Silent upgrade troubles

Last week I was asked to write a little script to automate an upgrade of oracle client 9.2.0.1 to 9.2.0.8.
Reason for this was that we needed to update arround 1.300 clients to enable them to connect to a 10g database (we couldn’t install 10g clients because of other applications restricted the client version to 9i).

Ok, easy enough. Oracle allows you to automate installations and upgrades via response files and the response file for a client upgrade from 9.2.0.1 to 9.2.0.8 is very simple.
When I started testing the upgrade, I immediately spotted a first problem. The setup.exe (it was on windows xp) started a new console and then returned directly to the prompt in the original console. This would make it impossible to check the return codes to know if a upgrade was successful or not.

The upgrade itself finished without a problem, but at the end the following message appeared in the newly started console: “Press enter to exit”.
Huh!? This was supposed to be a “silent” install, meaning no interraction needed. But here it was, asking to press enter to exit.
And the documentation was not telling anything about it.
After some searching, I found that you can specify the “-noconsole” flag when starting the setup, which would surpress the new console and avoid the question to press enter.
You still would see the question in the logfiles, but the installation presumed you responded to it and finishes the upgrade.

This left me with the first problem: the prompt would still directly return while the upgrade was running in the background.
After some searching in the documentation I found a note stating that you need to modify the oraparam.ini file and change the BOOTSTRAP parameter from TRUE to FALSE.
Unfortunately this did not help. Yelling at it did either.

Then I found that in 10g, you had a “-waitforcompletion” flag you could set, that would do exactly what I needed. So I tried if it would work for the oui shipped in the 9.2.0.8 patchset.
At first, it didn’t, but then I found metalink note 293044.1 that said that the setup.exe in Disk1 and Disk1/install where not the same and that the one in Disk1/install should be used for the “-waitforcompletion” flag.
At last it worked.

For those interested, here is the full command I used to start the silent upgrade:

start /wait C:\oracle\patches\9.2.0.8\Disk1\install\setup.exe -silent -noconsole -waitforcompletion -responsefile c:\oracle\patches\9.2.0.8\patchset.rsp -paramfile c:\oracle\patches\9.2.0.8\oraparam.ini

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Thanks to Geert for the yelling link :)

How to use the plan_table table to sabotage your oracle upgrade

Lets say you need to upgrade your 9i database to 10g (10.2.0.4 to be exact), but you actually want to sabotage the upgrade (don’t know why, just assume you do).
Granted, there are many ways to do this, but you want to do it subtle. What are your options then?
Well, one option is to create the plan_table table in your sys schema (or a synonym plan_table to a plan table in another schema if you want to make it really subtle) before the upgrade.
If you do this, you will see the following message in your upgrade log:

Warning: Package Body created with compilation errors.

SQL> show errors;
Errors for PACKAGE BODY DBMS_SQLPA:

LINE/COL ERROR
-------- -----------------------------------------------------------------
113/5    PL/SQL: SQL Statement ignored
118/44   PL/SQL: ORA-00904: "OTHER_XML": invalid identifier

And the “oracle database server” component in the dba_registry will be marked as invalid.
Mission accomplished I would say.

What is that?
You regret your actions and you want to fix the problem?

*sigh*

Ok then, to fix it you can use the following steps:

• drop the sys.plan_table table
• drop the sys.plan_table$ table
• drop all sys synonyms and public synonyms to the plan_table or the plan_table$
• @?/rdbms/admin/catplan.sql — recreate the plan table
• @?/rdbms/admin/dbmsxpln.sql — reload dbms_xplan spec
• @?/rdbms/admin/prvtxpln.plb — reload dbms_xplan implementation
• @?/rdbms/admin/prvtspao.plb — reload dbms_sqlpa

For those seeking more information:

Metalink note 565600.1 – ERROR IN CATUPGRD: ORA-00904 IN DBMS_SQLPA
Metalink note 605317.1 – DBMS_SQLPA ORA-00904 OTHER_XML invalid identifier

According to the notes, the problem only exists with upgrades to 10.2.0.4 or to 11.1.0.7.

ps. Don’t ask me why I had a synonym called plan_table in my sys schema. I didn’t do it.
pps. This is why you should test your migration (I’m glad I did)