Patching a Hyperion environment is a relatively simple process, but things can always go wrong with patching which can cause some serious headaches. In this post, we will discuss what to consider before you decide to patch your environment. Overall the main things you want to consider are:
- What enhancements/fixes am I adding?
- How to prevent the patch from causing issues
What enhancements/fixes am I adding?
On this section, Oracle makes it clear on the benefits of each patch that they are releasing by listing out any of the fixes as well as any new functionality on their website. To find this, you will need to go to support.oracle.com and sign in with your account. You then click on ‘patches and updates’ this will bring up an area that will allow you to search for your correct OS and EPM version. Once you the version, you click on the ‘Patch Name’. From here, you can view the Read Me or Download at this point.
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The example we have is for Analytic Provider Services, 11.1.2.3.507 in the Windows x64 system. Make sure that the patch you have selected includes the fixes or functionality you are looking for. Once you read the “Read Me” and you are satisfied with the fixes then feel free to download. You should keep the “Read Me” available to assist you in the process as each patch application has different instructions.
How to prevent the patch from causing issues
I recently encountered an issue with the APS patch that I referred to above and will use it as an example of some precautions you should take when applying new patches. When I explored the files applied with this patch, I found a few crucial jar files located in the following directory that did not appear to be related to APS: <patch number>\files\common\EssbaseJavaAPI\11.1.2.0\lib.
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After applying the patch, I noticed an issue in functionality that was unexpected. While this is not stated in the documentation, it is clear that the size of the Essbase jar files has changed (based on the screenshots I had taken from before the patch).
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Fortunately, if you follow the following steps, you can prevent this from becoming a serious issue. Since we identified crucial updates before we applied the patch, we want to archive the old ones before the patch is applied. To do this, we copy the old file and rename them to something we can easily refer back to, such as appending .old. This simplifies troubleshooting after the patch application if necessary. In the above example, I was able to replace these two jar files and the environment worked again. This allows us the opportunity to get the environment running so we can better troubleshoot (or work with Oracle) to identify the issue that this patch created.
Sherek Salokar, ssalokar@ecapitaladvisors.com
David Grande, dgrande@ecapitaladvisors.com
Jon Harvey, jharvey@ecapitaladvisors.com
