R12.1 Oracle HR: Receiving FRM-40654 error when trying to modify name

You will not believe the root cause of the MOS article "FRM-40654: Record has been updated. Requery block to see change Error When Updating a Person's Name" from note ID 2096800.1 but it sure is a good reminder to add data checks like this to your testing suites!!

R12 Assets: ORA-20001 and XLA-95103 errors on the Asset Workbench

Hoping to make a return to regular blog postings, tonight it might your time to read "R12 Asset Workbench Errors With ORA-20001 XLA-95103: An internal error occurred" from My Oracle Support note 1590451.1 to prepare your own alerts just in case the data matches this pattern of being in multiple books so you can get ahead of any issues!!

R12.1.3: Payables accounting date not in sync with General Ledger accounting date

I say a lot about bringing proactive data checks to Support teams, so tonight it would make a lot of sense to check out the My Oracle Support article "R12: Accounting Date And General Ledger Accounting Date Is Not In Sync" from note 1985068.1 because you will find out a setup issue that can cause a data mismatch between the EBS modules plus get a script which will allow you to identify if you are encountering this issue!

Weekend Learning: Block corruption in pre-12c DB versions

Out of a lot of error messages out there, I would think that the "ORA-01578: ORACLE data block corrupted" error is likely the most feared out there for DBAs (of course behind ORA-00600).  Do you want to find out more?  Read the long article "Handling Oracle Block Corruptions in Oracle7/8/8i/9i/10g/11g" on My Oracle Support via note ID 28814.1 to get all the details which also includes a lot of datafile related tables and errors that go into the alert log which are all potential candidates for proactive alerts going forward!

R12.1.3: Rejected PO mistakenly documents approval

Obviously the title catches your eye just the way it did mine as I thought I did not read it right the first time I saw it!  The content of My Oracle Support document "Purchasing Document was Rejected by the PO Approver, but it is found that the Status is Approved in the Action History" in note ID 1684684.1 actually is exactly what it says as rejected POs are instead documenting approval in the history lines due to a known bug.  Are you affected by this?  Repeat the steps as Oracle has shared them, and make sure you have already applied the bug fix to prevent data issues!

R12: Unable to change Supplier information

Since I'm on an A/P bug kick, and I've shared with you some knowledge about Supplier changes in R12, I should probably also clue you in on another item to add to your testing suite!  The other day A/P was in the web portal trying to change the inactivation date on a Supplier record when they received an error message indicating "Context Value Doesn't Exist In Value Set $FLEX$.DF_CONTEXTS" and the form wouldn't let them actually save their changes.  MOS note 1458183.1 indicates this happens because setup wasn't migrated over, or because there was a decision made to not migrate data, so you get two solutions: one if you want to fix your DFF and the other if you want to get a bugfix.

If you aren't testing the removal (or change) of information to your migrated data for A/P you should probably start trying to break the system by doing it, and even branch out to test other application data that was migrated because you might be able to introduce patches to your code base early in the process to prevent re-testing.

In Depth: Data Integrity

Have you ever wondered about the technical nature of data and the associated integrity?  How about some additional insights into constraint enforcement or global and distributed transactions?  Well then, you're in luck because Lucas Jellema does an amazing job here, found via ArchBeat, of not only writing up a paper that is easy to understand but uses several visual aids which seem simple but do a really good job of explaining some complex ideas to us.

Oracle Linux checks your data

Here you can see that Oracle is stepping up their efforts to combat data errors with data integrity protection around not only the whole system, but during the entire trip that the data takes it is being checked for validation.  Read the linked article to see a picture of this, as well as learn what creating integrity metadata is all about and how it relates to data integrity protection in an end-to-end disk-to-application solution.

Very interesting subject and a great visual presented, but I wonder why this solution only has EMC onboard as the first enterprise storage array vendor to join this effort by Emulex and Oracle.