I
remember distinctly when, as a kid while playing I would tear my clothes and my
mother would say she would “patch” it up or would tell the local tailor to do
so if the cloth had bigger tear. I think we all have worn those patched clothes
at some point. As I grew up, Rock and then Grunge music influence us so much
that those “patches” became fashion. I remember buying jeans that were all
tattered or had a lot of holes on them. If they did not have holes, we would
make some ourselves to make ourselves look cool. That is how “patches” had a
huge role in fashion and in our growing up.
In fact,
patches never seem to go away from our lives, especially if one is working in
the field of Information Technology. Let’s
take, for example, the life cycle of a software or even the whole operating
system. Companies spend millions of dollars in creating software or system and
even billions. In the case of Windows 8 operating system, for example,
Microsoft has spend around 1.5 billion dollars only for Marketing purposes. So,
if we add the overall cost associated to the Operating system, it comes to
several billions. Anyways, despite the billions companies spend in software
production and the time they spend in building, testing, and quality assurance
of the systems, they are not perfect; they are not without bugs or issues
because several issues come to the foreground only after consumers use them in
the real environment. That is where the patches come into play.
After
users start using software or operating system of any kind they start finding
bugs and errors not found by the company’s testers during the development of
the system. They start complaining about the bugs which will act as input for
the software development company to counter the bug and they come up with a patch
to fix the bug, which they give a nice word or phrase so as to make the
consumer think it is something good to have, for example Service Pack 1,
Service Pack 2, Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 4,
etc. They sound pretty cool right. Most of them are but simply patches that are
meant to patch the tear on your software or operating system. In fact, if you
work in the field of IT, you will find the server team applying patches to the
Operating system almost every month and/or during major upgrades as such. Now
let’s face the EPM patches, which I consider the grand mother of all pathes
that at least I know of.
EPM or
Enterprise Performance Management is a business intelligence Analytical
enterprise system that belongs to Oracle. I use EPM version 11.1.2.1, and there
are so many patches that can be attributed to this and other version of EPM
that the Windows patches can be considered child’s play. Recently, I had to
apply a patch to fix a hole, if you will, in the system, and guess how many
patches I have been applying as a part of that supposedly single patch.
EPM
version 11.1.2.1 works fine with version 7 of Internet Explorer, however, it is
not compatible with IE version 9 – meaning, some of the things work, some may
work, and most important things will not work. Some issues, for example, are
the missing Hyperion Planning tool bar, disappearance of Business Rules, toggle
between Explorer not working etc. Upon, checking with Oracle, they recommended
applying a patch 14464109 which would fix the Planning issue in IE9. We were so
happy that we would finally resolve the issue by simply applying the patch.
I logged
in to the Oracle Support page, searched and finally found (for those of you who
have not been to Oracle Support page and other Oracle page, it is like a maze
where you would lose yourself trying to find the item you are looking for) the
required patch. Happily, I downloaded the .zip file, moved it to the Planning
server, unzipped it, and before moving it to the OPatch folder, which is the
folder in the EPM Middleware home where we are supposed unzip the patch (or
move it already unzipped) before running the script to run the patch, I went
through to the READ ME, and then to my horror found out that the patch 14464109
is not easy and on its own. It had several brothers-and-sisters patches that had
to be applied before it could be run, some Oracle patches and some Microsoft
patches.
So, the
READ ME said “You must have applied Microsoft VC 2005 SP1 ATL
redistributable pack” before we could even think about applying the EPM
patches. And apart from this MS patch, we had to apply the following patch:
Essbase
Administration Services 11.1.2.1.103 Patch 13904640
Oracle
Hyperion Shared Services 11.1.2.1.600 Patch 14142678
Oracle
Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management Workspace 11.1.2.1.600 Patch 14119724
Now we are talking about six patches
when we thought it was simply one. Moreover, they had to be applied in sequence
as some were prerequisites to the others. So the sequence would be:
Microsoft VC 2005 SP1
ATL redistributable pack
14119724
14142678
13904635
13904640
14464109
Now
that we had all the files unzipped in place, we started applying those patches
in sequence – one at a time, and after we applied the last but one, ie, the
13904640, we found out that the EAS stopped working.
I
asked about this issue in OracleForum and the King of the Forum, by whom I mean
John Goodwin, suggested me applying one more patch – the Essbase Run Time
Client patch # 13904628. Even though, we wanted to follow him as we know he is
simply amazing when it comes to EPM (Thanks John), we wanted to make it
official so, we opened a ticket with Oracle Support for any suggestion from
their side. And guess how many days it took for us to get the same response –
10 freaking days.
Now that we applied the patch, it is working again. Anyways,
my point is that if the EPM or any other information technology system comes
brand new, however, as times goes on, it gets holes and tears in the form of
bugs or errors in order to fix which they come with patches. The patches fix
some issues but they come up with more holes, ultimately having some many holes
and patches to fix them that they, if we had to visualize would look like a
tattered jeans full of holes and patches.
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