Smart Thinking Newsletter

5 Reasons to Avoid an ERP “Frakencloud”

What is a “frakencloud”? In a nutshell, it’s when your system is a cobbled together network of various applications that over time grown and create a monster.
Initially, these applications are intended to make a system more agile, more flexible, but over the long term they can create serious issues. Inefficiencies, security risks, and reduces a company’s ability to serve its clients.

I was doing a PeopleTools upgrade using Change Assistant from 8.44 to 8.54 recently, and have found that upgrading to 8.54 can be a pinch problematic mainly because of the 32bit to 64bit change-over.  So I have found it easier to do two upgrades:  8.44 to 8.53 and then 8.53 to 8.54.

One interesting problem I ran into was I reverted a failed attempt and missed a step and I had an upgrade template thinking I was going from 8.44 to 8.53 but the environment thought my database was at 8.54, so as change assistant went through the script it started skipping steps.

I ended up having to go back to the database level and set the TOOLSREL on PSSTATUS to 8.44 and rebuild the environment in Change Assistant.  Then create a new job with the updated environment and the upgrade template, then I changed the database back to the correct level it was at and marked all the completed steps in the template complete and ran the steps that were being skipped. Change Assistant will read the Tools Release level from PTSTATUS table when the Change Assistant job builds from the template and if that level is different then when the job starts any step is not at the right level will be skipped in when Change Assistant processes through the job.

I am really not a big fan of User Account Controls and Policies to control users on Windows Servers.  I completely understand the need to control users and limit access as needed, but in order to run PeopleSoft and many ERP systems on windows, the account used to setup the window machine typically needs full administrative access.

The other day, I was on a restricted system and I dropped down to a command line (run as administrator) to do some COBOL compiling and of course my source was on a network drive and there was no sign of my network drive.  As it turned out there is a permission that controls weather or not I can see the network drives as the administrator.  However instead of getting crazy and doing a registry edit, I opted for a quick easy fix in this case.

Run the command line cmd.exe as administrator and then map the network drive from the command line:

net use <drive-letter> \\UNC-Path\To folder\You Want To Map\<share>

Just working through some PUM patching of an HCM environment and the change package that was created was a little on the large size.  In the past large change assistant templates cause extreme delays in trying to get change assistant to respond.

One thing you can do is increase the Heap Size of Change assistant.  The easiest way to do this is to create a shortcut to changeassistant.exe and append the parameter:   -Xmx1024m

In PeopleTools 8.54, I have also found that to minimize the size of the application, you can do an Initial Pass with just the source and/or target steps.  This cuts out a number of steps and makes an easier package to work with.  Also, you can disable the file deployment and do it the old fashion manual way and this too will reduce the template work load.

For example I am doing Image 9 to 12 HCM patching right now, and the file deployment is approximately 1/3rd of the entire change package XML file.

Happy Patching….

Ran into an odd issue when moving file attachments from the database to file storage.  When users attached files sometimes those filenames contained unicode characters and the process PeopleSoft employees to addAttachments and/or putAttachments allows those characters to pass into the database, however because the database is non-unicode in order to reference those filenames the unicode character references need to be scrubbed out of the filenames in order for the copyAttachment function to work.

Oracle Allows you to use the function unistr to put a unicode reference into a string.  In order to work through them I found references for unicode characters, this allowed list out the original file name which had references like <80><99> from a unix output file, so I generated a file that removed the <80><99> reference and added in a || unistr(‘\characternumber’) || reference:

update ps_pv_att_db_srv set attachsysfilename = ‘USER12014-01-01-12.12.12.461The_Fish_Restaurant.pdf’  where attachsysfilename = ‘USER12014-01-01.12.12.12.461The_F’ || unistr(‘\2019’) || ‘ish_Restaurant.pdf’;

It isn’t pretty but it works.  I had a whole series of characters in the database that just should not have been there which included commas, quotas, semi-colons, question marks, many odd ball characters like trademark, copyright, registered, french accent characters etc…. Once I had the file attachment record fixed, make sure that you also update the file attachment reference record as well to the same name.

I didn’t try it out in SQL Server as I didn’t have any references to it but there is a UNICODE function that should behave very closely to Oracle’s UNISTR.