This MOS note is not available anymore??!?

Let me craft a very short Tuesday evening blog post as this happened quite often to me. We promote a MOS note, either via our blogs or in our Virtual Classroom seminars and workshops. And when you try to access it, the note is gone. Plus, MyOracle Support (MOS) gives you no indication why it has disappeared or what has happened.

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One of the many cases …

Chris commented on the blog here saying:

Hello Mike,

Unfortunately document “MOS Note: 2720807.1 – Oracle Database 19c Important Recommended One-off Patches” is not available anymore as it can’t be found anymore on Metalink :-(. Hopefully it will be back online again soon.

Greetings,
Chris

And I agree completely – this is bad. Actually the message looks like this:

Why is that?

The above MOS note number has gotten a much easier to remember synonym, MOS Note: 555.1 – Oracle Database 19c Important Recommended One-off Patches.

Now what happens in the background:

1. A new issue gets added to MOS Note: 555.1 (or any other note)
2. Then this note gets into REVIEW state
3. And at this point it is not visible anymore for customers – and you receive the above output
4. Now another engineer has to to the REVIEW and then PUBLISH the note again
5. The note is visible to you again

The problem here is that the generic “Document cannot be displayed” message does not differ between a note being in REVIEW state and just waiting to be republished or the case that a note got removed or switched completely to “INTERNAL ONLY”.

For very popular notes, especially those we talk about and recommend, you normally can assume that the “Document cannot be displayed” message is just a temporary message saying “Document is right now not available – please try again in a few hours”.

I can’t change this – and we raised this internally many times.

But maybe this will help you not getting too frustrated. Try it again the next day please – that usually helps.

Any quick solution?

At worst case, you need to open an SR. Let’s assume this is a step-by-step note, for instance the one explaining how to replicate the plugin of a non-CDB from the production to the standby site in ASM. And you need this script for the ASM aliases. But you get the above error.

Then open an SR and ask the Support engineer to share this note with you. They can’t share notes which are marked as INTERNAL ONLY of course. But in this case I’m pretty confident that you’ll get the note when it is just temporarily in REVIEW state.

–Mike