Oracle E-Business Suite eTRM

The Oracle E-Business Suite Electronic Technical Reference Manual (eTRM) is online repository of database object definitions and their dependencies. It’s used by the technical teams that support or implement Oracle E-Business Suite systems. An online application that was available with a valid My Oracle Support account. I first remember using the Oracle eTRM on Oracle 11i. It was quite useful during my first years a applications DBA.

Oracle eTRM Decommissioned

In March of 2021, Oracle decided to decommission the Oracle eTRM. This came without a warning and folks were scrambling to find a replacement. Oracle’s official statement was that the technology stack that it was built on was antiquated. Some unofficial versions popped up online (with plenty of ads). The user group community offered to come up with solutions. but I don’t believe anything materialized.

Oracle’s New eTRM

Oracle released a poor replacement to eTRM which was basically a massive dump of static web pages. With a valid My Oracle Support account you could download it as a patch. The patch number is 32347023 for EBS 12.1 or 32405646 for EBS 12.2. The My Oracle Support reference document ID is 2736939.1.

I download the patch for 12.2. The download consists of six zip files for a total of 3.6 GB. Unzipping it took unbelievable amount of time. Almost six hours for me! Once unzipped the documentation is over 20 GB in size!

Since these are static web pages, they are not up to date. We also loose the search functionality which is really helpful at times. This is better than nothing but with some lost functionality. As you can see it looks similar to the original eTRM.

Oracle is working on another version of the eTRM that will install directly into your Oracle E-Business Suite system. This requires a patch to be downloaded and applied to your system. They are promising continuing feature improvements so that should be a better solution. Let’s see how that turns out.

You can follow the updates to that version with My Oracle Support document, Oracle E-Business Suite Electronic Technical Reference Manual (eTRM), Release 12.2 and 12.1.3 (Doc ID 2850246.1).