ORA-28221: REPLACE not specified

Very interesting situation. This error occurs, when user’s profile has limit password_verify_function, at the same time user doesn’t have ALTER USER privilege and trying to run the following statement:

ALTER USER my_user IDENTIFIED BY my_password;

* If user doesn’t have that limit in profile, he/she can change its password by this way without any problem.

* If she/he has that limit, it should have ALTER USER privilege to change password by this way without any problem.

There is also another way, if you are not able to change password by the previous command, but you must know old password:

ALTER USER my_user IDENTIFIED BY my_password REPLACE my_old_password;

Just one more trick in Oracle, that you should know…