EBS DBA: R12.1.2 Another Step for Automated Vanilla EBS Cloning

As many of you know a cloning is one of the most DBA time consuming operations. For the first few times an Apps DBA may enjoy it. However, after the 20th cloning it becomes a boring routine.

For some time I have been interested to get the EBS cloning process 100% automated and I must admit that for many customers we have been quite successful with the process; saving them tons of DBA boring hours ;)

If you have tried to automate EBS cloning then you definitely know that you can’t get through without hacking and customizing the Oracle-provided Rapid Clone utility. One of the areas we should “hack” the code to make it running in batch scripts is the services startup bit. The problem is that by default straight after Rapid Clone is completed Oracle starts all the services on the Apps node and until now there wasn’t a way to change it. There are many reasons why you wouldn’t start Apps processes straight after Rapid Clone is completed. Among them are APPS user password change (this is typical operation for cloning), SSO integration, CM/CR disabling etc.

R12.1.2 brings on board a small but very nice feature. From now on, Rapid Clone will ask you if you would like to start services at the end of Rapid Clone call:

Do you want to startup the Application Services for EBSPRD? (y/n) [y] : n

How great is this? Now we can specify that we don’t want to starup services and run after cloning steps before we are ready to start the environment.

My best regards to all Apps DBAs around,

Yury