Oracle Priority Service Infogram for 29-FEB-2012

Performance

Charles Hooper's Oracle Notes gets down to brass tacks about indexes, myths and legends that have accrued around indexes, and calls for experimenting and thinking, both of which are practises DBAs should engage in as often as time permits (I know you don't get time to think on most production systems, but such is life): Interesting Index “Facts” – What is Wrong with these Quotes?



At the Oracle Scratchpad blog, Jonathan Lewis takes up the topic of Not In, again: Not In - 2.

Timur Akhmadeev's blog goes into some depth on the Load profile section of Statspack and AWR reports.

Web Utilities

bex huff brings us a tool that no one would have understood twenty years ago. They found that some of the URLs generated for Oracle patches are too long to fit in Twitter and came up with a URL shortener. I can just imagine how the conversation would have gone about this before the web:

Fred: "I invented an URL shortener."
Tom: "What the heck did Earl ever do to you to make him want to shorten him? He's short enough already!"

SOA

A great posting over at Chris Warticki's Blog - Oracle Support on SOA Support Resources.

SOA@Oracle SCA, BPEL, BPM & Service Bus announces that Oracle Fusion Middleware PS5 is out.

Exadata

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control has a posting called: Oracle Exadata Management — Diary of an Exadata DBA. I'm just glad it's not 'confessions of an Exadata DBA.'

Hyperion

The Enterprise Performance Management Blog takes the long view of things in this posting: Hyperion Enterprise Customers - Moving Forward..

PeopleSoft

The PeopleSoft Technology Blog lets us know the PeopleSoft Portal Solutions Multi-Language Media Pack is Available.



Social Networking

What is antisocial networking, anyway? Oh, I remember. It's called international diplomacy. Anyway, AppsLab has a good posting on the Oracle Social Network: Well Hello There, Oracle Social Network Videos


Endeca

Rittman Mead Consulting takes a look at Oracle Endeca Week : What is the Endeca MDEX Engine?

History of Technology

The 40s were a time of horrible historical events and coming up with brilliant technological solutions to deal with them. This interview with historian George Dyson at Wired is well worth a read.as his upcoming book Turing's Cathedral probably will be.

Oracle Priority Service Infogram for 22-FEB-2012

Social Networks

Have you checked out Oracle Mix lately? It's a good place to learn about Oracle as well as making your voice heard.

VM

Oracle's Virtualization Blog discusses Implementing Secure Live Migration with Oracle VM Server for SPARC.

Coming up on March 6th: Top 10 Tips to Accelerate Oracle VM Deployments.

New Releases

OBIEE 11.1.1.6 Now Available for Download – Release Highlights

Oracle APEX 4.1.1 Patch Set released!

Siebel Reports Guide, Version 8.1 [ID 1110636.1]
Support Policies

The riddle of the Sphinx in Greek mythology was "What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?" Oedipus gave the correct answer: man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age. Although Oedipus encountered some really nasty problems later, he won this round with the Sphinx, who destroyed itself when faced with a correct answer. 

Programs don't have legs, and they just plain get old. As they do, the available support changes. You can find out more about the stages of the process here, and it's a good idea to check in once in a while to find out the latest, since policies change over the years: LIFETIME SUPPORT STAGES.

Working in a Data Warehouse

It's pretty rare that we post jobs here at the Infogram (in fact I think this is a first). But when an Oracle blog that has been a consistent favorite for technical wisdom on data warehousing is looking to hire I'm happy to pass it along.

And while you are preparing for your interview you can read their latest technical article: Sizing for data volume or performance or both?

Fusion

The folks over at A-Team - Exalogic and Cloud Application Foundation introduce us to the wonderful open source world of ThreadLogic.

EBS

The Oracle E-Business Suite Communities Blog points the way to a very valuable note: Doc ID 1400757.1: How to Find E-Business Suite Recommended Patches. 

Book Announcement

Fair notice, I haven't read this book, but here's the announcement for you to evaluate over at the SOA Community Blog: Service Bus 11g Development Cookbook.

Performance

Over at the Oracle related stuff blog there was a (fairly) recent blog on Nice Additions For Troubleshooting that discusses the V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY view.

Cary Milsap, one of the deities of the Oracle performance world, is presenting a one-day course on Mastering Oracle Trace Data in May. 


YMSTR (Yet More Stuff To Read)

Finally, here are a few items from Eddie Awad to peruse: Ten Interesting Things You May Have Missed This Week.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Learn more about the future of My Oracle Support. Check out a 3-minute video on "Improving Your Online Support Experience" by Dennis Reno, VP, Customer Portal Experience.

Oracle Priority Service Infogram for 15-FEB-2012

GoldenGate

The Data Integration blog discusses better life through GoldenGate: Eliminating Batch Windows Using Real-Time Data Integration.

Performance and Internals

Jonathan Lewis continues variations on a theme: Subquery Factoring.

Hemant's Oracle DBA Blog asks the question from the ancient public service spot: It's ten o'clock, do you know how many child cursors CURSOR_SHARING FORCE has spawned while you weren't looking: CURSOR_SHARING FORCE and Child Cursors.

A talk on Exadata Performance Best Practices as tweeted by @myoraclesupport. 

Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog goes through some of the factors involved in: Slow querying of DBA_EXTENTS, DBA_FREE_SPACE and dropping tables.

MySQL

Check out MySQL web seminars: What's New in MySQL Cluster 7.2 .

Also in the realm of MySQL:

MySQL Connector/Net 6.5.2 RC has been released 

Migration and Patching

The Isaac Rozenfeld's musings blog points out a newly posted white paper on SPARC Live Migration, with an Oracle Database as an example.
https://blogs.oracle.com/unixman/entry/db_live_migration

Upgrade your Database - NOW! asks a question often posed by our customers: Why is every patchset now a full release?

