Checking the logfile it showed that a call to “dbms_sqlpatch.patch_initialize” had failed. Looking at what might have caused this error in the procedure I found this:<\/p>\n
\r\n DIRECTORY_SQL := 'CREATE DIRECTORY dbms_sqlpatch_dir AS ' ||\r\n DBMS_ASSERT.ENQUOTE_LITERAL(ORACLE_HOME || '\/rdbms\/admin');\r\n DEBUG_PUT_LINE('directory sql: ' || DIRECTORY_SQL);\r\n EXECUTE IMMEDIATE DIRECTORY_SQL;\r\n<\/pre>\nWhy would that fail? The code should actually work. After some further investigation I noticed a sneaky little behavior change in Oracle 12.2. If you create a PDB with the “PATH_PREFIX” clause “CREATE DIRECTORY” will no longer accept absolute path names in that PDB.<\/p>\n
\r\nSQL> alter session set container=pdbdev1;\r\n\r\nSession altered.\r\n\r\nSQL> create or replace directory testdir AS '\/u02\/oradata\/DEV1\/PDBDEV1\/dump';\r\ncreate or replace directory testdir AS '\/u02\/oradata\/DEV1\/PDBDEV1\/dump'\r\n*\r\nERROR at line 1:\r\nORA-65254: invalid path specified for the directory\r\n\r\n\r\nSQL> create or replace directory testdir AS '.\/dump';\r\n\r\nDirectory created.\r\n\r\nSQL> select directory_path from dba_directories where directory_name = 'TESTDIR';\r\n\r\nDIRECTORY_PATH\r\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\r\n\/u02\/oradata\/DEV1\/PDBDEV1\/.\/dump\r\n\r\nSQL> create or replace directory testdir AS 'dump';\r\n\r\nDirectory created.\r\n\r\nSQL> select directory_path from dba_directories where directory_name = 'TESTDIR';\r\n\r\nDIRECTORY_PATH\r\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\r\n\/u02\/oradata\/DEV1\/PDBDEV1\/dump\r\n<\/pre>\nOracle 12.2 will basically accept any string that doesn’t start with a forward-slash “\/” and append it to the PATH_PREFIX. This behavior does not reflect the current documentation<\/a>:
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.spotonoracle.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/ora-doc_dp-path-name.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOracle 12.1, on the other hand, will accept just any string. But as you can see only the first directory object ends up with the inteded directory path.<\/p>\n
\r\nSQL> create or replace directory testdir AS '\/u02\/oradata\/DEV1\/PDB1';\r\n\r\nDirectory created.\r\n\r\nSQL> select directory_path from dba_directories where directory_name = 'TESTDIR';\r\n\r\nDIRECTORY_PATH\r\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\r\n\/u02\/oradata\/DEV1\/PDB1\r\n\r\nSQL> create or replace directory testdir AS '.\/dump';\r\n\r\nDirectory created.\r\n\r\nSQL> select directory_path from dba_directories where directory_name = 'TESTDIR';\r\n\r\nDIRECTORY_PATH\r\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\r\n.\/dump\r\n\r\nSQL> create or replace directory testdir AS 'dump';\r\n\r\nDirectory created.\r\n\r\nSQL> select directory_path from dba_directories where directory_name = 'TESTDIR';\r\n\r\nDIRECTORY_PATH\r\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\r\ndump\r\n<\/pre>\nI believe the intention of Oracle was to restrict the directory object path to “PATH_PREFIX” and subfolders in 12.2. They just did it in a very bad way. I’m going to raise a Service Request to see if that’s expected behavior or a regression and will keep you posted in the comment section of this post. Either way, Oracle will have to fix one or the other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oracle has released the first Database Proactive Bundle Patch (12.2.0.1.170516) on May 16th 2017 for Oracle database 12.2. Unfortunately, I could not successfully apply the patch to my lab environment. It would patch CDB$ROOT and PDB$SEED but failed patching my PDB (see lines 34 to 36). $ .\/datapatch -verbose SQL Patching tool version 12.2.0.1.0 Production […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spotonoracle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spotonoracle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spotonoracle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotonoracle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotonoracle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotonoracle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotonoracle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions\/256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spotonoracle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotonoracle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotonoracle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}