GeekStuff (EPM): Oracle EPM HFM 11.1.2.4 and Oracle DB 12c

Introduction

At the time of writing the latest available PSU .204 for HFM does not support Oracle Database 12c yet. Although it works well, it doesn't work out-of-the-box.

Can't wait for Oracle to officially support Oracle DB 12c? Read on!

 

Configuration Used

My installation contained the following EPM products: Foundation (Shared Services, Calculation Manager), RA Framework,  Financial Reporting, FDM EE and Financial Management. Installed the latest available PSU's for all products. In addition I updated Weblogic 10.3.6.0 to REL13 (21984589), and updated the JDBC (25454480) and UCP drivers (25508728) for REL13. The later may not be required. The platform used was Oracle Linux 6.8 (x86_64) and Oracle Database 12c version 12.1.0.2 without any additional patches.

The Issue

The core-issue is the out-dated Merant ODBC (7.1.4 which date back to 2014) drivers that do not support the default authentication protocols configured in DB 12c. As a side note: Oracle Advanced Security (OAS) is supported, but does not work due to a unpublished bug. According to Oracle this will be fixed in PSU .205. Financial Management xfmdatasource.exe process happens to depend on these out-dated drivers. When attempting to start a HFM application, an error will appear in the web interface complaining about not being able to find a datasource for the application you are trying to open.

Looking at the log xfm.odl.-1.Log, you will encounter the error message:

Solution

After some troubleshooting, the solution turned out to be simple. The Oracle Database 12c must be configured to allow/support legacy authentication protocol. This can be done by adding the following parameters to the sqlnet.ora typically located in /u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.2/db_1/network/admin.

Make sure to restart Oracle Database (or simply restart the server). However when I tried to open the application, the error message remained and the application would not open. Looking again in the same log a new message appeared:

After checking the user was not locked and the password for the HFM schema user was 100% correct, I discovered that the solution was to lower the password versioning for the HFM schema user. Default in Oracle Database 12c, the versions are 11g and 12c. However these versions are incompatible with the Merant ODBC drivers used by HFM. Luckily Oracle provides a script with DB 12c that configures 12c in 11g compatibility mode related to password versioning and auditing policies. The script can be found in $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/secconf.sql.

Execute this script, recreate the HFM schema user password in order to change the password versions and validate the result by executing the commands:
Yes! The HFM application now opens without any issues. For as far I could tell, none of the other installed products had any issues. Having said that, bear in mind that at this point only the HFM schema user has the 10g, 11g and 12c password version support. It could be that you need to re-create the password for the other schema users used by the other EPM components.

Final Notes

It turned out to be fairly simple to configure Oracle Database 12c in such a way, that Oracle EPM works with EPM 11.1.2.4.204 out-of-the-box. However keep in mind that this configuration is officially not supported by Oracle and it may have security implications (since you lowered allowed authentication protocol versions). Implement on your own risk!