Last month I wrote about a problem that Informatica as part of OBIA was causing us, wherein an expired database account would bring Oracle down by virtue of multiple connections from Informatica. I raised an SR with Oracle (under OBIA support), who after some back-and-forth with Informatica, were told: This is not a bug. That the two error messages coming back from Oracle are handled differently is the result of a design decision and as such not a product fault.

This problem, which in essence is bad behaviour from Informatica bringing down Oracle, is a good illustration of unintended consequences of an apparently innocuous security setting. Per our company’s security standards, database passwords expire every 90 days. When this happens users are prompted to change their password before they can continue logging into Oracle. This applies to application user IDs too. It appears that Informatica 8.6.1 HF6 (part of OBIA 7.

The latest point release of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, 7.9.6.1, has been released and is available for download from here (direct link to download). The version.txt reports the version as: Build: 7.9.6.1.100609.2038 Release Version: Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 7.9.6.1 Package: 100609.2038 No updated documentation library yet through, so can’t nosey through the release notes. The docs that come with the download are labelled 7.9.6 and dated April 09 so don’t look like they’ve been updated either.

We’re getting problems with an instance of Informatica / out-of-the-box OBIA on a new set of servers. When we run the execution plan we get this error soon after starting: MAPPING> DBG_21075 Connecting to database [TNSENTRY], user [MYUSER] MAPPING> CMN_1761 Timestamp Event: [Tue Mar 24 18:56:33 2009] MAPPING> CMN_1022 Database driver error… CMN_1022 [ Database driver error… Function Name : Logon ORA-12537: TNS:connection closed Database driver error… Function Name : Connect