Oracle Error 01804 - Failure to initialize timezone - Common solutions

[Legacy User]

Hello Automic Community!

I recently ran across an interesting error message in Oracle that I wanted to share. This issue occured when attempting to start up WPs after an installation/upgrade to the Automation Engine. The error message is written below:

ORA - 01804: failure to initialize timezone information

This is a generic error message from the Oracle Database indicating that the timezone information file was not properly read. Below are the most common solutions:


1) Your oracle client may be missing some timezone related files in its$ORACLE_HOMEdirectory. You can try simply copying those files from another instance of oracle client. 

2) Binary may not have permission to access the OCCI library. Please ensure permissions are in correctly in place. 

3) Check to make sure the following paths are set correctly in your environment: 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH 
ORACLE_HOME 
NLS_LANG

I hope this is helpful!

[Legacy User]

May be this additional information is also helpful 

The oerr utility shows this for the ORA-01804 error:

ORA-01804: failure to initialize timezone information

Cause:  The timezone information file was not properly read.

Action:  Please contact Oracle Customer Support.

The first thing to do is to check if ORA_TZFILE is set and if it is, remove it and restart the database and listener. Oracle will then try to load the $ORACLE_HOME/oracore/zoneinfo/timezlrg.dat file.

If for some reason the file that Oracle wants to use is not available then this is the cause of the problem.

If the file is present then an alternative reason for the error could be that Oracle cannot load the file because of permission problems.

If all above is correct then it might be a .dat file that is corrupt.