PeopleSoft and JD Edwards Support Transition

Customer Connection Set to Retire - Critical Information for Customer Connection Users

Oracle is committed to ongoing innovation and the enhancement of support tools to help you lower the cost of operating and maintaining your Oracle systems. We deliver on that commitment with our new customer support portal, My Oracle Support, providing simplified support for your Oracle solutions. My Oracle Support will soon replace Customer Connection as your customer support portal.

Note: If you have support agreements for other Oracle products (E-Business Suite, Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware, BEA etc.) you will need to continue to use your existing customer numbers and support web sites until all product groups are migrated at a later date. Details for the existing customer portals can be found at www.oracle.com/support.

Please check back here for the latest information to ensure a smooth transition.
(Requires Customer Connection login)

Advisor Webcast: WebForms: From HTTP to HTTPS in 3 simple steps

This one-hour session is recommended for technical and functional users who will develop and deploy Oracle Forms on the Web. It will give an introduction to configuring Oracle Forms to be run via the HTTPS / SSL protocol.

Target audience: This seminar is primarily directed towards all Forms developers, but all attendees are welcome.
The web seminar duration is about 60 minutes.

Agenda:
1. Background to the presentation.
2. Introduction to using and configuring HTTPs / SSL protocol in Oracle WebForms.
3. What is required to get it going.
4. Show how simple setting HTTPs for Webforms is.

Event details:
Seminar starts on:
1-October-2008 at 8:00 am GMT / 10:00 am CET
1-October-2008 at 4:00 pm GMT / 6:00 pm CET

To register for the event click the link in top left corner or follow the link in the scheduling note below.
Note 423317.1: Advisor Webcast Scheduling of all Oracle Developer Forms Webcasts 2007 / 2008

Certifications, OOW, EBS Shell Scripting, 11g Parameters, SOA Grid, APEX, Lies, BI Publisher, SYSDBA

Certifiable

Want to find out what the latest production combination certifications are (and lots of other good postings)? Have a look at Steven Chan's outstanding Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog.

Oracle Support at OOW

Come see some of the presentations at Open World next week from Oracle Support people. Here's a writeup at Chris Warticki's blog.

Shell Scripts in EBS

Need to outgeek the competition? There's nothing like shell scripts to demonstrate that you are a geek with major wage earning potential. Take the tutorial on Shell Script Tutorial for Oracle Applications here.

11g Improvement 

Every little bit counts, and as H.Tonguç Yılmaz tells us in this posting, RDBMS 11.1 writesout the  initialization parameters to the alert log at startup in a format that makes it easier to recreate them if you lose your SPFILE or PFILE.

SOA Grid

A good jumping off point to research the Oracle SOA Grid concept is this posting at the AMIS technology blog.

APEX

Like APEX? Like meeting others who do? Like eating? Put them all together for the APEX Meetup at Open World, Tuesday at 7:30.

UCM

The Fusion ECM blog points us to some free, as-is UCM components here.

Lies

There are lies, damned lies and statistics, and then there's the simple fact that when faced with a complex set of tasks day in and day out, well...stuff happens, and afterwards people cover their tracks, or at least try to. Mike Ault has a brief but inciteful article on the inevitability of lies and how often DBAs have to wade through them to get to the real cause of a problem.

BI Publisher

A handy list of 25 sessions for those interested in BI Publisher linked to from this posting at the Oracle BI Publisher blog. 

SYSDBA

The Oracle Forensics blog is collecting differences between the DBA and SYSDBA roles. Have some you can't find in this posting? Contribute!

Contributions by Angela Golla

Oracle Open World is almost here. For those of you unable to attend Technet will be making video available at the following link: http://www.oracle.com/technology/events/oracle-openworld-2008/index.html

JSR170 vs. CMIS, Control, APEX Tip, PM Taxonomy, Forms Conversion, 10.2.0.4 and NUMA, Index Impact, Chrome Tips, Hyperion at OW

JSR170 vs. CMIS

If the acronyms JSR170 and CMIS arouse your passions...you're a techie. Okay, that said, you will be interested in the view in this posting over at the Bex Huff blog on the subject.

Total Control vs. Free Interaction

In another one vs the other controversy, there is an ongoing tendency for the upper tiers of IT management to lock down systems and the working masses to open up backdoors to get things done. It's the ancient human conflict of control and safety vs. free networking and the risks that involves. Good post with pointer to another here at the Fusion ECM blog.

APEX Tip

A good APEX tip on setting the default for APEX popup LOV records displayed at the Inside APEX blog.

PM Taxonomy

Where does your project manager (or you if you're a project manager) fit into this handy classification of PMs at the Radvision blog (as pointed out by the I'm Just a Simple DBA blog)?

Forms Conversion

Work continues on the anxiously awaited Forms conversion program, as we learn from this posting at David Peake's APEX blog. They are throwing open the early adopters program to a wider audience, so keep an eye on David's blog for updates.

10.2.0.4 and NUMA

David Closson demonstrates (albeit by proxy) that yes, you can boot a boot a Large 10.2.0.4 SGA on AMD Servers Running Linux.

Index Impact

Changes to indexes can have radical effects...good or bad. Vivek Sharma examines Predicting Performance Impact due to change in Index Columns at his blog.

