Deployment without downtime?

Downtime is costly to the business. As developers, avoiding it can give us a ton of benefits both in term of efficiency and for personal well-being as well. For example, when making changes that require downtime to a shared environment, I have my freedom back since I don’t have to ask or wait to do it at night. 

With the introduction of Automation Script, most of the business logic and front-end changes we need push to production nowadays can be done without downtime. Some of them are:

• Automation Script
• Escalation
• Application Design

How to run SQL query in Maximo without DB access using API Automation Script

From Maximo version 7.6.0.9, we can now build custom API using automation script. This is a powerful new feature yet it looks to be underutilized by the community.

The first obviously use case is it gives us the freedom to build any API we wanted without being restricted to the limitation of the Maximo Integration Framework. For example, we can build an API that returns data in CSV or binary format. Or we can use it to upload data and bypassing the business layer.

Since it allows us to use the browser to interact with Automation script, and the script framework itself has access to all Java functions of the MBO layer, We can exploit it to execute all sort of weird operations.

Hot reset sequence without restarting Maximo

One error we often have to deal with is incorrect sequence when adding new data to Maximo. There are many situations when it might come up, such as:

• When loading data using MXLoader, or inserting data directly via SQL
• Sequence corruption due to unknown cause in Production, probably due to errors caused by cancelled/terminated job
• Restoring database from a copy, or after an upgrade.

When this happens, the user sees an error with duplicated key value such as “BMXAA4211E - Database error number 2601 has occurred…”