Oracle Priority Service Infogram This Week - 27-APR-2011

Star Transformation

No, it's not what happens to participants in American Idol, it involves warehouse work. One of the key concept's of Oracle data warehousing SQL is star transformation. Read some of the details over at Jonathan Lewis' Oracle Scratchpad blog (as with most things involving the optimizer, things get a bit complex): Star Transformation.

Also in the realm of data warehousing is this item on OWB 11gR2 – XML at the Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) Weblog

OEM

Oracle offers a variety of webcasts every week on OEM. Here's a link to the latest: Increase the ROI of Your SOA Infrastructure with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.

Hyperion

Now that 11.1.2.1 is out people are starting to work with it and coming up with great postings like this Planning 11.1.2.1 - Exporting metadata over at the More to life than this... blog.

RDBMS

Need to impress people at a cocktail party? Discourse on delayed block cleanout. But don't dwell on it a lot or you'll lose the crowd. You can research it at the Oracle related stuff blog: Delayed Block Cleanout / ORA-01555.

PL/SQL

Some coding knowledge for PL/SQL users over at Andrejus Baranovskis's Blog: Invoking Stored Procedures and Functions with Named Variable Parameters.

Lifetime Support for Sun

Soporific but useful, the official word on Oracle's Lifetime Support for Oracle Sun System Products.

WLS

Some useful items on WLS security. This one from Oracle Fusion Middleware Security on SSL offloading and WebLogic server.

And from Middleware magic: Securing the WebLogic Server .

Sequences vs. Sequence Tables

Those of us who have been working with Oracle for some time know that there are sometimes transaction systems that absolutely, positively, have to keep assigned sequences in order and without dropping numbers out. That can be difficult with Oracle sequences. But if you use a sequence table you build yourself you are blown into the dangerous waters of very high volumes of commits and a potential I/O hotspot on the table. So what do you do? I did some preliminary research on just that this week for a client and wanted to pass along pointers to the discussions I found of the most interest:

Old, but from the grand master, Tom Kyte:

http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:0::NO::P11_QUESTION_ID:2985886242221

A newer discussion involving and recommending Streams on the picture:

http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:2685071500346592076

A related discussion from Charles Hooper, an Oak Table performance guru:

http://hoopercharles.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/

The most interesting link I've found so far:

http://www.gplivna.eu/papers/gapless_sequences.htm

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Are you planning your migration from E-Business Suite Release 11 to 12? Check out these helpful notes on the EBS Technology Stack:

E-Business Suite (EBS) Technology Stack Upgrade from 11.5.10.2 to 12.1.2 (Doc 253.1)
E-Business Suite (EBS) Technology Stack Upgrade from 11.5.10.2 to 12.1.3 (Doc 269.1)

PS Infogram this Week: CPU, GoldenGate, OpenOffice, WLS, PeopleSoft, WebCenter, SOA

CPU

The April CPU has been released:

For more information see the following link:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html . >

The reference to the Patch Set Availability is located at

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/cpuapr2011-301950.html

HA and GoldenGate

High availability is the cutting edge of backup and recovery. The closer you get to 100% availability (the unobtainable Holy Grail of availability), the more expensive and elaborate things get. But recent product improvements (RAC and Data Guard) and new Oracle products (GoldenGate), make life a lot easier. I've been researching HA aspects of GoldenGate for a client, and thought I'd pass along some of the useful articles and links I've found:

White paper: Oracle GoldenGate high availability using Oracle Clusterware

A book that I've mentioned before here:

Oracle GoldenGate 11g Implementer's guide

A set of GoldenGate Quick Start Tutorials at the Oracle DBA – Tips and Techniques blog.

A quick rundown on the advantages of GoldenGate at Tushant's Blog: Oracle GoldenGate - A solution for real-time data integration and continuous data availability .

OpenOffice

Oracle OpenOffice is becoming a purely community-based project.

WLS

Over at Middleware magic there's a good posting on Optimizing WebLogic Server Performance: JVM tuning.

OBIEE11g

The latest Oracle magazine is out and has an article from one of our favorite groups of folks, RittmanMead: New Oracle Magazine Article on OBIEE11g Map Integration.

PeopleSoft

Were you the first on your block to download IE9 and now you have browser's remorse because of how it display PeopleSoft? This article at the PeopleSoft Tipster may help: PeopleSoft and IE9.

WebCenter

From Andrejus Baranovskis's Blog we have a Practical Guide for Oracle WebCenter PS3 Security Implementation.

SOA Clouds

Some thoughts over at SOA Today on The Essential Cloud Integration Checklist.

PS Infogram This Week: APEX and Exadata, PeopleSoft, Windows, Collaborate, Scheduler, OER, BI, BPEL

APEX and Exadata

Tyler Muth's Blog discusses the particulars of APEX on Exadata: APEX is 57.4x Faster on Exadata.

PeopleSoft

Oracle Announces Oracle’s PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 Feature Pack

Of Windows Memory and Processes

I ran into an issue with Windows memory the other day. There are ways to get some extensions to memory available to apps for Windows, though in some ways they are similar to the old ‘expanded memory’, a smoke and mirror exchange of pieces of memory to make the application seem to have more memory, even though it really is being pulled up behind them and put in front of them like someone laying carpet just in time for their houseguest to step on it. Here is a Microsoft page on /PAE, the key option involved.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366796(v=vs.85).aspx

and here is a very useful set of tools that Microsoft puts out for monitoring all kinds of things in greater detail than the built-in tools: Sysinternals

A long time ago when I was a Windows admin (for Windows 3.0 to NT, if that gives you an idea of how long), I used those Sysinternals tools a lot to track down what was going on with processes, TCP/IP, I/O down to the individual file access level, etc.

