Oracle Database Autoupgrade Tool throws Java Error on MS Windows

Hi,

building up knowledge often starts with trying new things. One of the things I am currently playing around with is the new autoupgrade tool provided by Oracle.
If you start with this tool, I would suggest you to consult Mikes blog.
Mike Dietrich has some blog posts (and more are coming) regarding autoupgrade.jar, how to use it, etc..

As I am often trying things early, I also often run in problems who can be easily avoided, if you know, what you need to do.
These days, I was struggling with running the autoupgrade.jar on my MS Windows 10 notebook.
I have downloaded the latest 19c (19.3.0) database from Oracle, I also have downloaded the last autoupgrade.jar from the support note. 

Running java -jar showed me, that I have the right Java 8 executable, but trying to run the autoupgrade.jar with

java -jar c:\app\oracle\product\19.3.0\rdbms\admin\autoupgrade.jar -version 

returned a wonderful java runtime error stack:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
at oracle.upgrade.autoupgrade.boot.AutoUpgMain.<init>(AutoUpgMain.java:114)
at oracle.upgrade.autoupgrade.boot.AutoUpgMain.newInstance(AutoUpgMain.java:142)
at oracle.upgrade.autoupgrade.boot.Boot.main(Boot.java:39)
Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
at java.io.Reader.<init>(Unknown Source)
at java.io.InputStreamReader.<init>(Unknown Source)
at oracle.upgrade.commons.lang.LangSettings.resourceBundleFromFile(LangSettings.java:213)
at oracle.upgrade.commons.lang.LangSettings.loadLanguageInfo(LangSettings.java:71)
at oracle.upgrade.commons.lang.LangSettings.<init>(LangSettings.java:64)
at oracle.upgrade.commons.lang.LangSettings.<init>(LangSettings.java:54)
at oracle.upgrade.commons.context.AppContext.<clinit>(AppContext.java:47)
... 3 more 

As I have read out of the java error stack, it seems there is a problem with some language settings... Well, as an Oracle dinosaur I often have seen things in Oracle, which sometimes only worked with english/american/US settings. You can guess the language of my Windows system?
It's german!

So I tried to set NLS_LANG to american, but unfortunately that didn't helped. Afterwards, I opened a Service Request and sent that also to Mike, because we were already communicating about that.

Some days later Mike contacted me again and told me, there is a new autoupgrade.jar (published end of June) available at metalink and there is a bug fix that says, it fails back to english if a language isn't found. Maybe this could fix the behaviour of the tool on my machine also.

I then downloaded the autoupgrade.jar again from metalink and tested it. Today I am now able to start with the tests of the autoupgrade tool, because it doesn't throw an error anymore:

C:\app\oracle\product\19.3.0\rdbms\admin>java -jar autoupgrade.jar -create_sample_file config
Unsupported language [de], defaulting to English

So, if you are running in a java problem with autoupgrade.jar, don't waste time, download the newest version here and try it again. As it is a relatively new tool, there may be still some more errors in, but Oracle is fixing them and they do release new versions still often. Don't base your tests on the autoupgrade.jar that is delivered with the Oracle database downloads, neither for Windows, nor for Linux/Unix.