Error

Datapatch return codes and helpful queries

Posted on February 17, 2026 by Mike.Dietrich datapatch 4

The other week I was visiting a customer in Germany who had specific questions for datapatch. And luckily, Alejandro Diaz who is the Product Manager for Data Pump in our team has a history in datapatch. He helped me with Datapatch return codes and helpful queries.

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Datapatch return codes

Yes, datapatch generates various return codes you can use to verify the outcome in case you program or maintain an automation.

0 for success
1 for prereq failure
2 for non-ignorable error during patch installation
255 runtime error

I may …

OJVM patching fails with ORA-1403 in 19.30 if JAVAVM is not installed

Thanks to all the people (Jeff, Daniele, Lothar and others) who alerted me about this topic. Some of you had even created their own fix already. So, this is about an issue which happens only if you have no JAVAVM installed in your database or PDB but you still apply the OJVM Bundle on to of the Oracle Database 19.30 Release Update. You may find then: OJVM patching fails with ORA-1403 in 19.30 if JAVAVM is not installed.

OJVM patching fails with ORA-1403 in 19.30 if JVM is not installed

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When does this happen?

This issue happens when you apply the OJVM bundle together with …

ORA-43907: Potential behavior change with Oracle RU 19.28.0

Posted on September 22, 2025 by Mike.Dietrich Behavior Change Oracle Database 19c Patch Recommendation 2

As I said multiple times, we have the best and most knowledgeable customers out there. Julian Frey is one of them, and there is a good and legit reason why he is an ACE Director since (I think) two years. Julian alerted me the other day about an ORA-43907: Potential behavior change with Oracle RU 19.28.0. And I guess, some of you would like to learn about this, too.

ORA-43907: Potential behavior change with Oracle RU 19.28.0

Photo by Shannon Potter on Unsplash

What you may see?

Oracle Database 19c Release Update 19.28 contains a fix for Bug 36386077 – ORA-43907 NEEDS TO BE RAISED FOR CONVERSION …

ADB Migration: Why does my SPA report has so many errors?

Posted on February 24, 2025 by Mike.Dietrich Autonomous Database - ADB Performance Tuning SPA - SQL Performance Analyzer 2

I’m dealing lately with several migration to Oracle Autonomous Database, mostly to ADB Serverless (called “shared” a while ago, in short: ADB-S). With one of the customers we run SQL Performance Analyzer reports with about 1500 statements. But one topic came up in this ADB Migration: Why does my SPA report has so many errors? Let’s see why that is …

ADB Migration: Why does my SPA report has so many errors?

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A little bit of background on SPA

The SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) is one of the two pieces of Real Application Testing. This is a feature in the database I keep using …

The downsides of in-place patching – and a patching lab

Posted on January 10, 2024 by Mike.Dietrich Best Practice Patch Recommendation 40

Happy New Year to all of you at first. I hope you all had a good start – and for myself, I promise to blog a bit more again in 2024. Let me start with my first post since I received a question very often: Why should I patch out-of-place with a new Oracle Home? Since I need to patch a bit today I can easily show the downsides of in-place patching – and a patching lab.

The downsides of in-place patching - and a patching lab

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It all started at OCW 2023

Ok, we didn’t really start it at OCW 2023 in …

ORA-13516 “CATPROC not valid” during datapatch or autoupgrade to 19.18.0

Posted on February 24, 2023 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls Patch Recommendation 18

I thought I could relax this week using my leftover vacation days from 2022. But this issue is triggering me since some of you mailed me already. Maybe this blog post can prevent others from being trapped by this issue: ORA-13516 “CATPROC not valid” during datapatch or autoupgrade to 19.18.0. And as a prolog, you will NOT see the below issue when you started your database in NORMAL mode for the execution of datapatch.

ORA-13516 "CATPROC not valid" during datapatch or autoupgrade to 19.18.0

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What is the symptom?

Regardless of whether you patch to Oracle Database RU 19.18.0 manually or with …

Upgrade from 11.2.0.4 to 19c with Label Security Policies

Posted on July 6, 2022 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls 5

I remember, I have a blog. Forgive me that I don’t write a lot at the moment even though I still have a long queue of “future posts to write”. It is just too busy, and I was away for almost two full weeks in June as well. But let me briefly drop information on an issue I learned about recently. It just affects your when Upgrade from 11.2.0.4 to 19c with Label Security Policies. All other readers may simply ignore this blog post.

Upgrade from 11.2.0.4 to 19c with Label Security Policies

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What happens?

You are using Oracle Label Security, and …

Data Pump: The Time Zone Pitfalls

Posted on May 14, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls 15

Photo by Luis Cortes on Unsplash

Last week a very experienced colleague called me. He had issues with an export dump taken from an Oracle 20c database importing into 19c. It failed. So this blog post is about Data Pump: The Time Zone Pitfalls.

The Case

Usually you will see this issue only when you try to export from a higher version, and then attempt to import into a lower one. But the same thing can happen when you patched your databases partially with a newer time zone patch regardless of the version.

My colleague saw this error:

impdp system/welcome1@//localhost:1521/MYDB

RMAN Catalog Upgrade fails – ORA-02296 – error creating modify_ts_pdbinc_key_not_null

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls RMAN 4

This issue got raised to my via a customer I know for quite a while – all credits go to Andy Kielhorn for digging down into that issue and solving it.

Failed RMAN Catalog Upgrade from 11.2.0.4 to 12.1.0.2

The RMAN catalog upgrade:

SQL> @?/rdbms/admin/dbmsrmansys.sql

$ rman CATALOG rman/xxx@rman01

RMAN> UPGRADE CATALOG; 

RMAN> UPGRADE CATALOG;

failed with the following sequence of error messages:

error creating modify_ts_pdbinc_key_not_null
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-06004: ORACLE error from recovery catalog database: ORA-02296: cannot enable (RMAN.) - null values found

error creating modify_tsatt_pdbinc_key_not_null
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR

Error

Datapatch return codes and helpful queries

Datapatch return codes

OJVM patching fails with ORA-1403 in 19.30 if JAVAVM is not installed

When does this happen?

ORA-43907: Potential behavior change with Oracle RU 19.28.0

What you may see?

ADB Migration: Why does my SPA report has so many errors?

A little bit of background on SPA

The downsides of in-place patching – and a patching lab

It all started at OCW 2023

ORA-13516 “CATPROC not valid” during datapatch or autoupgrade to 19.18.0

What is the symptom?

Upgrade from 11.2.0.4 to 19c with Label Security Policies

What happens?

Data Pump: The Time Zone Pitfalls

The Case

RMAN Catalog Upgrade fails – ORA-02296 – error creating modify_ts_pdbinc_key_not_null

Failed RMAN Catalog Upgrade from 11.2.0.4 to 12.1.0.2

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