Issue Upgrading 11.1.1.1 to 11.1.1.3

I got an email this week from old friend and Essbase practitioner, Bryan Bain, about an issue he was encountering when trying to upgrade a customer from Hyperion 11.1.1.1 to Hyperion 11.1.1.3. As we focus on software development, we don't run production systems on our servers and thus never have a need to upgrade

Bryan emailed me back a short time saying he had "found the solution and it's pretty cool. You should probably blog about it, but you have to give me credit. :)". Better yet, I convinced Bryan to be a guest blogger here. So, without further adieu, here is Bryan's writeup:

The issue was encountered with a 11.1.1.1 system being upgraded to 11.1.1.3.

When we attempted to upgrade 11.1.1.1 to 11.1.1.3 using the Oracle installer, the “Apply maintenance release” option was disabled. Click on the graphic below to see a full size copy of the dialog.

We determined the original installation was performed while logged into the Windows server as . Unfortunately, had left the company and thus the login was no longer available. As in many companies, getting IT to resurrect the login would’ve taken an act of Congress.

After some research, we found the initial installation places a small file, called oracle.products, in the users home directory (i.e. C:\Documents and Settings\). The Oracle installer apparently looks for this file and, if it is not found, the installer will not recognize that any Oracle products are installed and thus applying a maintenance release would not be possible. The simple solution was to copy this file from the home directory to the home directory for the user login we were using.

The lesson for all of us doing infrastructure work is to always perform installation steps using a permanent, non-expiring ID. When I set up an environment, I typically ask for a non-expiring ID that will be used for the installation and to run the EPM services. If you run the install using this ID, you would never run into this issue during subsequent upgrades/patches.

Thanks Bryan for sharing this information!