Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

The PeopleSoft Information Portal provides a single entry point for locating documentation, training, and other useful information to help with implementation and improve your daily experience with PeopleSoft products. Check it out.

Infogram this week: Performance, EBS, OBIEE, Solaris, APEX, SOA

Performance

Two posts from gurus of the performance and internals realm this week, Jonathan Lewis on Index Joins at his Oracle Scratchpad Blog, and Tanel Poder on the vicissitudes of the Asynch descriptor resize wait event in Oracle .

EBS

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

Five Power-User Tips for Searching My Oracle Support

Microsoft Office 2010 (32-Bit) Certified with E-Business Suite

Access to Automated Release Update System Has Changed

Assessing E-Business Suite Performance on Oracle VM

OBIEE

Are you certifiable? Yeah, yeah, I know. But in OBIEE? Look into it here.

Solaris

Need some tips on working with Solaris Express? Here's a start: Oracle Solaris 11 Express Resources for Sysadmins.

APEX

David Peake once again helps us look down the road ahead for APEX: APEX 4.1 Statement of Direction Published.

SOA

The AMIS Technology blog brings us a good step by step posting on Oracle’s Pre-built Virtual Machine for SOA Suite 11g.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Oracle has played a pioneering role in making Grid Computing relevant to enterprises with ground breaking products such as Oracle Real Applications Clusters (RAC), Automatic Storage Management (ASM), and Storage Grid. More recently, Oracle has brought Grid Computing to middleware with the Application Grid approach to infrastructure. These products/technologies make the enterprise IT infrastructure elastic so that it can grow incrementally without any theoretical upper limit, as well as provide the flexibility to move resources around in order to meet dynamic business priorities. Learn more about this exciting technology at:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/cloud/whatsnew/index.html

Oracle Infogram This Week: Performance, Exadata, MOS, EBS, Linux, RDBMS,

Performance

I was helping a client this week with some performance problems and ran across a good source on using plan stability in 10g at the Oracle related stuff blog: Plan stability in 10g - using existing cursors to create Stored Outlines and SQL profiles.

From the Oraclue blog we have a reminder to take at look at 'Mr. Trace', former Oracle VP and guru of the mathematical/methodical approach to optimization, Cary Millsap.

Local Indexes

Jonathan Lewis has another installment on his series on Local Indexes at this Oracle Scratchpad blog.

Exadata

Some very useful info (and some constructive criticism) on the control interface for Exadata at Kerry Osborne's Oracle Blog: Cellcli Command Syntax – Top 10 List. Also on Kerry's blog, though more in the realm of performance, are several articles on SQL Profile. This is a technique I never used before, but after seeing a client use it tonight to resolve a major Sev 1 situation I am now a believer. Here is what Kerry's blog has on the subject.

MOS Listing

The Oracle BI By Bakboord blog regularly runs some useful updates of the latest MOS items. Here's one: Oracle MOS HTML Update 14112010

EBS

The latest from the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog:

EBS R12 Sparse Mid-Tier Template for Oracle VM Now Available

Two New Options for Signing E-Business Suite JAR Files Now Available

11gR2 11.2.0.2 Database Certified with E-Business Suite

Using Physical Standby for EBS 12 Environments on 11g Databases

Oracle BPEL 10.1.3.5 Certified with EBS 12 on IBM Linux on System z

Oracle Linux Blog

Oracle has a new Linux blog.

RDBMS

Arup Nanda maintains a great blog. He also maintains some really handy tools for other DBAs. Consider this one (remember to test thoroughly and all the usual due diligence, of course, as Arup says this is for educational purposes only):

Tool to Add Range Partitions Automatically to a Table

Also there at Arup's blog this week is a redirect in case you can't find the My Oracle New Features series we linked to some time ago here:

My Oracle New Features Series on OTN

Speaking of handy tools from renowned bloggers, Kevin Closson is Reintroducing SLB--The Silly Little Benchmark.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

The E-Business Suite Application Technology Group (ATG) has monthly Advisor Webcasts on a host of E-Business Suite topics. Check out Note:1186338.1 for upcoming webcasts and archives of previous presentations. Topics covered include Workflow Purging and Upgrading to Release 12.1.

Oracle Infogram This Week: EBS, Exadata, Design, RDBMS

EBS

The last couple of weeks over at the Oracle E-Business Technology blog:

E-Business Suite 12.1.3 Templates for Oracle VM Now Available

EBS 12.1 + RAC Cloning Certified for AMP 3.1

What's New with Applications Node Services in EBS R12?

