ORA-1031

Sometimes things get revealed at unexpected occasions. This one happened during a recent customer upgrade to Oracle Database 12c with a 3rd party geospatioanl application installed (ESRI).

At the very end of the upgrade the customer saw many ORA-1031 (insufficient privileges) errors and it seemed to be that nothing was working correctly anymore.

This happened during the run of catupend.sql. The following code path in  catupend.sql causes the error.

cursor ddl_triggers
is
select o.object_id from dba_triggers t, dba_objects o
where t.owner = o.owner and t.trigger_name = o.object_name and o.object_type = 'TRIGGER'
and (t.triggering_event like '%ALTER%' or t.triggering_event like '%DDL%');