Connection Failed error message with PeopleTools Change Assistant on 64 Bit Windows

With PeopleTools 8.5, Oracle moved the app servers into 64-bit territory. That was welcome news. Unfortunately, the whole stack isn't quite there, yet, and we ran into an irritating problem when running Change Assistant to upgrade from 8.49 to 8.51. Specifically, when setting up the environment, we recevied a "connection failed!" error when testing the connection. Here's what we saw: No logs, no details. Just failed. But then, finally, a hint: Data mover (which shouldn't connect, since the database is still at 8.49) wouldn't even run: it failed with an error "missing or invalid version of sql library psora". Aha! Now that is something one can work with. It turns out it needs the 32-bit Oracle client. Install that, and everything is good, again.

WebLogic Case Sensitivity

Prior to v9.0, Weblogic was case-insensitive in Windows, but starting with v9, the default is, like Apache, to be case sensitive. A web search on changing that behavior isn't very helpful, and the setting is buried a bit, so I thought I'd post the instructions on changing that setting. The first step is to run the weblogic admin console. The default URL, once that has been started, is to browse to http://servername:9999/console. You'll be prompted for the username/password that you configured when installing weblogic. Once there, click on Domain-> Security-> Advanced. There you will see a "Web App Files Case Insensitive:" setting. By default, this is set to "false". Change it to "os", click on save. Once it's been saved, the changes have to be Activated. Click on the green Activate Changes button on the left-hand side of the screen.

You'll have to reboot the admin console, as well as your standard weblogic web services, for this change to take effect.

PeopleSoft Upgrade Woes

When upgrading a PeopleSoft database from 8.47 to 8.49, we ran into a curious problem, receiving this error:

SQL Error. Error Position: 14 Return: 6550 - ORA-06550: line 1, column 15: PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "TABLE" when expecting one of the following: := . ( @ % ;

It turns out that it was a simple problem, but it wasn't at all obvious from the error: the DDLORA.DMS script that ran during the initial part of the upgrade was old; for whatever reason, it hadn't gotten updated by the install process. This is what was happening: Datamover was importing the tables, and the first succeeded. Then: it went to compute statistics. That's where things went wrong. Here's why: the ddlora.dms script defines not only default tablespace parameters, but also the method by which DataMover will compute statistics. Pre-8.48 PeopleSoft did it using the 'analyze table' method, while 8.49 uses the dbms stats method. With the old statistics parameters in the PSDDLMODEL table, the compute stats call failed, and so did the upgrade.

To fix this problem, we installed PeopleTools 8.49 again on an empty PS Home, and then we copied the new script over.