E-Business Suite Release 12 Certified with New Virtualization + Partitioning Technologies

Portal 11g (11.1.1.3) Certified with EBS on 17 Additional Platforms

OAUG Surveying Your Readiness for EBS 11i Extended Support

E-Business Suite 12.1.3 Now Available for IBM Linux on System z

Recording Available for AT&T E-Business Suite 12.1 Upgrade Webcast

Oracle AS 10g 10.1.3.5 Certified with EBS 12 on IBM Linux on System

Exadata

A followup on the Exadata webinar that the folks over at Pythian blog offered, a recorded version: Exadata Implementation Results.

Also at Pythian is a link to the latest Log Buffer, a blog of links similar to the Infogram in many ways: Log Buffer #205, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs.

Also in the realm of Exadata, be sure to tune in to the Oracle Exadata Online Forum November 16th. The Oracle Data Warehouse Insider lets us know it's coming up.

Data Entry and Money

It's amazing what a single field can do. Have you reviewed your website and internal forms lately? I remember working a contract where one suggestion saves us millions of keystrokes a year. 999 times out of a thousand users were calling for an 'XYZ' type of file, but you had to type that XYZ in every time. By defaulting the field we saved all those extra keystrokes. That contract was also a good learning platform for me on taking care about changing fields around when dealing with 'heads down' data entry people. That seems to be a dying breed in these days of mice and Java clients, but the elements of good form design are just as important as ever. Oracle AppsLab has a link to an article on how Expedia saved a bundle of money and prevented customer frustration (which loses masses of money) by simply dropping an optional field: Expedia Saved $12 Million a Year by Deleting One Input Field.

RDBMS

A blog that's a new one to me, Oracle by Madrid, has a good posting on alternatives for dealing with getting access to the alert log when it is secured (that is to say, the DBA getting to it, since there are some companies with such comprehensive security that access isn't a given). One of the alternatives is an external table: Reading the alert.log as a local table

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Did you know that there is a Oracle Sample Code Repository, where Oracle Technology Network members collaboratively build and share sample applications, code snippets, skins and templates, and more? Check it out at: http://www.samplecode.oracle.com/.

Oracle Infogram This Week: Hyperion, MySQL, Search Filter, SQL Injection, Data Modelling, Time

Hyperion

Timeouts don't always happen on the server side. Here's a posting over at In 2 Hyperion on the browser factor: Why Does Workspace Log You Out?

MySQL

Some tips on MySQL at Net tuts+: Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices

OBIEE 11g

Over at Ritmann Mead Consulting, one of the best blogs out there, is: A Quick Recap on “The Best of” our OBIEE 11g Postings, so that's the best of the best. Definitely worth a look.

Search Filter

I've read and enjoyed the work of various members of Miracle, a company based in Denmark, for years. The legendary Oak Table is owned by its founder (the Oak Table is somewhat like the Round Table. Only it's not round. And has nothing to do with chivalry. And is all about Oracle performance experts. And has a lot more beer stains on it.). So when I stumbled across this search engine from Miracle Finland I thought I'd pass it along: Miracle Finland search engine.

SQL Injection

You've heard me speak (well, preach, more like) about the need for continued vigilance to eliminate SQL injection vulnerabilities. Here is a good cheat sheet I came upon about SQL injection. There are links to other vulnerability references at the bottom of the posting:

SQL Injection Prevention Cheat Sheet.

Data Modelling

Speaking of thorough lists, this is the most comprehensive list of data modelling tools I've seen: Data Modelling Tools over at Database Answers

Time Marches On

And everything gets old. That includes software. Please have a look a the dates for the RDBMS and plan accordingly:

Please see details in MOS Note : Release Schedule of Current Database Releases [ID 742060.1]

The patching end dates for the different release/patch levels are as follows unless noted otherwise in the table:

Release	Patching Ends
11.2.0.1	13-Sep-2011
11.1.0.6	18-Sep-2009
10.2.0.4	30-APR-2011
10.2.0.3	22-Feb-2009
10.1.0.4	30-Jan-2007

Click here to view the dates. Note that although 10.2 Extended Support begins in August 2010, Extended Support fees have been waived for the first year for all customers - for more information see the Oracle Technical Support Policy document section 6 (d).

Notes:

• ¹11.1.0.7 is the last patch set for Release 11.1. Future integrated error correction will come in the form of Patch Set Updates. Please see Patch Set Updates for Oracle Products (Doc ID 854428.1) for current details.
• ²11.2.0.1 is a base release.
• ³10.2.0.5 is the last patch set for Release 10.2. Once patching ends for 10.2.0.4, future integrated error correction will come in the form of Patch Set Updates. Please see Patch Set Updates for Oracle Products (Doc ID 854428.1) for current details.
• The start of Extended Support no longer forces customers to run the last patch set in order to receive new fixes (such as PSU or CPU) - 10.2.0.4 will be patched up until the end date listed above.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

The Applications Technology Group (ATG) has released a new newsletter. Check out Note:1207404.1. It contains links to articles on Oracle Internet Directory, Concurrent Processing Tips and Tricks, Patching Best Practices and more.