25 November 2012

Upgraded to APEX 4.2 and....Goodbye Website!

Software is a funny thing.

It is, when you think about, a lot like playing god. You get to create your own world and invite people to inhabit it.

But creating (and maintaining) worlds can be really difficult.

For example, this weekend we upgraded to APEX version 4.2.

And after we were done with the upgrade, which occurred without any complications and resulted in successful upgrades for many of the applications running in this APEX instance, we found that the PL/SQL Challenge webpages had become, how shall I put this, blank.

Nothing visible on the page. No HTML to be rendered.

And, strange to say, at this point (22:00 UTC on the 25th of November) we do not yet know what is wrong or how to fix it.

I guess I don't have to tell you troubling it is for me to write the above sentence, but I must.

So as I board a plane to return home from a weekend in New York with my family, I hope that something happens in the next two hours and the website comes to life.

If not, we will just have to do without the PL/SQL Challenge for a little bit. My apologies to all of our devoted players.....

Regards,
Steven Feuerstein


5 comments:

  1. Looks like we will not have the site back up for the 26 November quiz. Our apologies. I do expect that it will be available for Tuesday, 27 November.

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  2. 13:20 UTC, 26 Nov: I woke up to find the site back - sort of. You can now see pages, but when you try to take a quiz, APEX reports a session state protection error. So now we are looking into that.

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  3. Taking site down to apply a patch that hopefully addresses SSP errors.

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  4. The patch seems to have done the job. You can now take quizzes. We will continue to test the site, and see if there are any other issues.

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  5. Hello Steven,

    I like the comparison with "a god" :) :)

    All I can say at this moment is that this one (aka the PL/SQL Challenge team) was much more successful than the other one ...

    I will try to play later today and hope for the best.

    Hope it did not "succeed" to spoil your weekend :):)

    Thanks a lot & Best Regards,
    Iudith

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