AD Utilities in Oracle Apps R12

1. What are the AD utilities ?

AD Utilities (abbreviation from Applications DBA) are programs which perform a variety of tasks, including generating files, updating your system, merging and applying patches, installing off-cycle products.  

These AD Utilities are executable files in $AD_TOP/bin

2. Which are the AD Utilities and their role ?

Utility	Executable/ Interface	Role
AD Administration	adadmin Oracle Application Manager	Performs maintenance tasks on the Oracle Applications file system and database.
AutoPatch	adpatch	Applies patches to the Oracle Applications and Oracle database (also you can add new languages and products as a patch).
AD Controller	adctrl	Which this utility you can restart, see the status of parallel workers in AutoPatch, AD Administration and AutoUpgrade.
AutoUpgrade	adaimgr	Upgrades your database code and objects from an old version to the last 11i version. This is a time consuming step.
AD Relink	adrelink	Used to re-link apps executables with product libraries. This must be done if some library definition is changed or an executable is corrupted.
AD Merge Patch	admrgpch	Used to merge multiple patches into a single one. This is useful when we have to apply many patches to reduce the patching time.
AD Splicer	adsplice	Used to register the off-cycle products (a new oracle released product which is not delivered with the initial package).
File Character Set Converter	adncnv	Used to convert a file from one character set to another.
AD Configuration	$AD_TOP/sql/adutconf.sql	Shows information about the installed configuration of the APPS.
AD Job Timing Report	$AD_TOP/admin/sql/adtimrpt.sql	Shows timing statistics about the parallel workers.
AD File Identification	adident	Shows the header file of one Oracle Application file. In the header we can see the version and the timestamp of the file.
License Manager	Oracle Application Manager	Licenses products, country-specific functionalities or languages.
Patch Wizard	Oracle Application Manager	Determines which patches was applied and which need to be applied.
Applied Patches	Oracle Application Manager	Keeps a history of the patches which have been applied.

3. How could I run an AD utility (like adpatch, adadmin, adctrl) ?

An AD utility starts like a normal executable file: type the name of the file to execute, press "Enter", answer the prompts. Type "abort" to any prompt to exit. 

NOTES: 

• You can restart the same utility after a failure by typing his name again at the OS prompt. However, the AD utilities, by default, will start running from the point where it was failed. The utility will ask you to confirm if you want to restart the utility from the beginning (Oracle recommends continuing a prior session to completion );
• AD utilities accept arguments and flags to change the execution behaviour of the AD utility. The arguments must be typed in lowercase without whitespace characters between them.

4. What are the restart files ?

The restart files are files used by the managers or workers to restart a failed job. When a job complete the restart files are deleted, but backup files still are saved on the system with the extensions .bak, .bk2 or bk3.

The restart files are located in the $APPL_TOP/admin/<SID>/restart directory.