PeopleSoft

PeopleSoft Red Papers:

Check out the following 2 Red Papers on Customer Connection:

Oracle Database Vault for Enterprise Tools 8.46 and Higher

This Red Paper discusses the guidelines on how to implement Oracle Database Vault in a PeopleSoft environment, including installation, configuration, and known limitations.
Much of the information contained in this document originated within PeopleSoft Development in collaboration with some of our big customers and is therefore based on "real-life" customer use cases encountered in the field. Although every conceivable problem that one could encounter is not covered in this document, the issues that appear are the problems that prove to be the most common.

Clustering and High Availability for Enterprise PeopleTools 8.4x

This Red Paper is a practical guide for technical users, installers, system administrators, and programmers who implement, maintain, or develop applications for your PeopleSoft system. In this Red Paper, we discuss guidelines on how to build a fault tolerant PeopleSoft Online Transaction environment, including PeopleSoft Internet Architecture and Portal. The clustering architecture ensures that the deployed PeopleSoft system has no single point of failure and that the system can operate uninterrupted in an event of a HW/SW failure.

White Papers

Integrated Talent Management: Extending the Value of a Strategic Framework (PDF)

Check this latest Whitepaper on Oracle’s integrated talent management framework that solves immediate people-problems while establishing a foundation for resolving critical issues on an ongoing basis. Some of the key issues addressed include driving productivity and profitability, maintaining alignment with business objectives and optimizing overall organizational performance. Native integration and a single data source equip HR with consistent employee data and information, enterprise-wide line-of-sight visibility and insight for decision-making. The framework also solves the plethora of technology problems that plague organizations with a heterogeneous mix of vendors.

Metalink Outage Coming This Weekend

There is a Metalink outage coming this weekend. Oracle Priority Service customers, please contact your SDM if you have critical operations planned for the outage period so we can make special arrangements for you. Thanks!

MetaLink Outage Planned for Weekend of April 4, 2008

A two-part MetaLink outage is planned for Friday April 4, 2008 starting at 9:00 PM Pacific Time (Saturday April 5, 4:00 AM GMT/UTC) for system maintenance.

Starting at 9:00 PM Pacific Time (Saturday April 5, 4:00 AM GMT/UTC), Oracle's internal ticketing system will be temporarily taken out of service for system maintenance. During this time, MetaLink's Service Request (SR) functionality will be disabled. This means that you will not be able to report new SRs or update existing ones using the MetaLink interface. SR query and other associated reporting functions will also be unavailable. All other MetaLink functionality will remain unaffected during this time.

All MetaLink functionality will be inaccessible from 10:00 PM - 1:30 AM Pacific Time (Saturday April 5, 5:00 AM GMT/UTC). We encourage you to plan accordingly and to download any patches or other information that you may need ahead of time. Please write down your CSI number so that you will have it available if you need to call. Although internal systems will be available, telephone hold times may be elevated as customer traffic is directed to phone support.

For urgent issues during the outage please call your local Oracle Support center. Phone numbers globally may be found on the Oracle Support Services Global Contacts Directory page.

		Partial Outage - Service Request Functionality Unavailable	Complete MetaLink Outage
Scheduled Start		Friday, April 4, 2008 / Saturday April 5, 2008	Friday April 4, 2008 / Saturday April 5, 2008
GMT/UTC		Saturday 4:00 AM	Saturday 5:00 AM
Orlando		Friday/Saturday 12:00 Midnight	Saturday 1:00 AM
San Francisco		Friday 9:00 PM Pacific	Friday 10:00 PM Pacific
London		Saturday 5:00 AM	Saturday 6:00 AM
Bangalore		Saturday 9:30 AM	Saturday 10:30 AM
		Duration: 1 Hour	Duration: 3.5 Hours

Thank you in advance for your patience and we apologize for any inconvenience.
The MetaLink Team

