So you’re going to patch from 12.0.6 to 12.1.1?  It’s basically like any other major upgrade with Oracle’s e-Business Suite; tons of pieces to upgrade, patch, validate, and a high potential for running into problems.  The documentation for all the “gotchas” is all over the place, but Metalink document 752619.1 is the best place to start and has all the major steps listed.  In general, the following is required:

• Confirm database version
• Upgrade 10.1.3 home to 10.1.3.4
• Upgrade 10.1.2 home to 10.1.2.3
• Apply necessary pre-req patches
• Apply maintenance pack (7303030)
• Apply post-maintenance pack patches
• Do all the post-upgrade steps

Below are some of the lessons learned in an environment in which we patched 12.0.6 to 12.1.1 and along the way, upgraded the 10.2.0.4 database to 11.1.0.7.

Oracle XDB core-dumps (look for ORA-31114)

• Follow Metalink document 760611.1
• We’re not sure exactly why this happened, but something in the XDB upgrade from 10.2.0.4 to 11.1.0.7 failed

AZ tables/objects invalid and workers fail on 7303030 (azR12active.sql)

• Result of XDB core-dump issue above
• Follow Metalink document 832459.1

Worker fails on EGOSILDU.sql

• Per Metalink document 847687.1, this is a bug patched with 8485942.  This patch, 8485942, isn’t available as of 10/10/2009
• Per the recommendation in 847687.1, skipped worked and continued

Relink fails on RAXTRX

• Choose to continue.  This is due to bug
• Look in 841113.1 for patches.  These are the ones I found that fixed this, plus some other issues found during testing …

8239041

7721420
7660309
7673650
8393427
8414254
8414069

Failures during 7303030 compiling multiple forms and libraries

• Choose to continue.  Manually recompile using adadmin after the patch, and if things still fail look for patches

Issues applying 10.1.3.4 IAS_ORACLE_HOME patch (7272722)

• Receive failures trying to start OPMN while at 83% complete on initial screen
• Environment was cloned and adcfgclone’d successfully from a 12.0.6 instance
• adcfgclone.pl will update all the right stuff in $ORA_CONFIG_HOME correctly, but several files in $IAS_ORACLE_HOME will not be updated with the correct environment-specific values
• Change hard-coded paths in the following:

$IAS_ORACLE_HOME/inventory/Clone/clone.xml
$IAS_ORACLE_HOME/config/ias.properties
$IAS_ORACLE_HOME/opmn/bin/opmnctl
$IAS_ORACLE_HOME/Apache/Apache/bin/iasobf

• Make sure you can run $IAS_ORACLE_HOME/opmn/bin/opmnctl startall|stopall|status
• Resume 7272722

Failures with 7303030 doing FndXdfCmp

• I’m pretty sure this was a site-specific issue related to not cloning cleanly
• If the adworkxxx.log file looks like this …

java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor1.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
at oracle.apps.ad.worker.AdJavaWorker.invokeUtility(AdJavaWorker.java:501)
at oracle.apps.ad.worker.AdJavaWorker.main(AdJavaWorker.java:356)
Caused by: java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: mTypeData
at oracle.apps.fnd.odf2.FndInitType.doCmpType(FndInitType.java:156)
at oracle.apps.fnd.odf2.FndXdfCmp.doOdfCmp(FndXdfCmp.java:98)
at oracle.apps.fnd.odf2.FndXdfCmp.applyXDF(FndXdfCmp.java:186)

• … hopefully you’ve got an existing 12.1.1 instance to refer to
• Look in $JAVA_TOP/oracle/apps/odf2 for class files containing mTypeData.  You should see 3 class files
• Restore anything missing from a clean instance
• Generate all JAR Files
• Kill patch
• Resume

Patch takes a very long time on adobjcmp.sql (11.1.0.7)

• This will take a long time, it’s compiling all  invalid objects and there will be 50,000+
• Look for lots of time on “resmgr:cpu quantum” wait event
• Do “alter system set resouce_manager_plan=””
• Bounce the database when everything is done

Are you trying to use RapidWiz to Upgrade to 12.1.1 from 12.0.6?

