PAM-CM-0539: A database error occurred on target accounts or access page

Products

• CA Privileged Access Manager (PAM)

Issue/Introduction

PAM admins start seeing "PAM-CM-0539: A database error occurred." errors when going to the unfiltered Credentials > Manage Targets > Accounts page. Some users with a very large number of target accounts available either for auto-login or view on the Access page also see this error, typically at times of high activity in PAM. In both cases the page fails to load the expected data.

Cause

This may be observed in environments with a very large number of target accounts and with workflows that require approval for password view. PAM releases as of February 2025 retain all historic password view requests (PVRs) in the database. Old requests just get marked as deleted. The growing list of items in the table holding the PVR objects impacts performance of queries on target accounts that pull in information on whether the account has an active PVR. Such queries are run for the access page, which displays any active PVRs for the user at the top of the page, and on the target accounts page, which also pulls in information on whether an account has a PVR open.

Resolution

Adding a filter to only list the devices (access page) or accounts (accounts page) you are currently interested in, should allow the pages to populate with the filtered data.

To remove the old stale entries from the database, open a case with PAM Support. Note this problem takes a very long time to build up and should not require frequent manual interventions.

Additional Information

An enhancement feature is open to automate stale data cleanup in future releases.