Infogram Weekend Edition: Chinese Business, Humor

Chinese Business: Changing Markets

I was watching the Antiques Roadshow the other night and had an epiphany about the Chinese economy. The show was set in San Antonio, and a lady had brought in a nice set of four porcelain decorative panels in faux-teak frames. Her father had bought the items back in the 50's when he was stationed in Hong Kong. They cost him a few hundred dollars back then, quite a bit of money at the time. The appraiser worked through various aspects of the pieces, the subject, the frame, the quality of work on the border, and determined that they weren't 18th century pieces as it may have seemed at first glance, but made in the 1920s. This is usually the point in Antiques Roadshow where the appraiser gently breaks the bad news: 'And if they were 18th century they'd be worth XYZ. But these late pieces...and then the bad news'. Or even worse, 'well, they're fakes'. Not this time. He said that until quite recently the pieces wouldn't have fetched much money, but that the Chinese market for such items was very hot, especially items from the 1920s, and the set was worth $40,000. The owner was floored; I was floored. I'm sure she was expecting to be told that they were worth a few thousand dollars, or perhaps even anticipating the disappointment of finding out they were worth those same few hundreds now as then. Nope. Different world Different market.

For me it showed that the Chinese economy has two key elements at work right now: disposable wealth and pride in Chinese culture.

There is a growing trend to restore the massive losses inflicted on Chinese traditional buildings and cultural items by the Cultural Revolution. The human impact of the Cultural Revolution was the real tragedy, the lives lost and the lives ruined. Chinese society is trying to work out why such excesses happened. But there was also a tremendous swath of devastation to the physical culture of old China. Old books were burned, temples, pagodas and city walls torn down with complete abandon, and many valuable items were smuggled out of the country, quite a few of them ending up in Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan.

Now that China has started to acquire large cash reserves (and we are talking about national savings in the trillions of dollars), art investment is one area where we can expect to see grow steadily, even as the slowing American economy hurts the production facilities in China.

Granted there is a new and very powerful wave of destruction for the remaining old buildings now; this time to make way for ambitious modern projects in China's large cities. The last of the old tradition courtyard residences in Beijing are coming down, sometimes whole neighborhoods at a time, victims of merciless commercial modernization now just as they were subject to Marxist anti-cultural warfare a few decades ago. But more and more wealthy Chinese are funding projects to restore (and digitize) ancient libraries, rebuild ancient buildings and restore the ones that remain.

It's hard to predict what will happen to the Chinese economy over the next few years. There have been many ambitious projects and initiatives that are now proving harmful (the Three Gorges Dam project, for instance, which is likely to be an expensive cause of regret for many years to come). The Chinese market economy is very young, even if the country itself is steeped in antiquity, and a young economy has to make many mistakes before it finds its long-term formula for success. An ancient Chinese book describes it with an image of a young fox crossing a frozen stream: 'The young fox wets its tail'. A mature economy (usually) takes less risk and thus avoids 'getting its tail wet.'

In the meantime, look around the attic. Your Chinese antiques may just help out if your 401k is in retreat.

Musical Humor

The Presurfer blog found this remarkable piece of musical athletics coming to us from an unknown corner of the Korean entertainment world. As he says, watch the drummer.

Internet Seminar

Internet Seminar

Colorcon Success Story
Are process industry regulatory compliance requirements eating up your bottom line?

Siebel

Siebel Unleashed:
Check this site for some cool ‘how-to’ tips for Developers.

Siebel for Dummies
Another Blog on Siebel and Oracle. It has got some nice posts on PL-SQL and Oracle.

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne

End of Premier Support for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.9 - Mark your calendars!

If you are currently on this release you would have received a letter from Oracle as a reminder to the upcoming expiration of Premier Support and start of Sustaining Support for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.9. The key items in this letter are:
1. Premier Support for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.9 ends on September 18, 2008.
2. Premier Support for Tax, Regulatory and Legislative issues ends on September 18, 2009.
3. Tools release 8.97 will be the last certified Tools release for 8.9

Important information available on Customer Connection:
1. Solution 201063018 posted on Customer Connection includes an FAQ link and a copy of the letter.
2. Frequently Asked Questions lists specifics on accepted SAR dates, V&V certifications and general guidelines.
3. Lifetime Support Policy details out Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards product support time frames.
4. Solution also posted on the EnterpriseOne Knowledge Browser.
5. Home page article posted on Customer Connection for the next few weeks.

