T09-2020 BIOVIA 2020: Update on BIOVIA 2020 product support for Oracle 18c and Oracle 19c

Program

BIOVIA CISPro 2020, BIOVIA Direct 2020, BIOVIA Insight 2020, BIOVIA Insight for Excel 2020, BIOVIA Isentris 2020, BIOVIA Pipeline Pilot 2020, BIOVIA ChemReg 2020, BIOVIA BioReg 2020

Operating System

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Oracle Linux 7

Background

While implementing and testing Oracle 18c and 19c support for the 2020 versions of the BIOVIA products we discovered an Oracle issue which may cause particular queries in the BIOVIA Direct product to return incorrect results or errors. The issue was confirmed by Oracle and is logged as bug number 30328168. The bug applies to two specific types of queries which are frequently used in other BIOVIA applications that implement BIOVIA Direct functionality. Due to the nature of the bug BIOVIA had decided to initially not support BIOVIA Direct 2020 and depending BIOVIA applications with Oracle 18c and 19c. The list of impacted BIOVIA products or applications includes the following:

BIOVIA CISPro 2020 (MSB application)
BIOVIA Direct 2020
BIOVIA Insight 2020
BIOVIA Insight for Excel 2020
BIOVIA Isentris 2020
BIOVIA Query Service (part of Pipeline Pilot 2020)
BIOVIA Registration (ChemReg 2020, BioReg 2020)

Solution

In the meantime, Oracle has released a patch specifically for the Release Update 3 of Oracle 19c (i.e. 19.3.0.0.0) on the Linux platform. Following that, BIOVIA conducted testing of the impacted BIOVIA products with a patched version of Oracle 19.3 on the Linux platform. Based on the test results, BIOVIA declares support for the above listed BIOVIA products and applications with Oracle 19 Release Update 3 on the Linux platform, presuming that the patch 30328168 is applied. To access the Oracle patch, login to your Oracle Support account and search for the patch number 30328168 in the Patches & Updates section.

Oracle have confirmed that they will also provide a patch for the issue for Oracle 19c on the Windows platform, though without an estimate of the release timeframe for the patch. BIOVIA will therefore review the support for Oracle 19c on the Windows platform once Oracle released the patch for this platform.

According to Oracle, no patch is planned for Oracle 18c. At this point in time BIOVIA therefore cannot support the listed BIOVIA products and applications with Oracle 18c.

Customers who have a specific need to run any of the listed BIOVIA products or applications on Oracle 18c or on an Oracle 19c version other than Release Update 3 on the Linux platform are expressly requested to contact BIOVIA Support to discuss technical options.

How to contact BIOVIA Support

If you have any questions, please contact BIOVIA Support.