Hyperion, SQL and APEX, Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics, SOA, OBIEE

Hyperion

Just came across a Hyperion blog I hadn't seen before, one run by Johnson & Associates Consulting called the Hyperion Consultant Blog. Let me know what you think of it.

SQL and APEX

A posting over at John's Blog touches the tip of the veritable iceberg of the potential impact of views on performance. Through a simple example he shows how you can end up with a reduntant sort operation from using a view. But there can be lots of other impacts, and I've seen views of such intricacy and inefficiency that they've turned out to be the cause of major performance problems. Often it starts out as: well, we just need a view to simplify coding this report. Then over the months and years it is forgotten that the view was created for a specific report and it starts to be used as if it were a table, then there are modifications, then someone creates a view that uses the view as an element, and from there it's all downhill in a handbasket.

So views are a great way to help out developers, but don't let them take on a life of their own or they can become a real problem.

On APEX, have you been hearing the hoopla about Application Express for a long time and meaning to 'get around to that'? Well, have a look at this site and you can set up an account and mess around in your very own workspace to get familiar with APEX. I think you will find it an elegant and useful product for fast development (and a lot of more complex tasks).

One more item in the wonderful world of APEX this week: How to Avoid Bot Spammers in APEXover at Martin Giffy D'Souza's APEX blog.

Lies, Statistics and Their Ilk

In a posting entitled Autotrace Lies Too! Kerry Osborne digs in to some of the behavior of autotrace and the intricacies of how close an explain plan is to what the optimizer really ends up doing. He points back in the posting to an excellent posting from Tom Kyte on the same subject.

SOA

Looking for a trimmed down summary of SOA 11g: Cluster installation? Well, there's the link over at the SOA@Oracle SCA, BPEL, BPM & Service Bus. The blog title is almost as long as the process.

OBIEE

Working with OBIEE? You should definitely take a look at the Oracle Business Intelligence obiee 101 blog. Lots of nice little technical how-to's. Definitely something to add to your RSS feeds. Example: OBIEE Popup Box.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

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JDE, AIA, APEX, Liking Pie, Security, Performance

JDE

An interesting post over at the JD Edwards Advisor blog on EnterpriseOne Built-in Dashboards. This article discusses using available features to get more out of an application product.

But there is a larger issue loosely related to this that I have run into with the Oracle RDBMS over the years. I've often heard customer management arguing for an application to be 'database agnostic'. As a result, nothing but ANSI standard SQL is used and many features unique to a particular RDBMS are not designed in to the build. So in order to avoid a possible one-time rebuild in the future the designers are crippling the everyday operation of their RDBMS and not using some of the 'neater than sliced bread' features that they are paying for.

AIA

Over at the Official AIA Blog (you couldn't get more official than that): RV 2.5 EBO Implementation Maps and EBO HTML documentation are available on Metalink Note # 881022.1

APEX

David Peake, author of the David Peake on Oracle APEX blog is looking for customer references for the product? Have you had some good experiences with APEX you want to share? Considering that it's been my experience that APEX is one of the most elegant products we make (and as a result of that elegance saves IT departments large quantities of cash by converting legacy apps quickly, scaling smoothly, and being capable of going from concept to proof of concept at light speed). Please have a look and see if you can help David out.

The AMIS Technology Corner blog has a handy APEX tip: Uploading and viewing photo’s with your mobile APEX application

I Like Pie

One of the classic silly lines that circulates on the Internet, often appearing in the profiles of computer people on the 'something about yourself' section of various social networks is: 'I like pie'. Well, here's a pie that Abhinav Agarwal over at the Oracle Business Intelligence blog did not in fact like. It's a pie chart with more slices than you can find in Brooklyn on a summer afternoon, and he even offers remedies.

Secure Programming

Eddie Awad has a worth its weight in gold list of links on the Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

Performance

Cary Millsap has a new article on Thinking Clearly About Performance linked from his blog.

Also in the realm of performance is the last installment of James Morle's series The Oracle Wait Interface Is Useless (sometimes) over at his blog.

RDBMS

Tanel Poder answers the question How to CANCEL a query running in another session? over at his blog. Now I've watched too much of the Sopranos, so my immediate solution is: You go over and slap the user around until they stop. But Tanel's solution is a lot nicer and involves the use of computers.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

The March / April release of Oracle Magazine is now available at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/10-mar/index.html. It features articles on implementing complex enterprise applications and handling spikes in demand for computational power using a dynamic infrastructure, called an application grid.

Hyperion, EBS, RDBMS, BI, PeopleSoft, Performance, Indexing

Hyperion

The "in 2 Hyperion" blog is offering a tool to its readers for Generating Random Sample Data. That's a handy thing. The trick is getting management to believe that the random data is actually your company's data and that things are really looking up. So perhaps you should just use it for simulating data.

Tim Tow found a 'touchy spot' in Essbase that he is sharing. It's a point in the API where a space, or the lack thereof, actually makes a difference. Such moments make me remember why I moved from developer to DBA. Though I've found plenty of touchy spots in database scripts, etc. over the years as well.