Hyperion

Check out the latest articles on Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.3/2 like Enabling Multi-User Development(MUD) for repositories; Merging Repositories - Substitute for Import From Repository - 2 way Merge with No Parent; and others. Click here for the latest blog from Venkatakrishnan J

11g meets 11i

11g/11i

Well, it was inevitable that the identical number and neighboring letters of our products would meet at some point, and here it is:

Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1.0.6.0) now certified with E-Business Suite Release 11i

as announced by Prasad Akkiraju over at the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog.

BIP, APEX, How Many Logons?, PL/SQL

BI Publisher

Using Oracle BI Publisher? Make sure you have a look at Tim Dexter's Oracle BI Publisher blog.

APEX

Dmitri Gielis has a helpful posting on setting up help in APEX 3.1 here.

How Many Logons?

One of the frequent questions you get as a DBA is: how many people are logged on? Easy to answer...up to the next question: 'How about cumulative logins as well the highwater mark? H. Tonguc Yilmaz has a handy script to get you the answers.

PL/SQL, the Good and Bad of It

Tired of doing things right? Bored with code that just runs and runs, not giving you anything to complain about, not keeping you up nights on calls with Support? Just use the handy guide Eddie Awad has found for PL/SQL Bad Practices and you can fill all those idle hours with quick fixes and explanations to management.

OraPerf, 11g Optimizer Tool, Delete vs. Truncate

OraPerf

Doug's Oracle Blog notes that Oraperf.com is showing signs of life, after a long and painful hiatus. This was a very useful site where you could upload statspack reports and have them analyzed for free run by Anjo Kolk, renowned Oracle performance pubah (a pubah is one level above a guru, and normal gurus are required to say: "Ahhh! {insert pubah name}! Yeah, they're good." whenever one is mentioned). The good news so far is that I was able to register an account and confirm it. The bad is that the mechanism for submitting performance reports to analyze is still among the missing.

11g Optimizer Tool

Need another reason to consider 11g? How about the SQL Test Case Builder? You can read all about it over at the always-excellent Inside the Oracle Optimizer blog.

Delete or Truncate?

Both sound painful, but if you want a list of some of the less-encountered depths of the age-old question, see the Oracle Sponge Blog.

Security and Inertia, OBIEE, PeopleSoft

Security

Slavik's Musings on Database Security blog has a good brief posting on reactive vs. proactive security with a link to another blog which discusses the Hedgehog product, an interesting active defence system for your data.

OBI EE

Good posting on Metadata Warehousing at An Eye on Oracle BI blog, with an emphasis on Oracle's OBI EE product.

PeopleSoft

A quick and practical posting at Jim's PeopleSoft Journal on Getting Google gadgets to behave themselves on your PeopleSoft portal page.

10G Upgrade, Identity Management, Awareness

10G

Chris Warticki's Oracle Support blog recently came out with a posting combining many useful links on 10g upgrades here.

Virtual Directories + Provisioning vs metadirectories - The Battle is On

Nishant Kaushik at the Talking Identity blog brings us another episode in the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of the IT identity management community. Is metadirectory dead? Poke it with a stick and see.

Awareness

The Structured Data blog has a great posting today on awareness and the interplay between details and attention. Definitely fun and worthwhile to take the test.

Business in China

Business in China: The Art of Dragon Management

Jack Perkowski, a Wall Street wunderkind who started a Chinese company in 1990 (not an American company in China, mind you, a Chinese company in China), has come out with a book: Managing the Dragon. It's already collected a rave review from the China Law Blog, one of the best authorities on Chinese business out there.

OTN Webcasts

Upcoming OTN Webcasts

- Diagnose and Tune Java Application Performance Problems Faster

- Thursday, 27th March @11 a.m. PDT/2:00 p.m. EDT/6:00 p.m. GMT

Registrations open on OTN.


Using plug-ins that allow managing a mixed environment from a single console.

- Managing third party products in your Oracle Environment

- Thursday, 27th March @ 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/3:00 p.m. GMT

Registrations open on OTN.


