I’ve published this guidance in various articles before but it never hurts to consolidate it here for new readers.

You may choose to:

  • Modify or extend the E-Business Suite code that we ship
  • Add new database objects or modify existing database objects that we ship
  • Modify our standard EBS database partitioning schemes or add your own custom partitions
  • Introduce various forms of third-party virtualization technologies for any of the E-Business Suite’s three tiers — the database tier, the application server tier, or the desktop tier
  • Use third-party tools to modify your database directly
  • Integrate third-party software with your EBS environment, say, for reporting purposes, or to obtain additional industry-specific functionality
  • Use third-party tools to manage or configure your EBS environment
  • Run EBS on a third-party file system

Oracle generally considers all of these types of activities to be some form of customization.  This is not a complete list. Generally speaking, if you have introduced something into your environment that we haven’t tested, we cannot take responsibility for it, so we consider it to be a customization.

Where these activities fall on a risk spectrum depends on their invasiveness.  The more invasive a customization is, the greater its potential risk.  Oracle generally recommends against invasive customizations.

Oracle’s official policy on handling customizations is detailed here:

The support implications boil down to this:

  • Issues that are isolated to the E-Business Suite will be investigated by E-Business Suite Development.
  • Issues that are isolated to your customizations or third-party tools should be directed to the third-party vendor.
  • E-Business Suite Development will provide E-Business Suite Development patches for issues that can be reproduced in environments built using E-Business Suite documented procedures and tools.
  • If the third-party vendor cannot resolve issues isolated to their tools, you should restore from a backup and revert to using Oracle’s documented tools and procedures.

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