more as an administrator then rebooting servers, so many bad things can happen when you reboot.

For example on the weekend my servers were forced to restart and when they came back online my Web Server was down because the HTTP port was in use by another service.  This is odd because I didn’t install anything new however in my case it turned out to be the KDC proxy service that was installed when I did some changes to my remote desktop services.

In order to figure out what service was causing the problem in this case, there is a nice quick trick you can use to figure out what services rely on the HTTP and HTTPs ports.  From a command prompt if you issue the command:

net stop http

This will list out all the services that will be impacted when you execute this command.  In my case I don’t need the KDC proxy service to be running, so I shut down the service, and I was able to bring the WebLogic server online and my client was able to login to their environment from the web again.

Recently, I was working on a PeopleTools 8.44 to 8.54 Upgrade and ran into some major issues with the fact that the database so far behind in so many areas.  On the Oracle platform PeopleSoft changed the way it handled Long datatype fields and also how it handled Date & Time datatype fields.  The  part that I found was very difficult was some of the scripts that are more current don’t seem to take into account that coming from 8.44 might be an issue in handling these different datatypes.

Basically, in order to make this upgrade work I did a 8.44 to 8.53 upgrade first, and made sure that the LONG TO LOB datatype conversion was ran before the upgrade and that the DATABASE_OPTIONS field on PSSTATUS was set to 34 datatype setting.  Otherwise I ran into all sorts of weird issues with datatypes.

DATE and DATETIME, LONG and LOB fields in PeopleSoft and Oracle database

Smart Thinking Newsletter

Can You Improve ERP User Adoption (Without Starting Over?)

Even the most perfect ERP implementation won’t succeed in the long run if users are unwilling to come on board or resist using new aspects of the system – so how do you get users to embrace new ERP functionality? Here are three quick tips:

• Training: Continuous and easy to access
• Documentation: Provide users with what they need to understand the system and processes
• Improve user experience: Make it friendly

Yesterday, I was working with Oracle’s data pump export tool, which is something I don’t normally do. I am not really sure why Oracle is so difficult to work with in regards to backing up, migration of data and recovery of data. I mean it is just flat out confusing when you don’t do it on a regular bases.

So I ran into all sorts of weird errors. The first one was:

ORA-23603: STREAMS enqueue aborted due to low SGA – after some research I found that the my SGA area was too small, which in my opinion “Who Cares” you are simply dumping data to a flat file why in the world does that need to be complicated, but….

The quick google search turned up to increase the streams_pool_size parameter and increase the SGA memory target area. The first change I needed to make was to increase the sysctl parameter to as this parameter defines the maximum size in bytes of a single shared memory segment that a Linux process can allocate in its virtual address space. So I modified the sysctl.conf file and increased my kernel.shmmax paramter and set the change active with the sysctl -p call. You need to shutdown/start the database for this change to be made. I also modified the init.ora file to increase the streams_pool_size parameter.

It took a couple of tries to get everything to run correctly, however, the last run I did presented me with the UDE-00008 error. What the heck, everything looks great, so again another google search reveals a novel idea: check the logs:

Master table “SYSTEM”.”SYS_EXPORT_FULL_02? successfully loaded/unloaded
******************************************************************************
Dump file set for SYSTEM.SYS_EXPORT_FULL_02 is:
/oracle/datadump/fs92demo.dmp
Job “SYSTEM”.”SYS_EXPORT_FULL_02? successfully completed at Wed Jun 17 11:13:53 2015 elapsed 0 00:41:17

Well, what do we have here. Everything completed successfully. Apparently there is a glitch in Oracle’s data pump that sometimes appears randomly however, the job has ran successfully. Simply ignore the error and move on! If you want to read up on the bug apparently the bug number on Oracle is: 5969934. I honestly, didn’t take the time to read it.