Oracle inventory empty after upgrade to AIX53 TL08

[abc]

Hi,

The Oracle inventory (where the patch data is kept) is empty after an upgrade to TL08. The problem did not occur after upgrading to TL06 and can't be reproduced on a TL06 system. Has anyone else encountered this problem when upgrading to TL08?

[Michael]

patch data? Oracle patches? AIX patches.

It feels like a migration procedure might have been used, rather than an update_all.

Where does oracle store it's patch data - if it is oracle data.

What command was used to update to TL08? And have you been able to replicate this (restore of mksysb, or alt disk update repeated).

[abc]

Apologies for not replying earlier. No it was the Oracle patch data (Oracle inventory) that was "missing" after the migration (not an update_all). The problem has since been resolved by Oracle: the cause was an env variable set for the DB user. This was set when the system was still running AIX 43 to solve a memory issue. This variable setting seems to have caused a problem after vthe migration from AIX52 to AIX53. The variable was MALLOCTYPE and it was set to 3.1. After it was unset, the issue was solved.

[Michael]

Good to hear it is resolved.

Which level or version of Oracle - in case someone comes here via a google search?

[abc]

The versions of Oracle were different versions, but the issue was related to TL08. Description of the issue and the solution:
Issue: core dump when running ?opatch? or ?java? command as dbuser.

This is caused by the environment variable MALLOCTYPE which is set under the dbuser profile in all instances.
in /home/db<instance>/.<instance>
export MALLOCTYPE=3.1

This seems to be historical (set in 2004 initially) to manage some memory issues running oracle under AIX 4.3.

MALLOCTYPE is also set in report60.sh under apps:

## MALLOCTYPE need to be defined on 4.3.x systems to 3.1 o.w. we may get
## coredump from X libraries
export MALLOCTYPE=3.1

Solution:
Oracle (SR 7170278.992) recommends to unset this at db user level but to leave it at apps level unless it causes problems.