Enterprise Manager 12c No Special Characters for SYSMAN account

While doing an upgrade of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c from 12.1.0.1 to 12.1.0.4 I encountered an error which caused the upgrade to fail. Please keep in mind you cannot do a direct path upgrade from EM 12.1.0.1 to 12.1.0.4 you will first need to apply Bundle Patch (BP1) to the 12.1.0.1 binaries and then you can upgrade from 12.1.0.1 BP1 --> 12.1.0.2 or 12.1.0.3 and then finally you can upgrade to 12.1.0.4.

From the upgrade logs the error stack is below.


INFO: oracle.sysman.top.oms:MDS Schema Creation status: FAILURE 
SEVERE: oracle.sysman.top.oms:MDS Schema Creation is failed 
INFO: oracle.sysman.top.oms:_______________________________________________________________________ 
INFO: oracle.sysman.top.oms:Starting opss Schema Creation. 
INFO: oracle.sysman.top.oms:Failed to create OPSS schema 
INFO: oracle.sysman.top.oms:_______________________________________________________________________ 
INFO: oracle.sysman.top.oms:Starting APM Schema Creation. 
INFO: oracle.sysman.top.oms:APM Component is already created 
INFO: oracle.sysman.top.oms:The plug-in MDS Schema Configuration has failed its perform method 

Cannot change password for sysman_mds java.sql.SQLSyntaxErrorException: ORA-00922: missing or invalid option 

ERROR:MDS java.sql.SQLSyntaxErrorException: ORA-00922: missing or invalid option 

java.sql.SQLSyntaxErrorException: ORA-00922: missing or invalid option 



The Upgrade basically failed due to special character(s) in the SYSMAN password. Please make sure you do not have any special characters in the SYSMAN password such as *,#,!, etc Just use a good combination of alpha and number characters.

Since the upgrade failed I had to fallback and do the following to restart the upgrade all over again for this issue.

1.) Restore the database, inventory and OMS Middleware Home from backup.
2.) Startup database and listener
3.) Start the OMS
4.) Change the SYSMAN password that doesn't use special character(s), procedure below.


<OMS_HOME>/bin/emctl config oms -change_repos_pwd

Please note changing the SYSMAN password will change it on both the OMS and on the repository database.