- Managing Peoplesoft, Siebel and E-Business suite with Enterprise Manager

- Tuesday, 25th March @ 11:00 a.m. PDT/2:00 p.m. EDT/6:00 p.m. GMT

Registrations open on OTN.


- Simplify Configuration Management and Compliance Controls For Database Environments

- Tuesday, 25th March @ 8 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/3:00 p.m. GMT

Registrations open on OTN.

Essbase, PeopleSoft, Financials, JD Edwards

Essbase Book Out Soon

The Look Smarter Than You Are blog is announcing that the similarly named book Look Smarter Than You Are with Essbase, is coming out soon. Judging from the blog, this will be an amusing, smart-alecky kind of book, but with solid technical grounding.

PeopleSoft: One Baby Step After Another

The Grey Sparling PeopleSoft Expert's Corner blog has a nice step by step guide to 'improving your end-users' ability to get meaningful information out of PeopleSoft'.
Is it just me, or does Grey Sparling sound like a fish? I can imagine a sentence in The Old Man and the Sea: 'The old man turned back toward the docks. The grey sparling were running, but his heart wasn't in the fishing that day...'

PSST0101 blog has an entry (with references to other blog how-to's) on how to read PeopleCode from a PeopleSoft database.

EBS: Financials

OracleAppsBlog has a nice set of technical questions to ask your Financials consultants before hiring them here. That's fine, but what if you have already hired them? Perhaps you could conceal their paycheck inside a puzzle-box that can only be opened by answering the questions?

JD Edwards and Demantra

Over at the JD Edwards Advisor blog there's a good update on JD Edwards and Demantra integration.

Applications News

White Papers

Siebel integration with HP Output Server
Integrating the popular Siebel Systems customer relationship management (CRM) software that runs on the Microsoft Windows platform with the UNIX-based HP Output Server gives users of Siebel customer relationship management systems access to all of HP Output Server's document delivery capabilities. This paper discusses how to integrate the customer relationship management suite from Siebel Systems into HP Output Server. It describes the software components for linking the Microsoft Windows-based Siebel application with UNIX-based HPOS, how these components pass information from Siebel to HPOS, and how HPOS returns an asynchronous feedback response to the Siebel system. The components and the general approach for linking them together is easily adapted to other situations that call for linking applications on the Windows platform to HPOS.


Anatomy of a Siebel Archiving Project
Learn how Siebel sites are realizing the benefits of a full-lifecycle enterprise data management strategy that includes database archiving to deliver enhanced application performance and lower costs.

Advanced Trading Models Using E-Business Suite
Many global organizations are considering advanced operating structures to maximize efficiencies. This White Paper describes how they can be enabled and automated using Virtual Trader in conjunction with E-Business Suite.

Appcasts
The Latest Updates to Oracle's Applications Strategy
February 28, 2008
Ed Abbo, Senior Vice President of Oracle's Applications updates listeners on the exciting innovations within Oracle Applications, how Oracle is integrating all its new product lines and why customers should adopt the latest releases.

Top 10 Questions from E-Business Suite Customers
January 24, 2008
Listen to Annette Melatti, Sr. Director, Applications Marketing address key questions asked by E-Business Suite Customers such as Product Roadmap, Upgrading to Release 12, Customer Momentum with Release 12, Path to Fusion, AIA, and more.

What's New in E-Business HCM Release 12?
September 25, 2007 Listen to Gretchen Alarcon, Vice President of Product Strategy for HCM, discuss the latest enhancements in E-Business HCM R12 and how they address business pain points today.

Business: New Chat/Email Program

Business: New Program in Beta

I've been experimenting with a new product in Beta (it just went to public Beta today). It's called Digsby and it combines all your various IM/email and social networks into one program. Okay, in traditional parlance it collects all your communications eggs into one vulnerable basket. But that aside, it's very handy. For those of you who, like me, have several Yahoo mail accounts, Jabber IM, AIM, etc. it's nice to have one program that keeps track of it all and lets you know when there's something new.

Here's the link.

