Sqlldr is working randomly

Question

Hi ,
We are running a unix script as part of batch job which uses sqlldr command. It was working fine for the past few year . They ran some patch two weeks back and the problem started. The sqlldr command behaves randomly. sometimes it works and some times its not.
we are getting
SQL*Loader-128: unable to begin a session. ORA-01017: invalid username/password;
error.
following are the command we are executing . and we have a script which called at the begginning of main script which exports all the environment variables and it also set the oracle environment by . oraenv command.
echo $(/csapps/oracle/scripts/schema_password -s $ORACLE_SID -o $username)|$SQLLOAD $username@$ORACLE_SID control=$LOCATION_CTL/$WIP_DATA data=$LOCATION_FTP/$WIP_DATA_FILE \
log=$WIP_DAT_LOG bad=$WIP_DAT_BAD silent=FEEDBACK BINDSIZE=$WIP_MAX_BINDSIZE DIRECT=TRUE
Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Hello user648844.
You are going to want to identify what was patched. Since the problem seems to be authentication, check first to see if the user/password is valid. Second, I'd recommend checking to see if schema_password was patched. All other commands are OS or database related and I would expect that the scope of the impact would be much larger if something there was changed and not working.
Hello Jean-Valentin.
user648844 is passing the password by using echo $(/csapps/oracle/scripts/schema_password -s $ORACLE_SID -o $username)|$SQLLOAD This works because SQL*Loader will start to log on, find that it hasn't been provided a password and then it will prompt for one...the pipe passing the password to that prompt. I expect that the schema_password program accesses files containing the passwords for different users for different databases. If you are considering using this approach, please keep in mind that execution can be logged and in that case the password may appear in the logs; I'm not sure if the password could be viewed through ps with this approach.
Hope this helps,
Luke