My Experience with Oracle Service Contracts (OKS) Rule Migration Metalink Note:265048.1

Does this Note:265048.1 sound familiar ? At least I can't forget this Note#. I can tell this Note# even if someone wakes me up in the middle of the night. This is because I have spent so much of time and iterations doing Service Contracts Rule Migration before 11.5.10.2 upgrade to cut down the time the Maintenace Pack (Patch# 3480000) takes.

Coming to the technical aspect of this Note#, looks like there is an architecture change the way Service Contracts are maintained in 11.5.8 vs 11.5.10.2. So, all the customers having huge volumes of data/Contracts are supposed to follow the Note#265048.1 and migrate the existing data to the new tables. Out of my own experience I have arrived at the following "Best Practices".

#1. First and foremost, read and understnad the Note#265048.1 and know the importance of this module. Sit with CRM users and understand how they use this module in their daily work. Don't be in a rush to apply the patches mentioned in the note.

#2. Before you get your hands on Service Contracts Rule Migration, get hold of a Service Contracts Functional Expert. OKS Functional expert needs to submit few concurrent requests and validate Service Contracts Data (Especially, Coverage Times and Reaction Times of a Contract) during the process.

#3. Define roles & responsibilities for the "Service Contracts Rule Migration" process documented in Note#265048.1 and agree in black & white in a meeting with all the stake holders. I'm over emphasizing it here. A email will do with the agreement. ;)

#4. If the Appliations and Database you are upgrading is 11.5.8 and 8.1.7.4 then make sure to add sufficient space for tablespaces OKSD and OKSX before you kick of the Section:3 Patch mentioned in Note:265048.1. This patch is the one which does the bulk data processing. In other words it inserts the data into the new tables. CAUTION !!! Do not add the datafiles with autoextend ON for OKSD and OKSX tablespaces. You might hit a bug:2229895 while the patch sqls do an insert and you will see the following ORA-00600 error in the alert log.

"ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [ktfbtgex-7], [952329], [5], [952328], [], [], [], []"

Refer to My Post "Importance of keeping a eye on alert.log while applying Oracle Applications Patches"

#5. Never ever apply these patches in a telnet or ssh session. Use VNC to apply the patches mentioned in Section:2 and 3 as it takes few hours. (> 10 hours).

#6. Document timings and errors you hit into it.

#7. Not but not the least Never skip any ADPATCH worker. If you do, you pay for it.

This is my experience with OKS in a nut shell. Even though this post looks theoretical, it is lot practical. :)

nJoy !!