Migrating Hybris with Ease

Running Hybris On Oracle - and deriving advantages of its data backup/recovery mechanism.

During a common course of Hybris implementation, at times changes made (intentionally or otherwise) in the schema/data can adversely affect the development environment and make it unstable. In some cases, initialization of system is the only resort which means losing all the manually created configurations that are made in the system and re running the impex scripts (which are not hooked up for their automatic execution). However, this is time consuming as well as requires manual intervention if the impex scripts and external settings are not properly set. Similar in design of rails active record where the database state is kept in form of migrations, the data structure is kept under impex and items configuration and updated as necessary.

To alleviate this problem in our latest project, we are using the same oracle database that is present on the staging server and just after re-initialization, resetting the database back to its saved state.
Periodically, the database team resets the master db backup to keep up with the occurring schema changes (which ensures that the additional work that a developer has to perform after 'initializing' the system is kept to minimum). So instead of running all the impex and doing synchronization, only a typical system update suffices.

Here's a short description of how the database is reset from its backed up state.


1. Disconnect from all running applications/programs that oracle user is logged into.

2. Log on to SQLPLUS as admin user: sqlplus / as sysdba

3. Drop and Create the user via the sql file with the following text (the path where the dbf files are present inside the oradata folder).

CREATE TABLESPACE YHTSPACE DATAFILE 'G:\app\oracle\oradata\HYBRIS\YHSPACE.DBF' SIZE 20M AUTOEXTEND ON LOGGING;
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLESPACE YHTEMP TEMPFILE 'G:\app\oracle\oradata\HYBRIS\YHTEMP01.DBF' SIZE 5M AUTOEXTEND ON;
define us=aphy
define pw=aphy
define ts=YHTSPACE
define tts=YHTEMP
DROP USER &us cascade;
CREATE USER &us IDENTIFIED BY &pw DEFAULT TABLESPACE &ts TEMPORARY TABLESPACE &tts PROFILE DEFAULT ACCOUNT UNLOCK;
GRANT "CONNECT","RESOURCE","CTXAPP" TO &us;
GRANT UNLIMITED TABLESACE TO &us;
ALTER USER &us DEFAULT ROLE ALL;
GRANT CREATE CLUSTER TO &us;
GRANT CREATE DATABASE LINK TO &us;
GRANT CREATE SESSION TO &us;
GRANT create ANY INDEX TO &us;
GRANT CREATE SEQUENCE TO &us;
GRANT CREATE SYNONYM TO &us;
GRANT CREATE TABLE TO &us;
GRANT CREATE VIEW TO &us;P
GRANT CREATE PROCEDURE TO &us;
GRANT CREATE TRIGGER TO &us;
GRANT CREATE TYPE TO &us;
GRANT CREATE SNAPSHOT TO &us;
GRANT EXECUTE ON CTX_DDL TO &us;
GRANT ANALYZE ANY TO &us;
grant IMP_FULL_DATABASE to &us;

4. Run the import command:
imp aphy/aphy FROMUSER=APQA TOUSER=aphy file=G:\app\oracle\oradata\HQD_22072016.dmp


While this method of managing database is time saving, it inherits the problem found in most of the tailor made approaches which involve manual intervention. Whether this is a worthwhile approach or a poor one is totally up to you and can be used in a manner depending upon your needs.