Hyperion, EBS, Storage, APEX, PeopleSoft, Programming

Hyperion

More valuable stuff from the 'in 2 Hyperion' blog. This time it's the start of a series on backup strategies for Essbase.

Essbase Labs blog has a quick trick for us this week: Smart View Features You Never Knew Existed - POV Printing.

EBS

This week at the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog:

Live Migration of EBS Services Using Oracle VM

Switching to Cumulative Critical Patch Updates for E-Business Suite 11i

Latest DSTv13 Timezone Patches Available for E-Business Suite

Firefox 3.6 Certified with Oracle E-Business Suite

Storage

There's a new series starting over at Kevin Closson's Oracle Blog: Oracle Database 11g Database File System (DBFS). Common DBFS Problems and Solutions. Part I.

APEX

This is an example from APEX over on the YABAOAE blog, but modifying Oracle metadata without specific instructions to do so from Oracle Support is always a bad idea. It doesn't always cause disasters, but then again a bomb left standing in a cornfield doesn't necessarily ever go off either--but that's no reason to plant it there, even if someone told you it improves the crops:The Perils of Modifying the Application Express Metadata

Over at Random Insights into Oracle there are some positive findings on APEX 4.0: Oracle APEX 4.0 + Ext JS = Happy Days

PeopleSoft

Over at the PeopleSoft Technology Blog: Portal Solutions 9.1 Upgrade Now Available on MyOracle Support.

and from the same source news that the PeopleSoft Portal Solutions 9.1: Multilingual version is Generally Available.

Programming Contest

Think you’re the best coder on the block? Find yourself reprogramming old VCRs just because no one else can? ACM is holding a coding contest to help you prove your prowess to the world. Get your editor loaded, your caffeinated beverage chilled or warm as appropriate, and make your way to the acmqueue Programming Challenge

CRM On Demand sneak peek

The Oracle CRM marketing team has put together a quick demo on youtube to show a sneak peek at just one of the many new features in the next release of Oracle CRM On Demand. "We're calling it (and I hope you're sitting down) Oracle CRM On Demand Release 17!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-0qDnLHVDo

Contribution By Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

On January 27, 2010, Oracle announced it finalized its acquisition of Sun. Learn more at: http://www.oracle.com/us/sun/index.htm

Switching to Cumulative Critical Patch Updates for E-Business Suite 11i

On Steven Chan's blog there is a new posting that many DBAs and sysadmins on eBusiness suite 11i will look forward to.
"With the introduction of CPU Cumulative Patches for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i10 CU2, starting with CPUJan2010, things have changed in an important way. E-Business Suite Release 11i sysadmins now have a convenient way of getting up-to-date on the latest Critical Patch Updates with a single patch."

Read more about this here: http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2010/01/cumulative_ebs_cpu.html

Oracle Finalizes Acquisition of Sun

As many of you may have known Oracle has been moving towards adding Sun microsystems to the list of other high level aquired companies. This week that aquistion was finalized. This is big news for our customers who run Oracle applications on Sun machines. On Wednesday, January 27th, 2010, Oracle hosted several webcasts to discuss the strategy of the combined company and how our customers will see improved performance and greater ROI.

You can view the recorded sessions, the official press release and more on this topic at the offical website: http://www.oracle.com/us/sun/index.html

Entity Relationship Diagrams for Peoplesoft Now Available

In an effort to streamline the process for customers to receive Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) and make it more efficient for us internally, the ERDs are now available on My Oracle Support. Customers no longer have to open a SRS ticket. Customers can find them on My Oracle Support using the Note ID or from this central ERD page (note ID 1051533.1).

ERDs are available for:

HCM: 9.1 Note: 968850.1, 9.0 Note: 979328.1, 8.9 Note: 981781.1, 8.8 Note: 989720.1

ELM: 9.1 Note: 989317.1, 9.0 Note: 989318.1, 8.8 Note: 1050817.1

CRM: 9.1 Note: 986733.1, 9.0 Note: 978853.1, 8.9 Note: 981780.1

FIN: 9.0 Note: 961655.1, 8.9 Note: 979359.1, 8.8 Note: 989673.1

SCM: 9.0 Note: 975752.1, 8.9 Note: 981711.1, 8.8 Note: 989690.1

EPM: 9.0/8.9 Note: 985535.1

Portal: 8.9 Note: 988728.1

Additional ERDs will be posted when they are available.

