Oracle XA issue in WebSphere

Transaction recovery failure (for XA data sources)

Problem

When WebSphere Application Server attempts to recover Oracle database transactions, the transaction service issues following exception:

WTRN0037W: The transaction service encountered an error on an xa_recover operation. 
The resource was com.ibm.ws.rsadapter.spi.WSRdbXaResourceImpl@1114a62. 
The error code was XAER_RMERR. The exception stack trace follows: 
javax.transaction.xa.XAException
at oracle.jdbc.xa.OracleXAResource.recover(OracleXAResource.java:726)
at com.ibm.ws.rsadapter.spi.WSRdbXaResourceImpl.recover(WSRdbXaResourceImpl.java:954)
at com.ibm.ws.Transaction.JTA.XARminst.recover(XARminst.java:137)
at com.ibm.ws.Transaction.JTA.XARecoveryData.recover(XARecoveryData.java:609)
at com.ibm.ws.Transaction.JTA.PartnerLogTable.recover(PartnerLogTable.java:511)
at com.ibm.ws.Transaction.JTA.RecoveryManager.resync(RecoveryManager.java:1784)
at com.ibm.ws.Transaction.JTA.RecoveryManager.run(RecoveryManager.java:2241)

Cause

Oracle requires services such as the WebSphere Application Server transaction service to have special permissions for performing transaction recoveries.

Solution

As user SYS, run the following commands on your Oracle server:

grant select on pending_trans$ to public;
grant select on dba_2pc_pending to public;
grant select on dba_pending_transactions to public;
grant execute on dbms_system to < user>;

This problem is mentioned under Oracle bug: 3979190. Running the preceding commands solves the problem.