Over at Essbase Labs they are continuing their excellent series of tips on Smart View Features You Never Knew Existed: NumericZero.

EBS

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

Premier Support for Oracle Application Server 10g ends December 2010

11gR2 DB 11.2.0.1 Certified on Solaris 10 and E-Business Suite

What Are Your Plans for Retiring Internet Explorer or IE6?

Migrating E-Business Suite Application Tier Servers to Linux

Using Mobile Devices with Oracle E-Business Suite

RDBMS

One of the best Oracle resources on the Web is AskTom. If you haven't used it, your really should. You can usually find what you need in the archives. But on the off chance that your question has not been addressed before you can Ask Tom (as in Tom Kyte, Oracle VP and uber-guru). Here is a sample exchange from the recent

1. How do I find out how much space is filled in online-redo log files..

BI

Over at A BI Publisher developer's diary... there is a good hint to be found on Can we recover the failed Bursting cases? (wow, that sounds painful).

PeopleSoft

A new blog in the PeopleSoft realm, JRE Consulting, looks to have some interesting material. For instance: Using setup manger to generate a GP task list

Book Review: Application Performance

Christian Antognini has good things to say about The Art of Application Performance Test from O'Reilly. Have a look at his review here. As always, there is plenty of interesting performance lore to be found at Christian's blog, such as this article on Query Optimizer Cost PX Distribution Methods.

Speaking of performance books, there's a new book out, Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table, and it's getting good reviews so far: Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table

Indexing

Richard Foote is starting another excellent series on indexes. First he is preparing the ground with some information on Index Block Dumps and Index Tree Dumps

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

As part of Oracle’s ongoing commitment to provide better proactive support capabilities to its customers, we are pleased to announce the release of 68 new Health Checks on My Oracle Support covering Database, Enterprise Manager, E-Business Suite, Siebel and PeopleSoft product lines. Customers installing Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM) and uploading their configuration information, enable Oracle’s Proactive Health Check capabilities. This proactive advice, driven by Oracle’s comprehensive knowledge base and configuration management capabilities, includes product health checks that identify problems and recommend fixes before they impact our customer’s business.These new health checks cover a range of problem areas & symptoms across the Database, Enterprise Manager, E-Business Suite, Siebel and PeopleSoft product lines. Each health check has a corresponding knowledge article published in the My Oracle Support knowledge base. The My Oracle Support Health Checks Catalog [ID 868955.1] includes a reference to all published heath checks and their associated knowledge article.

Important: WebLogic Vulnerability Patch

Security: WebLogic Server

A high priority WebLogic vulnerability was discovered recently. Here is a link to the information on effected systems with links to the patch:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/deploy/security/alerts/alert-cve-2010-0073.html?msgid=8516506&eid=4695403239&lid=1

PeopleSoft, Performance, Heroes of the Datamart, MOS, APEX

PeopleSoft

You can now download your PeopleSoft documentation in Kindle-compatible format. They're pretty large files, and I suspect they would look best on the DX model Kindle. I have to say, though, that is one of those times when Amazon's decision to do away with the external memory card slot of the Amazon classic Kindle seems foolish. If you have an original Kindle (like mine, bought the first day it came out, gloat, gloat) , you can use memory cards to hold sets of items you want to load on your Kindle. Newer models will have to dedicate a fairly large chunk of memory to the files. Still the idea of getting docs in a nice usable electronic form is the start of something very positive.

Another PeopleSoft item comes from the One the PeopleSoft Road blog. If only humans could switch languages this easily: Make Peoplesoft OVM Multilingual.

Performance

Olaf Heimburger has a new article over at OTN: Overview of Performance Tuning Tools in Oracle Fusion Middleware

It's been a while since we directed your attention to Tanel Poder's blog. It is a rich and technical place. Example: This posting on Bind Variable Peeking – execution plan inefficiency. I had a client who tangled with this recently.

First came the primordial stage of Oracle optimization. This was in the days when you would put wax on the server. If it melted, utilization was high. If the egg next to the wax fried, utilization was maxed out. If the phone rang at that point, you went out for coffee. Then came the age of ratio based tuning, we shall leave it in dignified silence. Finally we came to the Oracle Wait Interface. James Morley takes us to the next level in a multipart series catchily entitled: The Oracle Wait Interface Is Useless (sometimes)

Part 1

Part 2 (well, there isn't one, but there's a placeholder here).

Part 3a

Heroics

Do you have a bracing tale of heroism involving data warehousing? As part of the preparations for the next Iron Man movie, Marvel and Oracle are holding a contest to become honorary CIO of Stark Industries. See some details over at the Data Warehouse Insider blog.

Speaking of great hulking collections of organized data, there's a new Oracle data mining blog out there. Here's a sample of the wares: Generating cluster names from a document clustering model

MOS

What if My Oracle Support is down when you need to do research or open an SR? Chris Warticki has some answers.

APEX

David Peake has updated the APEX home page. It's worth a look.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Earthquakes, tornados and other diasasters can strike any data center. Here is a new article on using Oracle Grid Control and Data Guard to build a disaster proof production environment.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/havewala-easydr.html