Collaborate

Collaborate is going on down in Florida, and I'm not there. But I'm there in spirit, or at least in blog, with this link to CMS Wire posting some key items from Collaborate: Oracle Collaborate Round-up 2011: MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Release

Scheduler

Some wisdom on using the scheduler from Eddie Awad's Blog:
Oracle Scheduler Event-Based Jobs are Useful, Here is a Quick Example.

OER

In our continuing effort to keep our readership up with the latest and greatest in the wide world of Oracle acronyms we come to OER - The Oracle Enterprise Repository. OracleApps Epicenter clarifies the confusion with Oracle Integration Repository (IREP).

GoldenGate

As more and more people work with GoldenGate we are starting to see good technical posts like this one from Gavin Soorma's Oracle DBA-Tips and Techniques blog: Customizing GoldenGate processing using SQLEXEC and GETVAL.

BI

Good hands on advice on a gotcha in BI from The Art of Business Intelligence blog: Hierarchical Columns Require Underlying Level Columns in Presentation Layer

BPEL

Continuing the hands on issues, here is a quick one on Purging BPEL and ESB instances over at the Deltalounge .

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor Check out the PeopleSoft Apps Strategy Blog. This blog is dedicated to topics focused on PeopleSoft Applications, including Human Capital Management, Financials, Enterprise Service Automation, Asset Lifecycle Management, Procurement, Supply Chain and Customer Relationship Management.

Oracle PS Infogram This Week: EBS, Unicode, XE, APEX, RDBMS: I/O

EBS

Denise Arena put together the following excellent set of resources for those upgrading:

Information and Resources: Upgrading from EBS 11i > R12

The R12 Upgrade guide found here, the bible for R12 upgrades.

Other resources that might be of help:

• A monthly advisory web cast is scheduled to help customers who are upgrading or implementing R12 - go to MyOracle Support (MOS) note 738454.1 or click here.
• Recent 2010 OOW has a good .ppt entitled, “Best Practices for Upgrading & Maintaining Oracle eBusiness Suite R12”, refer to MOS note: 1242595.1 for details including video download

Oracle Upgrade to R12 Forum – link here: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=395&start=0

eBusiness Suite R12 document archive: http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/archives12.html

Oracle R12 blog (from Oracle Product & Tech Support gurus): http://blogs.oracle.com/mt/mt-search.cgi?tag=EBS%2012&limit=20

Below is a link to our "Upgrade Advisor" tool developed for EBS on Oracle Support. Upgrade advisors are specially crafted dynamic documents that are intended to guide customers through an upgrade lifecycle using step by step instructions. Link requires MOS access: https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&doctype=REFERENCE&id=250.1

Here is a link to a public blog about upgrading & testing procedures for your EBS upgrade: http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2011/01/testing_ebs_upgrades.html

The 12.1.3 Release Content Document describes all of the changes introduced in a given 12.1.x update. See this externally-published article for a pointer:

• Identifying Data Model Changes Between EBS 12.1.3 and Prior EBS Releases
  http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2011/02/ebs_data_model_1213.html

Planning Your E-Business Suite Upgrade from Release 11i to 12.1 – MOS Doc ID: 987516.1 published in Jan. 2011. Link here: http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2010/03/ebs_121_upgrade_whitepaper.html

This doc. offers best practice advice to customers currently on Release 11i who are planning a Release 12.1 upgrade. IT professionals involved with planning, managing, or running a Release 12.1 upgrade project are the primary audience. This paper combines advice from professionals in Oracle's Support, Consulting, IT, and Development organizations with real-life lessons learned from customers who are already live on Release 12.1. In a nutshell, this paper tells you "things you wished you knew" before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project.

Following a brief overview of the Release 12.1 upgrade value proposition, this paper launches into specific upgrade planning tips to help you:

• Understand the factors that can affect your project's duration
• Decide your project scope, and avoid missteps that can needlessly increase your scope
• Assemble the right project team
• Develop a robust testing strategy
• Upgrade your custom code
• Minimize your upgrade downtime
• Leverage all of the Oracle Support resources that are available to you
• Identify the Oracle tools that can improve your upgrade and maintenance experience
• Become familiar with the full range of Oracle's information resources

Unicode

Any of you who deal with the world of multilingual computing, or for that matter communicate primarily in a multi-byte characterset language, know the joys and tribulations of Unicode and Unicode conversion. Please check out this new tool: Oracle Database Migration Assistant for Unicode.

XE

Tanel Poder lets us know that: Oracle Database XE (Express Edition) 11.2 beta is out!

APEX

Martin Giffy D'Souza's blog announces his new book on APEX: My First Book: Beginning Oracle Application Express 4.

...and for those of you who've been around the block with APEX, another book, this one at John Scott's blog: Expert Oracle Application Express.

MySQL

All our products are perfect. But just in case you want to gripe constructively, The Data Charmer blog provides a link: Make your voice heard. Tell Oracle and the MySQL Council what bugs you

RDBMS: I/O

Studying performance problems involving I/O can sometimes be a bit of a challenge for DBAs since it is often a realm almost totally controlled by another shop, i.e. 'the storage people' (and no, they don't live in bins). This Database Journal article takes a shot at the topic: Oracle 11gR2 I/O Performance Tuning: Implementing I/O Performance Improvements.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Oracle recently announced future desupport for the Itanium architecture. Learn more at Doc ID 13307745.1.