Humor

Humor

There's another episode of Simon's Cat out there. I like the first one best, but this is still quite amusing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rb8aOzy9t4

New Blogs, Index Storage, Performance, Storage

New Blogs

Richard Foote found a new Oracle-related blog, the Oracle Multimedia Blog. Great photo there. Something along the lines of 'Tony Soprano manages the DB'.

Scott Spendolini points us to a new APEX blog, from Jason Straub.

Index Storage

Ok, get ready for a major battle between the performance folks over this. Many authors of performance books maintain that storing indexes in larger block tablespaces will get you a performance boost. Richard Foote bursts that bubble, and backs it up. Expect a mild-to-medium roast flame war to arise on the subject.

Performance: Bind Peeking

The Pythian Group blog brings us a very useful article called Stabilize Oracle 10G’s Bind Peeking Behaviour by Cutting Histograms If you are experiencing unstable optimizer plans in 10g this is definitely worth investigating.

Storage: Flash

Flash memory, otherwise known as SSDs (Solid State Disks) have been in the wings for years. Large DB operators with massive transaction rates have used them (in spite of the heavy cost) to manage high demand spots in the system like redo logs. Everyone else has been conjecturing about how nice they would be to use if 'normal' companies could afford them. The Storage Mojo blog brings us an excellent summation of the situation now with a glance to the future.

OTN Webcasts

Just got several registration notices for webcasts next week on OTN:


Automate Masking of Sensitive Data for Secure, Scalable Data Sharing

- Tuesday, 18th March @ 11 a.m. PDT/2:00 p.m. EDT/6:00 p.m. GMT

Lowering Management Costs Through Grid Automation

- Thursday, 20th March @ 11 a.m. PDT/2:00 p.m. EDT/6:00 p.m. GMT

Meet Your Service Level Objectives With Oracle Enterprise Manager

- Tuesday, 18th March @ 8 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/3:00 p.m. GMT

(And no, I can't say at this point where these will fall on the techie vs. sales scale, hopefully on the techie side)

Oracle E-Business Suite Updates

From Profit Online Magazine

Oracle EPM a Natural Fit for Sustainability Reporting
More than ever before, companies are striving to demonstrate their commitment to creating a positive impact on the environment and their community. But the pressure to demonstrate good corporate citizenship is not only coming from investors, customers, and employees. Governments across Europe and Asia already mandate environmental restrictions and reporting—as in the case of carbon emissions—and the U.S. is moving toward such regulations as well.

Release 12 Financials at a Glance
An excerpt from Terrance Wampler's executive blog
Terrance Wampler, Oracle vice president of financial products strategy, is responsible for driving product direction and recommending business strategies for Oracle's financial products set. He blogs frequently about issues and challenges related to corporate financial management at blogs.oracle.com/terrancewampler.

Oracle Financing: Speedy Return on Investment
- How customers are lowering acquisition and ownership costs and accelerating the benefits of Oracle-based solutions
Profit Magazine interview with Anil Vohra, global vice president of Oracle Financing, about vendor-provided financing and the role it plays in the new frontier of helping customers acquire, maintain, and evolve their business systems.

Events

Oracle CIO Executive Summit
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
March 31–April 2
Keith Block, executive vice president, Oracle, will host this gathering for Oracle's top customers, exploring new ways to develop and capitalize on innovations that can transform businesses and promote growth over the next 12 to 24 months.

White Papers

An Executive Guide to Oracle Applications Unlimited
High level executive summary of Applications Unlimited

TDE

TDE

Oracle Transparent Data Encryption is one of the newer features we offer. Like everything in life, it has its positives and negatives, costs and value. I'm researching it for a customer of ours and found a few spots of interest:

You should always look at the market as a whole when evaluating anything for your business, so we'll start with a tough but objective article:

http://wiki.ittoolbox.com/index.php/How_to_decide_between_Oracle_TDE,_hardware_encryption_and_other_encryption_solutions

There is a discussion thread at the Oracle Wiki on the subject:

http://wiki.oracle.com/thread/1011708/Thoughts%2FExperience+on+TDE?offset=0&t=anon

TDE 11G new features:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/security/database-security/transparent-data-encryption/index.html

PeopleSoft Blogs

PSADMIN: An Odyssey of discovery

This is a new blog that covers pertinent technical issues, tips and architecture of PeopleSoft Infrastructure. It will also cover various PeopleTool sets, Enterprise Application modules, upgrades and industry best practices. Click here for more information.

