OGG-08048 after patching GoldenGate: explanations and solutions

When patching GoldenGate Classic Architecture, you might encounter an OGG-08048 error when restarting your extracts and replicats.

OGG-08048: Failed to initialize timezone information. Check location of ORACLE_HOME.

What should you do exactly, and how do you avoid this error in the future ? In fact, this error is easy to reproduce, which also makes it easy to avoid. Usually, it happens when following the official documentation instructions for patching. They always include a modification of the ORACLE_HOME variable.

export ORACLE_HOME=GoldenGate_Installation_Path

Where does this come from ?

This is a good practice to make sure the OPatch utility knows what to patch. However, it might cause issues when restarting. As a rule of thumb, the modified environment should only be used to patch and roll back your installation. You shouldn’t do any management tasks with it !

The most important thing to remember is that you should start the manager with the correct environment variables ! If the manager is already started, you might still have the error when starting the extracts. What this means if that correcting your environment variables after restarting the manager might not solve the issue !

With this explanation, you now understand why rolling back the patch will not solve the OGG-08048. The rollback will work, but you will not be able to restart the extracts !

What should you do if you have an OGG-08048 error ?

If you have an OGG-08048 error when starting GoldenGate processes:

• If your environment is patched, do not attempt to rollback. Just load your usual GoldenGate environment, restart the manager and attempt to restart the processes.
• If you already rolled back the patch, you can apply it again. Then, follow the steps described above: load a standard GoldenGate environment, restart the manager and the GoldenGate processes.

And in the future, remember to always use your classic environment to manage your installation before and after applying a GoldenGate patch. To make it safer, I would suggest using separate sessions to avoid any confusion.

And after patching your GoldenGate classic architecture setup, you should definitely consider upgrading to GoldenGate 26ai, using the migration utility.