OGG-00423 when performing initial load with GoldenGate 23ai

Very quick piece of blog today to tackle the OGG-00423 error. There is not much information online on the matter, and the official Oracle documentation doesn’t help. If you ever stumble upon an OGG-00423 error when setting up GoldenGate replication, remember that it’s most certainly related to grants given to the GoldenGate user. An example of the error is given below, after starting an initial load:

2025-10-27 09:52:40  ERROR   OGG-00423  Could not find definition for pdb_source.app_source.t1.

This error happened when doing an initial load with the following configuration:

extract extini
useridalias cdb01
extfile aa
SOURCECATALOG pdb_source
table app_source.t1, SQLPredicate "As of SCN 3899696";

This error should be present whether you use SOURCECATALOG or the full three-part TABLE name.

For replicats, a common solution for OGG-00423 is to use the ASSUMETARGETDEFS parameter in the configuration file, but this is a replication-only parameter, and there is no such thing for the initial load. In this case, the error was due to the user defined in the cdb01 alias lacking select on the specified t1 table:

[oracle@vmogg ~]$ sqlplus c##ggadmin
Enter password:

SQL> alter session set container=pdb_source;
Session altered.

SQL> select * from app_source.t1;
select * from app_source.t1
                           *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00942: table or view does not exist

After granting the correct SELECT privilege to the GoldenGate user, it works ! Here is an example on how to grant this select. You might want to grant it differently, depending on security aspects in your deployments:

sqlplus / as sysdba
ALTER SESSION SET CONTAINER=PDB_SOURCE;
GRANT SELECT ANY TABLE TO C##GGADMIN CONTAINER=CURRENT;

NB: When testing GoldenGate setups, a good practice to debug OGG-errors if you do not use a DBA user for replication is to temporarily grant DBA (or a DBA role) to the GoldenGate user. This way, you can quickly track down the root cause of your problem, at least if it’s related to grants.