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.

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.

This error is just one that drives you crazy. PeopleSoft has been making the move from a 32bit application to a 64bit application. Almost everywhere you will find the that the application runs in 64bit mode, except for in windows. The client application is still a 32-bit client. So if you are using Oracle for example, you need to ensure that the Oracle client software on the windows machine is 32-bit. This is also true with the tuxedo service, when downloading patches make sure that you download the 32-bit patches.

So if you encounter this error, make sure that the 32-bit libraries are installed and are being referred to for the client. DBBIN variable specifically, and if necessary you may need to add the binary path to the add to path variable in the configuration.