I have recently been working on a Maximo upgrade from 6.2 to Maximo 7.5 and I have come across this error that doesn’t really say much.  Google didn’t help much either and IBM support site has nothing on it.  Eventually I figured out how to get passed it.

I don’t know the exact cause of this error, but I think it might be caused by some previous failure during a script and the upgrade cannot recover from it properly.

Modifying ADDUSER Wed Jul 29 09:13:45 EST 2015

rollback
go
java.lang.NullPointerException
at psdi.configure.ColumnElement.isPersistent(ColumnElement.java:342)
at psdi.configure.ColumnElement.getUpdateSql(ColumnElement.java:859)
at psdi.configure.TableElement.getUpdateSql(TableElement.java:1246)
at psdi.upgrade.Upgrade.loadMetaData(Unknown Source)
at psdi.upgrade.Upgrade.process(Unknown Source)
at psdi.configure.UpgradeUI.runUpgrade(UpgradeUI.java:631)
at psdi.configure.UpgradeUI.actionPerformed(UpgradeUI.java:344)
at javax.swing.AbstractButton.fireActionPerformed(AbstractButton.java:1879)
at javax.swing.AbstractButton$Handler.actionPerformed(AbstractButton.java:2199)
at javax.swing.DefaultButtonModel.fireActionPerformed(DefaultButtonModel.java:450)
at javax.swing.DefaultButtonModel.setPressed(DefaultButtonModel.java:288)
at javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicButtonListener.mouseReleased(BasicButtonListener.java:264)
at java.awt.Component.processMouseEvent(Component.java:5529)
at javax.swing.JComponent.processMouseEvent(JComponent.java:3148)
at java.awt.Component.processEvent(Component.java:5294)
at java.awt.Container.processEvent(Container.java:2001)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEventImpl(Component.java:3996)
at java.awt.Container.dispatchEventImpl(Container.java:2059)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEvent(Component.java:3844)
at java.awt.LightweightDispatcher.retargetMouseEvent(Container.java:4249)
at java.awt.LightweightDispatcher.processMouseEvent(Container.java:3929)
at java.awt.LightweightDispatcher.dispatchEvent(Container.java:3859)
at java.awt.Container.dispatchEventImpl(Container.java:2045)
at java.awt.Window.dispatchEventImpl(Window.java:1810)
at java.awt.Component.dispatchEvent(Component.java:3844)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:545)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:268)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:197)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:191)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:183)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:144)
BMXAA6819I – Upgrade completed with errors. Wed Jul 29 09:13:45 EST 2015

So to get passed this error this is what I did.  Open this file: SMP/maximo/tools/maximo/classes/psdi/upgrade/V600/en/MetaDoc.xml.  I removed/commented out all the lines that contained “OLDONLY” for the COLUMN xml tag definitions.  You will notice that the ADDUSER table has a few such as ADDRESS4, CALLID and more.  It is very tedious but you will have to go through this whole file and remove all of them for each table.  You DO NOT need to remove the “OLDONLY” rows for the KEY xml tag definitions which are at the bottom of the file.

It seems to me that the upgrade has already dropped these columns and because it fails at some point, it can’t recover.  And when you try to run the upgrade again, it’s trying to drop a column that doesn’t exist.

If someone knows the real cause or know a better solution, please leave a comment below.