HP-SIM 5.3 Database issue

[David J Atkinson]

I have an HP-SIM instance that will not start up. It was running fine, but we needed to restart the system and now the SIM application will not start. The only error SIM is giving is

03 Jun 20:29:23,442 ERROR [STDERR] java.sql.SQLException: ORA-12899: value too large for column "SIM"."SWVERSIONWEIGHTS"."OSKEY" (actual: 53, maximum: 50)



The inital database checks complete normally (No errors are found, but I've run mxconfigrepo manually anyway) and there is nothing obviously broken in the database. I can only assume that SIM has found data from somewhere and is attempting to insert a value that is to big into the database as it starts.

This system is running SIM C.05.03.01.00 (Systems Insight Manager 5.3 with Update 1 - Linux) on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP4. We are working on migrating to SIM 6.0, but old hardware and an old OS is slowing the move down. (We'll get there, but in the mean time we still need our 5.3 SIM running). Any help, suggestions, comments greatly appreciated...

[Change_happens]

not sure just a guess. it could be related to "character set". what is the "character set" you r using?
hpsim wants it to be Unicode(UTF-8).

[David J Atkinson]

Hi, Thanks for the suggestion. I should have mentioned that this SIM instance is using an Oracle database in a consolidated environment (ie. the database is on a separate machine, but the Oracle server hosts several databases). We discovered when setting up the server that SIM apparently does not like UTF8, the Unicode character set *must* be AL32UTF8 and the national character set must be AL16UTF16 - both exactly as per the manual. We initally selected the wrong options and ended up having to drop the database.

Anyway, getting back to the original problem... We were able to work around the problem by extending the field. We found that one of our SIM servers running on Windows and MS-SQL server uses 256 characters for the same field, so concluded that it would be reasonably safe to increase the field size. We haven't seen any issues yet. (And yes, we have SIM running on Windows, Linux and HP-UX... We've got a lot of servers)

So my question now is, is this "hack" a safe way to get around the problem? Is it going to lead to data corruption because we may now have larger than expected data in this field? Is this a bug in the mxoracleconfig?