Automic Workload Automation

  • 1.  Things you may need to know going from 12.2.0 to 12.2.1

    Posted Feb 06, 2019 11:59 AM

    From the series "random things that happen", and hopefully of use to someone else, these are the lessons from updating one system from 12.2.0+hf2 to 12.2.1-2019-02-02.

     

    This was an old-style update, since we don't do ZDU for the time being. The manual was found to be lacking severely in clarity. The chapter on Hotfix updates (whether applicable here or not) seems to have gotten truncated between 12.1 and 12.2 a lot (effectively improving it), but overall the procedures remains very unclear. After being severely puzzled and some fruitless discussion, we had to ditch the manual and went with a plain "shut down, update files, update db and bring it back up" approach.

     

    Some small findings:

     

    • when ucybdbld says

      U00038127 Loading in upgrade mode is not possible while the system is running.

      after shutting down the system, this means you needed to stop all clients. You do not need to empty EH (i.e. stop all activities), although Automic has recommended that in the past. But do stop all clients BEFORE you bring down the system or you won't be able to update the database.
    • it appears, at least for us, the 12.2.0 SQL agent in Service Mode is not compatible with 12.2.1. We needed to update to the latest SQL agent to get it to register with the engine after the update.

     

    The rest was smooth sailing.



  • 2.  Re: Things you may need to know going from 12.2.0 to 12.2.1

    Posted Feb 08, 2019 07:37 AM

    If you do string manipulation with Automic Script, you may also want to know that "STR_SUBSTITUTE" works differently now. While there is a brief changelog entry (01103382), this may not be very obvious.

     

    The third parameter, if left blank, used to default to en empty string. Many users used this to remove substrings from a strings, such as in filenames:

     

    :set &basename# = STR_SUBSTITUTE("payments.txt", ".txt")

     

    In the old releases, this would result in the string "payments". In the new release, the third parameter, if left blank, defaults to a "space" character. So in 12.2.1. and beyond, the result is now "payments ".

     

    While this does serve to bring the script behavior in line with the documentation, we are struggling to understand why the decision was to change the way the function works, thus needlessly breaking backwards compatibility, over adjusting the manual instead. Besides breaking jobs, this also leads to an unintuitive situation, because the amount of script languages that treat empty parameters as an explicit space (or "blank") vs. those that threat them as an empty string, nil or null value is probably negligible.



  • 3.  Re: Things you may need to know going from 12.2.0 to 12.2.1

    Posted Feb 08, 2019 04:32 PM

    This is good info thanks Carsten!

    We just bumped to 12.2.1HF2.

    Its missing a MAX_NESTING_DEPTH parameter in UC SYSTEM SETTINGS.



  • 4.  Re: Things you may need to know going from 12.2.0 to 12.2.1

    Posted Feb 11, 2019 05:07 AM

    Hi Tony,

     

    thanks. It's gone from my UC_SYSTEM_SETTINGS, too.

     

    But I'm confused now: To my knowledge, they introduced that parameter in 12.2.0 because people could create infinite loops with ACTIVATE_UC_OBJECT.

     

    Do you know if this change is by design, or is it a regression? For what it's worth, I can't find a changelog describing this. Is MAX_NESTING_DEPTH still honored if I put it back? Is there already a support ticket?

     

    Thanks!



  • 5.  Re: Things you may need to know going from 12.2.0 to 12.2.1

    Posted Feb 11, 2019 09:34 AM

    No, MAX_NESTING_DEPTH is not honored when we add it back to the UC_SYSTEM_SETTINGS variable. At least not in this version. (Automation Engine API Version - Automation Engine API 12.2.1+hf.1.build.1544018449118 Database - 12.2.1+hf.2.build.1544538398749). This is the version that we have upgraded to.

    We have a ticket opened with CA and they are looking into it. As far as we know this is a change by design and then they later added this MAX_NESTING_DEPTH parameter as a solution to resolve this issue. "Task is interlaced too much".

     

    Thanks

    Esther



  • 6.  Re: Things you may need to know going from 12.2.0 to 12.2.1

    Posted Feb 11, 2019 09:39 AM
    "Task is interlaced too much".

     

    Classic.

     

    Maybe they'll fix the message while they revisit the subject?



  • 7.  Re: Things you may need to know going from 12.2.0 to 12.2.1

    Posted Feb 21, 2019 09:54 AM

    MAX_NESTING_DEPTH - will be fixed in 12.2.2 on 28-Feb. Or there'll be trouble!