All ERD postings on My Oracle Support have the following disclaimer:

Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) are available only for selected PeopleSoft Enterprise products at the sole discretion of Oracle. Your existing license agreements with Oracle guide the use of this information. The information contained within the ERDs and the associated documents themselves are proprietary and confidential information and should not be distributed or otherwise made available without the expressed written consent of Oracle.

Oracle makes no statement regarding the completeness or accuracy of these diagrams. Since ERD's apply only to a specific version of a specific product, they may or may not apply to any products or versions of the product other than those specified. By providing these ERD's, Oracle makes no commitment to update or correct these diagrams, nor does Oracle commit to continue providing them for any products or versions of the product.

ERD's are provided ‘as-is’ and Oracle does not provide technical support or offer any warranties for these programs. By using the data in these document, the recipient assumes full responsibility for any liabilities encountered while using them and the information contained in them.

PeopleSoft, SOA, EBS, Index Rebuilds, Performance

PeopleSoft

I just noticed a PeopleSoft Wiki out there. The wiki is one of the better concepts of the new Web 2.0 apps (think of how many times you've used Wikipedia in the last month and you'll see what I mean). So I submit for your consideration the (unofficial) PeopleSoft Wiki

Another item of interest this week is Performance Metrics and XML Reporting in PeopleSoft

over at the PeopleSoft DBA blog.SOA

I'm happy to note that there are more SOA blogs out there by the day. Many of them are internal blogs with lots of nice grotty technical details. Example: A posting on How does Restricted Task Reassignment Work in SOA 11g at the Oracle SOA Best Practice And Troubleshooting blog.

EBS

This week at the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog:

Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 Certified with Oracle E-Business Suite

BPEL 10.1.3.5 Certified for Prebuilt E-Business Suite 12 SOA Integrations

Deploying E-Business Suite on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Elastic clouds? Sure hate to see a non-elastic one. It would be a great challenge to air travel)

Oracle Internet Directory 11g (11.1.1.2) Certified on Eight New Platforms for EBS

Index Rebuilds

I was going to title this 'Index Rebuilds, For or Against', but I can't really find articles and discussions from Oak Table members favoring regular rebuilds. Of those who do advocate them, some seem to be in a very limited subset of large data warehouses with very specific load routines that do benefit from the rebuilds. the prevailing sentiment of other postings seems mainly along the lines of: Well, we've always done that, and it's certainly no harm. Well, I'm not sure it's no harm. If you are doing regular index rebuilds please dig around in the following articles and discussions and judge for your yourselves:

http://richardfoote.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/1094/

http://richardfoote.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/rebuilding-indexes-every-sunday-afternoon/

Options from Jonathan Lewis:

http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/index-explosion-4/#more-2096

http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/index-rebuild-again/

http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2007/09/16/index-rebuild/

Performance

Want to see the leading lights in Oracle performance gathered in one place, many of them holding beers and eating BBQ? Consider the Hotsos 2010 Symposium. This is always one of the best conferences of the year. Remember that it is limited to 500 participants, so you may want to sign up sooner rather than later.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

PeopleSoft 9.0 Business Process Maps are now available in PDF format on My Oracle Support. The link to the My Oracle Support posting is below.

https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&id=989289.1

Performance, EBS, Forms, SOA, WebLogic

Performance

We haven't linked to the postings over at Jonathan Lewis' Oracle Scratchpad in a while. As always, some really valuable goings on there. Examples:

Using force_match in profiles

A cautionary note on first_rows_N

Playing fast and loose with copying stats, and doing it in a supported manner

and a bit of humor (which he insists on calling humour in a stubbornly British manner)

EBS

This item is important for all Oracle RDBMS users, not just EBS:

Critical Patch Update for January 2010 Now Available

AppsDataSource and Java Authentication and Authorization Service for Oracle E-Business Suite

EBS 11i Certified on Windows Itanium (2003) and 10gR2 10.2.0.4 Database

Mini-Review: Oracle E-Business Suite Development & Extensibility Handbook

Application Management Pack and Application Change Management Pack 3.1 Now Available

New Minimum Patching Baselines for E-Business Suite 11i Extended Support

Forms

People have been ringing the death knell of Forms for years. Forms does not seem to have noticed and keeps on churning away. Some discussion of the unanticipated vitality of the product is to be found here at Grant's Blog.