• Don’t.  This is for an 11.5.x upgrade

More to come as I find them, I’m sure …

Wallet Setup Error — Could not open file …./wallet/ewallet.p12 to read data

Post Clone steps that need to be taken into account for R12 Payments to function properly.
After you clone an environment (…assuming that source system has the wallet setup for payment instructions) you need to do the following:

1. Copy the wallet files (*.p12 and *.sso) from source clone to the new cloned instance.  Note the directory the files are placed into.  In our case we put into $CUSTOM_TOP/wallet directory.
2. Rebuild the wallet file
3. Validate the wallet file has the proper permissions
4. Null the two columns: SYS_KEY_FILE_LOCATION and SYS_KEY_HASH in table IBY_SYS_SECURITY_OPTIONS
5. Log into Oracle EBS as Payments Setup Administrator.  Navigate to: Payments Setup –> Shared Setup –> System Security Options –> Wallet Setup.
6. You can now set the wallet in the UI with the ewallet.p12 file in the new path (note path from step 1 above).  The cwallet.sso is then generated in file system.

The next time you check the Wallet File setting in UI, it will be pointing to sso file.

IFRS…Global Accounting Standards are changing

IFRS -  International Financial Reporting Standards is a series of accounting standards, developed by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), that is becoming the global standard for the preparation of public company financial statements.

IFRS focuses on the standardization of financial reporting standards across international borders. This standardized reporting practice provides a uniform view of a corporations accounting statements. Companies with international subsidiaries can use consistent cross-company financial reporting.

More than 12,000 companies in approximately 113 nations have adopted IFRS, including listed companies in the European Union.  Other countries, including Canada and India, are expected to transition to IFRS by 2011.  Mexico plans to adopt IFRS for all listed companies starting in 2012.  Other countries, such as Japan and Mexico, have plans to converge (eliminate significant differences) their national standards to meet IFRS.

Over the years Enterprise applications such as Oracle eBusiness, Peoplesoft, and SAP, have evolved to embed more and more, of the local accounting standards and regulations. Embedding functionality to support GAPP, SOX, etc.

Whilst these applications are exceptional an keeping up with the continually changing landscape of Financial/Accounting regulations, conforming to IFRS has may people befuddled.

IFRS represents a series of guidelines, unlike GAAP, which provides exceptional detail in accounting practices. GAAP consists of volumes of detailed instructions, whilst OIFRS can be consolidated down to the size of a paperback novel.

As these guidelines are incorporated and consolidated into the current GAAP construct, companies face what seems like an impossible task on once again changing their accounting practices to ensure compliance.

Oracle eBusiness Release 12 introduces the concept of Sub Ledger Accounting (SLA). Sub Ledger Accounting provides a interim step to translate, and derive accounting logic, prior to recording GL Entries. Whilst SLA continues to be a buzz word, in the Oracle community, it’s regarded with both awe, and disdain. However, SLA proves to provide the most expedient  roadmap for corporations to start converting to IFRS.

SLA introduces a very powerful feature called Multiple Representation : A Single accounting entry can be represented for multiple reporting requirement. Organizations are able to have a primary ledger to represent primary accounting requirements such as GAAP. Accounting representations can be created to represent additional/secondary reporting requirement such as IFRS. Each secondary ledger can have a different subledger accounting method.

As IFRS becomes more widely adopted, expect to see greater adoption of SLA as a path to achieving global accounting compliance.

Recently we upgraded our R12 instance from 12.0.6 to 12.1.1 and encountered several unique errors in Order Management.

The new issues prevent an order line from being created and or order lines from being updates.  The error message presented is: You Are Not Allowed To Create Order Lines.

According to metalink the environment needs patch: 6958955 applied.  Apparently this patch has a sql script ontup251.sql in it that needs to run.  Metalink as of this posting did not have this patch available for download.  Oracle analysts then recommended applying another patch that had the ontup251.sql script in it.

The patch that was recommended to apply was 8310984, which is not ported to 12.1.1 yet.

So how do you fix the issue above?  Simple.  Login into Oracle Applications as Order Management Super User and navigate as follows: Navigated to Setups–> Rules –> Security –> Processing Constraints. Query up Application “Order Management” and Entity “Order Line”.  Once results come back, then query operation only of “Create”. There is a seeded record that has an issue. This record had operation of Create, a User action of “Not Allowed” and the Enabled checkbox was on, and the System checkbox was off. The Condition was “Any” BUT THERE was no validation entity nor any Validation Template. Thus the issue.  Since this was not a system generated constraint and the validation condition was null, we disabled the constraint.  This then allowed us to create an order line.

In addition to the above there is also an “Update” operation that is also null.  However this record is a system generated record.  In our case it was record 87 of 89 “update” operations.  We made a duplicate condition to another update record and saved.  Once this happened we were able to create new lines and update existing lines in OM.

We know this is not the long term solution.  We have evaluated running ontup251.sql script to drop and rebuild the constraint validation packages but at this time we decided against it until Oracle provides correct patch and requests that the script can be run in isolation.