Data Relationship Management Schema Password Guidance

While I have managed to find guidance for the creation of Oracle schema passwords for the main EPM suite, I have not found anything noting restrictions around the DRM application schema passwords. Unfortunately, I have encountered one such restriction I must share.

The Oracle database schema password guidelines for your particular version of the product should be followed. Sometimes however something slips through and during troubleshooting, it is helpful to know what this kind of issue looks like and what causes it. In this case, we had a schema password that contained the “ @ “ character. SQLDeveloper will handle this password, and SQLPlus will allow you to use the password to connect so long as you enclose it in quotation marks. The DRM console behaves differently however.

I am able to enter the connection string and test successfully without issue, using what I’ll refer to as the “invalid” schema password. However, the application would not start, and an attempt to upgrade the application to the latest version was met with errors:

ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified

But, the test worked fine, why can it not resolve the connect identifier? We compared with other environments’ configuration, checked for the presence (or absence!) of tnsnames.ora , and the only difference we could find was in the password. Google quickly showed us what would happen if some products used the “ @ “ symbol in the schema password, and we immediately put in tickets to change the password to something that better conforms to Oracle’s schema password recommendations.