MacLochlainns Weblog

While preparing my new instance for class, which uses Oracle 11g XE and Fedora 27, I got caught by the Oracle instructions. I should have got caught but when you’re in a hurry sometimes you don’t slow down enough to read it properly. Actually, for me it was the uppercase APEX_HOME that threw me for a moment. It looks too much like an environment variable. Step 5 of the upgrading instructions says:

5. Log back into SQL*Plus (as above) and configure the Embedded PL/SQL Gateway (EPG):

   SQL> @apex_epg_config.SQL APEX_HOME

   SQL> @apex_epg_config.sql APEX_HOME

   [Note: APEX_HOME is the directory you specified when unzipping the file. For example, with Windows 'C:\'.]

Like an idiot, I typed it in literally without reading the note. That gave me this beautifully non-constructive error message:

DECLARE
*
ERROR AT line 1:
ORA-22288: FILE OR LOB operation FILEOPEN failed
No such FILE OR DIRECTORY
ORA-06512: AT "SYS.XMLTYPE", line 296
ORA-06512: AT line 16

I tried to launch APEX for a more meaningful error message, and it displayed:

Then, I used Google to find a few very old and not very helpful solutions because I wasn’t slowing down to read them. However, clearly if there are only old solutions the problem must be what I typed. I checked my old APEX 4 to APEX 5 blog post and then I understood the APEX_HOME. The documentation should really use APEX_UPGRADE_UNZIP_PATH to avoid having to read the detailed note.

After changing the generic APEX_PATH parameter to the physical directory directory where I stored the unzipped file content /u01/app/oracle/apex, like this:

SQL> @apex_epg_config.SQL /u01/app/oracle/apex

and, it worked as designed.

It important to note that the APEX upgrade works perfectly. Outstanding work by a well motivated and thorough development team. I can only quibble with making Step 5 simpler. As always, I hope this helps others.