Saturday 19 October 2013

Essbase 11.1.2.3.002 PSU incorrectly packaged

Update 6th November 2013: 11.1.2.3.003 PSU now available for Essbase related products and are correctly packaged.

I was intending on applying the latest patch set update 11.1.2.3.002 for the Essbase related products and noticed an issue with the Essbase Server and RTC patches which I thought I would share.

Now I know that the problem will be soon rectified and I will update this post when it has been updated in Oracle Support.

If you have applied the 002 PSU or have downloaded and are planning to then it is worth revisiting as it looks like they have been incorrectly packaged which seems to affect all platforms.


At first glance the patch on Oracle Support may look to be fine but on closer inspection it is only indicating the bugs resolved are for the previous 001 PSU


Once downloaded and extracted the patch number in the directory structure is incorrect and it is the 001 patch number not the 002 one.

If you take a look at the properties of the files in the PSU then they look to be correct.


The files are correctly displaying 11.1.2.3.002 so it looks like patch was just incorrectly packaged up.

You may be thinking you can just change the directory name to be the correct patch ID of 17417313 and then apply the patch.


If you do that the patch will be applied correctly but you will notice that it is still displaying the 001 patch ID instead of the 002 ID


Running an inventory report will output that .001 patch has been applied instead of 002 and the bugs resolved are only for .001 PSU

You may feel comfortable leaving the inventory with incorrect information but it is not an option for me so I looked into fixing it as all the Essbase product files indicate they are for the 002 release so it could be an inventory problem.

I rolled back the patch as I only applied it to demonstrate what happens.

Within the PSU directory structure under <patchid>\etc\config there is the inventory xml file.


Editing the file confirms the reference id is incorrect and is for the 001 release, the unique patch id looks to be correct as it is different than the one for the 001 release and if you search for it in Oracle Support it does correctly return the 002 PSU.


The inventory file also only contains the bugs for 11.1.2.3.001 and is missing 11.1.2.3.002

Fixing the file only requires a few changes.


The reference id number was updated to be the correct ID for the PSU which is 17417313.

As it is a cumulative patch I left in the base bug information for 11.1.2.3.001 and added in the 11.1.2.3.002 PSU information and that is pretty much all there is to it.


This time applying the patch displays the correct patch ID of 17417313


Running the inventory report confirms the patch ID is correct and the bugs fixed are for the 001 and 002 releases.

I carried out the same process for the Essbase RTC 002 release as that has been packaged up in the same way, all the other Essbase related product patches seem to be fine.

I expect the files will be fixed in Oracle support in the near future which makes this post obsolete but I thought I would share anyway.

1 comment:

  1. That's a great catch, we will have to look out for that when we update our 11.1.2.3 environments.

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