How complicated configdb can be?

Everyone would ask me how complicated a configdb can be for a maximo application. Yes it is very simple. You turn the admin mode on from database configurations application and then apply configuration changes and turn off the admin mode. I understand that you can even run configdb.bat or configdb.sh from command prompt, but what if you run into errors here.

I know some of you would think I have gone crazy. Yes, I had gone crazy scratching my head when I ran into error(s) while running configdb. I was working for one organization then where the team used to think if you can't figure out what to do next, run a complete database import. It was termed as classic jugaad (or jugaar which means workaround) of all times. But because of this, as a maximo user/developer I faced various issues.

We were deploying or moving some changes into production where we had only 1-2 hours of downtime and we had move a lot of changes to existing objects in Maximo so we had to apply the configuration changes and keep production system ready during that time window. From the command prompt, we ran the command configdb.bat and a series of errors we encountered.

Below are a few examples of errors we ran into and their resolution steps:

1. reorg_pending error in alter table - access the DB server and run the command                           db2 reorg table <tablename>
2. existing tables were not restored from backup - access the maximo database instance and run the SQL queries 
• select restoredata from maxtable where tablename=<tablename>
• select restoredata from maxtablecfg where tablename=<tablename>
• If any of the above query returns 1, we need to update this value to 0 in order for configdb to run successful.

PS: We were using DB2 database.