PeopleSoft

The PeopleSoft tipster has some hard-won experience to share on Restyling/rebranding HR9.1/Tools 8.50.

SOA

Sometimes we move where the knob is and when you reach for it, you need to read the manual to find out where it's got to. Or in this case you can read the Inside scoop on Oracle SOA Suite, BPM and EDA blog on SOA Suite 11g: weblogic.transaction.internal.TimedOutException: Transaction timed out after 299 seconds

WebLogic

Another good update over at James Bayer's Blog: WebLogic NodeManager Quick Start (including obligatory catchy image near the top of the posting).

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

The January 2010 Critical Patch Update (CPU) has been released. Learn more at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/security/critical-patch-updates/cpujan2010.html

The Oracle Lifetime Support Policies have updated with additional support dates. Download the latest copy of the documents from: http://www.oracle.com/support/lifetime-support-policy.html?origref=http://www.oracle.com/us/support/index.htm

Contributions by Sherron Garnett, Infogram Contributor

PeopleTools 8.50: A Tool Kit to Help Craft a Better User Experience

With PeopleTools 8.50, PeopleSoft has provided a set of cool, new user interface features that focus on usability. This has allowed PeopleSoft to kick off a substantial ripple effect across all of its applications, which has the potential to improve the user experience for every PeopleSoft user. More...

Hyperion, Weblogic, Support, EBS, Cloud Computing, APEX

Hyperion

Tim Tow helps out those of you moving to Windows 7 with a posting on his blog this week on: Windows 7 / Essbase 11.1.1.3 Installation Tutorial

Weblogic

James Bayer has a variety of solid techno postings on his blog. Here's a handy-looking example: A Simple Job Scheduler Example - WebLogic Server Clustered Timer

Support

Another one of those great 'keys to the kingdom' posts from Chris Warticki of Oracle Support: Oracle Support – New Year – Back to Best Practices

EBS

The E-Business Suite Technology blog updates for this week:

On Clouds and Virtualization in EBS Environments (OpenWorld 2009 Recap)

New Whitepaper: Symmetrical Network Acceleration with EBS 12

Year In Review: Top EBS Techstack Developments of 2009

Cloud Computing

We've blogged often on the subject of cloud computing, which is either a key new technology or another buzzword, perhaps both. There is a brief summation of a lengthy article in MIT's Technology review posted to the Risks Digest list, here. As I've said before, the Risks Digest is a fascinating and often scary mailing list with articles on all manner of havoc and mayhem involving IT. Here is the summation with link to the article:

Security in the Ether: Cloud Computing? Or "Swamp" Computing?

Lauren Weinstein

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:04:16 -0800

Security in the Ether: Cloud Computing? Or "Swamp" Computing?   

[From NNSquad, Network Neutrality Squad, http://www.nnsquad.org]  

An important article worth reading:  http://bit.ly/4uYabf  (MIT Technology Review)  

My personal "thumbnail" view on this is that:  

a) Cloud Computing" holds enormous promise.  

b) Most of the key security and other operational issues associated with cloud

computing are solvable, including aspects of pervasive encryption that would 

protect cloud computing clients from potential snooping by theoretically 

postulated unscrupulous cloud service providers.  

c) The financial and intellectual resources (including basic policy analysis) 

required to understand and solve these problems on an *a priori* basis, rather 

than on an "after there's a mess" reactive basis, are in general insufficiently 

emphasized and deployed.  

d) Given (c), not all of the current rush to cloud computing on today's widely 

available platforms can necessarily be justified as wise, particularly where 

sensitive and/or privacy-critical data is involved.  Or in other words, Cloud 

Computing can be a Really Good Thing if done right, but let's not get the cart

in front of the horse.

APEX

People are starting to kick the tires on the new APEX release, and so far the impressions seem quite positive, like this posting at John's Blog.