Extra Hot:
Chili Joe has a very nice PeopleSoft blog. Lots of good technical stuff.
Check it out.


Hardware Sizing Resources

Here are some handy links if you're interested in coming up with a starting point for your fresh PeopleSoft installation or you'd like to upgrade your hardware:

AIX: http://www-03.ibm.com/support/techdocs/atsmastr.nsf/WebIndex/PRS1617

HP: http://www.peoplesoft-hp.com/sizers/enterprise/engine/index.asp

Dell: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/DELL_PeopleSoft_Sizing.doc

SUN: http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/psoft/index.jsp has some other Sun/Oracle info though might not be specific to PeopleSoft. Try peoplesoft_sizing@sun.com e-mail to get more info. Note this address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hyperion

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.3.2 - Connectivity to Essbase - First Impressions

Check this blog for the list of bare minimum components that you would need to get Essbase and BI EE 10.1.3.3.2 up and running and to test the newly added feature of Essbase connectivity.

BPEL, Oracle Internals Blog, Cursor Sharing

BPEL

I was just researching CDH configuration for a customer and found a nice blog on all things Fusion, Antony Reynolds' blog. he has a good article up at the moment on how to import XML data into BPEL that someone has done the 'wrong' way, i.e. in VARCHAR instead of using Oracle's XML facilities.

New Blog

Kevin Closson's blog mentioned a new blog recently by Jonah Harris. Looks like a goodie. Here's a link to an article on Oracle OCI (which of course isn't really internals), but is worth a read if you want to know about accessing data using OCI.

Cursor Sharing

Jonathan Lewis has a warning to offer about cursor sharing on his blog. Changing your cursor sharing method can indeed be very useful, but it's a pretty elaborate act of data juggling, and sometimes a plate or two might fall down, so it is best to evaluate the options carefully.

Breaking Things, Buffer Busy Waits, Siebel Analytics and the SAN, Some HOTSOS Freebies

Backup and Recovery

Here's a nice article over at the Momen Blog on how to break Oracle so you can practice fixing it. The reader will find out the fine art of corrupting a block in order to then work on how to fix corruptions.

Buffer Busy Waits and Siebel Analytics

One of our clients recently encountered some performance problems, and one of the symptoms was high buffer busy waits with timeouts. In researching it I came upon this article, which has some very good back and forth on the issues involved.

Also from the Oracle Sponge blog is this article on Siebel analytics and some of the difficulties that can come from SANs set to default to OLTP optimization rather than those of a warehouse.

Hotsos

Did you miss Hotsos this year? Bummer. It's an awesome Oracle performance conference. But you can get the slides from Tanel Poder's Hotsos presentations at his blog here.

Siebel Webcasts

Siebel Webcasts

The OAUG, in collaboration with Oracle, is presenting a sixteen-part Siebel CRM Webcast series. A different Siebel CRM topic will be presented every Wednesday and Thusday, between February 21 and the COLLABORATE conference in April.

These sessions are FREE and available to everyone. Please feel free to join in.

Full series details and registration are located at: http://oaug.org/usercommunities/siebel/siebelwebseries.html.

Contributed to the Infogram by Kiran Dasari

IT Opinion

IT Opinion: The World is Flat

I'm reading a book right now called The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. The basic point he makes is that a serious of technologies (one of which is blogging) and convergences between those technologies is flattening out the world market. As this process continues we can expect people all over the world to be able to compete in the IT market. A blog entry from the Bex Huff blog today discusses just that. There's a global technical talent shortage, and talent, like everything else in a market economy, is priced based on supply and demand. So expect to go further and further afield to find inexpensive programming labor. Eventually even the most far-flung corners of the globe will have respectable wages as long as they produce the kind of people our technocentric economy requires.