Chrome Tips

Yes, in addition to something you find on antique cars, Chrome tips are tips about using the new Google Chrome browser. I like it so far, but it has a lot of catchup to do before it outpaces Firefox. Of course since the Firefox 3 upgrade was a disaster for me, I'm a good candidate for playing with a new browser. Main advantage: Chrome is fast, and you can set options to make it even faster using the tips at this page. Main drawback: No extensions. I love my pera-kun add-on to Foxfire that lets me read Chinese text with pop-up definitions. But it's not available for Chrome.

Going to Open World and Use Hyperion?

Some excellent notes at the wonderfully name Look Smarter Than You Are blog here.

Contributions by Angela Golla

Prepare for the My Oracle Support Launch

My Oracle Support (previously Metalink) is targeted to go live this Friday, September 12th and generally speaking, affects legacy Oracle Server Technology and E-Business Suite support customers. This new interface will provide customers with a rich support experience filled with new features. There are online training classes available. Schedule and enrollment can be found here or log into MetaLink and search on Doc ID 418295.1.

Peoplesoft Advisor Webcasts September 2008

Change Impact Analyzer
PSChange Impact Analyzer (PSCIA) is a powerful Tool that shows the far reaching effects that even one small change to a PeopleSoft object can have. PSCIA is designed to help developers and designers assess these effects before they make their changes, thereby providing everyone downstream - QA, Documentation, and most of all our Customers- with a better product experience.
Date: September 18, 16:00h CET, 10:00 a.m. US Eastern
Duration: 60 min.
Enroll

Working Effectively With Support
Learn how to save time and work effectively with Oracle PeopleSoft Support. Obtain details on leveraging your support investment and customer best practices. Understand support terminology, tools, and the escalation process.
Date: September 11, 16:00h CET , 10:00 a.m. US Eastern
Duration: 60 min.
Enroll

Change Assistant
Change Assistant for PeopleSoft Enterprise can enable you to assemble and organize the steps necessary to apply patches and fixes for your PeopleTools maintenance updates. Change Assistant also helps automate the application of change packages to ensure your systems have the latest maintenance software, and can do so with dramatic improvements compared with manual processes.
Date: September 16, 16:00h CET , 10:00 a.m. US Eastern
Duration: 60 min.
Enroll

Setup Manager
Setup Manager is a tool that helps you implement PeopleSoft applications by using a project and predefined tasks to produce a setup task list that is specific to your implementation project.
Date: September 17, 16:00h CET , 10:00 a.m. US Eastern
Duration: 60 min.
Enroll

New Apex Book

New APEX Book

There's a new APEX book on the way, and Tom Kyte wrote the preface, so it's going to be a good one. You can read his comments here.

Hyperion, OWB, Internals, Firefox, Weblogic Security, Pruning

Hyperion

Tim Tow has a couple of good recent postings:

Some thoughts on installing the new version (with a more detailed series of postings to come).

and a reminder about the Essbase docs.

OWB

The Oracle Warehouse Builder blog as a notice on the release for 10.2.0.4.

Internals

In yet another cool internals post, Tanel Poder dives into the depths of resource usage on writes to system tables.

Firefox Search Extension for Oracle

Eddie Awad is very pleased by a Firefox extension called Ubiquitous that lets you use powerful search tools inside the Oracle documentation. He talks about it here.
I upgraded to Firefox 3 and had it destroyed my RSS feedlist in Sage and now it's not displaying read/unread items in folders, so I'm in a less Firefox friendly mood. About the best I can say is that it stinks less than IE and Chrome.

Security

Using Weblogic? A vulnerability announcement today on the very valuable The Oracle Global Product Security Blog.

Paritition Pruning

A nice in-depth item on partition pruning (no, not in cubicle, much as you'd like a better view) from Richard Foote, the indexing guru.

E-Business Suite at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 (8 min.)
August 21, 2008 For E-Business Suite customers: Get a preview of the must see sessions, demos, customer presentations and other highlights of OpenWorld 2008, September 21st - 25th in San Francisco. Register at: http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2008/index.html

Oracle on Oracle
Find out what's new with Oracle, including the newest developments driving Applications, and two new publications targeted to executives and managers.

Retail
Learn about the latest retail trends driving growth and innovation. Plus, find out what's new in Oracle Retail V13.

Contributions by Angela Golla

In a proactive effort to reach customers affected by hurricane season, Global Customer Support has published the following information to Customer Connection and MetaLink to inform them about providing useful, support details in the event of a potential storm.

Customer Connection: Hurricane Support
MetaLink 2: Note ID: 735326.1
MetaLink 3: Note ID: 735501.1

Hyperion

Oracle’s Hyperion Pre-System 9 Products: Oracle Offers One Year of Extended Support - Free

As previously announced, Oracle Premier Support for selected Hyperion Pre-System 9 releases will end on September 30, 2008. One year of Extended Support for the Hyperion Pre-System 9 products will be offered for the period October 1, 2008 to September 30, 2009. The Extended Support fee for this period has been waived for those program licenses for which customers have paid the System 9 Enablement Fee and for which technical support is continuously maintained.

Note: Customers who have not completed their upgrade to a newer release of the listed products by September 30 2008 need to decide whether or not they want to purchase Extended Support, or if migrating directly to Sustaining Support is sufficient. New fixes are not covered by Sustaining Support.

Pricing Questions
Please contact your Support Sales representative for assistance with any pricing questions.

Additional Resources:
For complete customer FAQ notification posted on Oracle.com click
Oracle Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence solutions here.
Lifetime Support information
Lifetime Support Policy – Oracle Applications brochure
Oracle Technical Support Policies