I've installed July 2020 RU to one of my databases and have had a heck
of a time to figure it out. I was installing the RU on top of Oracle
19.7 EE. The "opatch apply" went without a hitch but datapatch -verbose
was failing with the following message:
catconInit: unexpected error in get_instance_status_and_name
The log files were as useless as useless can be, without the least
indication as to what may be the problem. I sometimes think that Oracle
developers really hate database administrators and want to exact revenge
on them for the sins committed by our forefathers, somebody like the
last common ancestor of Tom Kyte and me. I am sure that such a creature
will one day be found somewhere in the Great Rift Valley. However,
Oracle Support saved the day:
Datapatch fails with catconInit: unexpected error in
get_instance_status_and_name (Doc ID 2409301.1)
It turns out that modified glogin.sql can break the datapatch utility.
People will soon start installing this around and glogin.sql is a very
frequently modified file. So, if you don't want to hit the same problem,
here are the cause and the solution:
Cause
The issue was caused by customization to the
<ORACLE_HOME>/sqlplus/admin/glogin.sql
The datapatch script connects to the database to apply the patch and it
expects a certain response to verify that it has connected, but since
the glogin was customized datapatch does not understand the response and
so it fails.
Solution
1. Temporarily rename <ORACLE_HOME>/sqlplus/admin/glogin.sql
2. Retry datapatch
3. Rename glogin.sql back to the original name
--
Mladen Gogala
Database Consultant
Tel: (347) 321-1217