Charity Run

Charity Marathon Run Seeking Contributions

Lynn Davis, a long-time Oracle EBS guru who is now working for Ahmed Alomari at Cybernoor, is preparing to run a marathon for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. These diseases strike young and old alike. There has been progress over the years, but humanity has a long road to go before we can defeat these dreadful diseases. If you'd like to help support Lynn's charity marathon team, please donate at this link. Many companies (including Oracle) have charity matching available, so make sure you see if your company has a program available (there's a lookup form on the second page of the contribution process.

Dynamic SQL , Performance

11g New Features

A nice update on dynamic SQL enhancements in 11g at oracle-developer.net.

Performance

Several new items available from Richard Foote of late. More than most humans can comprehend on index compression, Part IV is here (and of course you can track back up the b-tree to the root article from there).

And a long and engaging article on Oracle diagnostic tools and their metaphors in life (with many links to other articles of interest along the way). The only thing I would add to the discussion is an aphorism from medical diagnostics that is my favorite reminder to myself when looking at a performance problem: 'When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras'. In other words, no, it's not usually the freelists or the underscore parameters causing a problem, it's shaky SQL, or a database built on the sand foundation of a blatantly non-relational design.

Siebel

Siebel CRM/ BIP Integration

Click here for Tim Dexter’s Oracle BI Publisher Blog for the Siebel CRM/ BIP Integration. There has been some migration work to move some of the more important reports from the existing Actuate formats to the BIP format that Siebel delivers to you the customer.

Oracle DB 11g on same box as 10g with Siebel

As per Siebel System Requirements and Supported Platforms document Oracle Database 11g is not supported, however Oracle 10g can still be used instead. Check the latest on Richard Naszcyniec's Blog regarding Oracle DB 11g on same box as 10g with Siebel.

Click here for details.

PeopleSoft

Tips and Tricks for PeopleSoft Developers

There is a wealth of information for PeopleSoft Developers out there. Check this blog, and you will be surprised to see the amount of resolutions/ technical information available in the monthly archives. The latest section for March,08 features the following:

- Master resolution on information regarding error message: “[TREENAME] is undefined, inactive, or invalid. (28,21)” in nVision.

- How to run the Tree Utility Tree Audit to check for Tree Corruption

- What does the Tree Utility tree Audits through the web check for?

- What are the steps to get current custom queries from Production database?

- E-NV: Error running nvision ‘Tree undefined, inactive or invalid’

PeopleSoft Coding samples

Click here for Jeromy McMahon’s Peoplesoft/Oracle blog that has some coding samples for HCM, SA mods, good scripts for Performance tuning and great sample SQL for capturing PS Payroll and HR tables within PeopleSoft.

ApEx, BI, SQL Injection

ApEx

It's been a while since we've done an Application Express item. A couple of nice undocumented features of ApEx 3.1, plus links to other articles at the Inside Oracle APEX blog.

BI

Using BI? Make sure you include the Oracle BI Publisher Blog from Tim Dexter to your RSS subscriptions. The latest article is about Source Control and Versioning and where it stands in BI.

Security: SQL Injection

The Oracle Global Product Security Blog has a link to a new tutorial on defending against SQL injection attacks.

Java Security

Java Security

There's an excellent item today at the aut disce, aut discede blog on Repurposing Attacks Against Java Applets. It has some excellent specifics, as well as some good background material on JAR files and security.

Infogram Weekend Edition, Links to Links

Infogram Weekend: WiFi Tricks and a Use for Windows

It's the weekend, and the Infogram editor is in geeking around mode, so I found a neat little videa on how to use your cell phone as a secondary antenna for WiFi on your computer. Yes, you too can experiment with salad bowls wrapped in tinfoil, all in the name of science! Not much of a signal boost so far, but I did pick up additional networks.

Also of note, something useful to do with Windows (other than solitaire), using XP and 98 sounds to compose music in a video here.

Links

Eddie Awad has some useful Oracle links to offer, so I'm linking to his links. Somewhere down this chain of mirroring links there are actual web pages you can read.