The Oracle EBS Invalid Object Utility

If you are familiar with Oracle databases then you are familiar with invalid objects. Specially in the realm of EBS, where making a code change to a package, changing a table or applying a patch can cause many objects to become invalid within the various schemas in your database. There are of course tables you can query to see which objects are invalid, like dba_objects, where you can see whether a particular object is in an invalid state. However, the reason as to why that is, is not as easy to discern.

Here is where the EBS Invalid Object Utility (Doc ID 2214169.1) comes in. According to Oracle, "this utility is provided by Oracle Support to proactively assist you with maintaining Oracle Application environments and can also be used for data collection by Support engineers".

So, what does it do? It generates an HTML output with good details around invalid objects in the target instance and insights as to why they are invalid. If you have ongoing research efforts to reduce the invalid objects within your EBS Oracle database then this is a must, also it is a great a tool going forward whenever you need to research any invalid objects. A good use case would be to run the utility after releases or maintenance activities where patches are applied in order to get information regarding any objects that may have become invalid and why that happened.

Unlike your basic SQL against the tables provided by Oracle, the UI within the report looks great, and aside from aiding the research of invalid objects it has a couple of additional features. First is the "droppable" objects feature, which lists obsolete objects that can be dropped, since many objects don’t get dropped automatically after patches or upgrades, even if they get deprecated, thus creating noise within your instance and making subsequent upgrades harder and true invalid objects difficult to mine. The second additional feature is the patches applied feature, this one is really useful since it helps show which patch caused which object to become invalid, which really narrows down the root cause analysis as to why an object became invalid after a patch was applied.

There is no configuration required, all that is required is for the utility to be unzipped and executed. There are some basic requirements such as having Perl installed and the APPS environment set, all of which can be seen in the note I included above.

Oracle has a dedicated thread to share feedback regarding the utility and ask any questions, the thread can be found at: https://community.oracle.com/docs/DOC-1011252

Happy invalid objects hunting!