PeopleSoft

One of our top Support Account Managers recommends this brief overview video on PeopleSoft continuous delivery feature packs.

Identity Management

The Identity Management blog makes The Case for Replacing Novell/NetIQ Identity.

Certification

Working on your Oracle certification? There are several competing products out there to help you prepare. orawin.info reviews Ucertify's OCA Oracle Deatabase 11g: Administration 1 exam.

Jobs and IT

A couple of items here. First let's say you're a programmer. This article tweeted by Eddie Awad is about jobs to avoid: 8 Questions To Identify A Lame Programming Job.

But what if you are already working in an Office Space company? (Office Space is the THE classic movie on the hell of being a junior IT person in a badly run company.) If you find that your workplace is at the intersection of Office Space and Dilbert you may want to move to being a DBA or Sysadmin. It sounds like being a Linux admin might be have the most prospects at the moment since they are much in demand: Need a Job? Learn Linux.

Mobile Computing

This is one of my pet peeves, so I thought I'd share it. Oracle AppsLab tweeted this article at Technology Review: All Web Developers Should Stop Doing This Immediately. I absolutely hate being shifted from the open web to somebody's 'me-too' app that let's you see a poorly designed magazine/newpaper/feed instead of using Safari or one of the other good mobile browsers. Even more annoying are those lovely 'mobililized' swipe me pages that use iOS page switching and think that compensates for locking the font size to something unreadably small. If you're going to do that, at least put a big button at the top that says: 'Load regular, non-helpful version that I can open in reader in Safari and actually read.'

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

A message from Dennis Reno, VP, Oracle Customer Portal Experience
Over the weekend of January 27-29, 2012, we upgraded My Oracle Support’s HTML-based user interface (UI) to a new one built using Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF). I’m pleased to welcome you to the new user interface, which will help provide our My Oracle Support HTML-based users more streamlined access to support information and services.

I encourage you to access the below resources for additional information regarding the new My Oracle Support UI:

The New My Oracle Support User Interface Web Page (Article ID 1385682.1)—Find up-to-date information on the new My Oracle Support UI and access the video series designed to take you through My Oracle Support’s features and functionality using the new UI.

Although the supporthtml.oracle.com web address and your My Oracle Support username and password remain unchanged, there are some changes to the list of browsers that are supported by the new UI. For example, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is no longer supported on supporthtml.oracle.com; you can visit “The New My Oracle Support User Interface” web page noted above for a list of supported browsers. Please note that you can still use IE6 on the Flash-based UI at support.oracle.com.In the coming months, we plan to also transition users of the current Flash-based UI to the new HTML-based My Oracle Support UI. We plan to release additional enhancements to the new UI during the time leading up to this transition to help ensure that Flash-based users have access to similar My Oracle Support functionality that they use today.

If you have any questions or feedback, please log into My Oracle Support and use the “Contact Us” link located in the upper right hand corner.We appreciate your continued feedback, as we work to improve your online support experience.

Sincerely,
Dennis RenoVP, Customer Portal ExperienceOracle Support

Oracle Priority Service Infogram for 08-FEB-2012

Cloud Computing

The Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control blog informs us that Cloud Management documentation has been enhanced and released.

The Oracle Enterprise Manager blog tells us about Delivering Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c.
 

RDBMS

Rulegen dives into some of the mechanics of how triggers fire during a merge: Statement-level constraint validation: MERGE + MTI.

Over at Triggers Considered Harmful, Considered Harmful is a posting on Where TK agrees with TK (or: why are triggers harmful). So between the title of the article and the title of the blog, figuring out what I should think of triggers makes me wish I paid more attention in algebra class so I could parse the whole thing out.
 

SQL Developer

SQL Developer 3.1 production is now available.   

SQL Developer on OTN

...and the That Jeff Smith blog provides you with Your Guide to New Features in Oracle SQL Developer version 3.1.

SOA

The A-Team - SOA (didn't they have a TV show?) are pleased to announce that the SOA 11G Database Growth Management Strategy white paper (the 'purging' whitepaper) is now available.

Trace

We don’t usually share links that involve buying things (at least not things we don’t sell. But Cary Milsap recommends this site/product in a Tweet. If you can’t trust Cary Milsap, who can you trust? get your traces - yourself at berxblog.

PeopleSoft and MOS 

Sometimes it's hard to find the patches you need in MOS. Here's a document to assist on PeopleSoft patches in particular: Searching using the Certifications Application.

 Oracle Support

The Proactive Support EPM and BI blog has a pointer to a good note on Hot Topics on MOS and patches.

Performance

Jonathan Lewis has his new book out: Oracle Core: Essential Internals for DBAs and Developers.

At his blog this week there is an engaging experiment in Index naming.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Big Data Online Forum - Big Data Essentials: What You Need to Know

Date: Thursday, February 16, 2012 Time: 10:00 a.m. PT – 1:30 p.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET – 4:30 p.m. ET

Big data is big news these days. But you don’t base IT investment decisions on magazine headlines. Join us for the Big Data Online Forum to learn the essentials of big data – from the technology underlying it to real-world use cases. Oracle Senior Technical Architect Tom Kyte, Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, and other industry thought leaders will be on hand to explain how big data can deliver revolutionary insight and competitive advantage. You’ll get answers to tough questions surrounding big data, including:

What business insight can big data uncover?
How do you manage big data?
How do you integrate big data and decision-making?

Register Here

Oracle Priority Service Infogram for 01-FEB-2012

Important Security Announcement

Oracle Security Alert for CVE-2011-5035 was released on January 31st, 2012.

Oracle strongly recommends applying Security Alert fixes as soon as possible.

The Security Alert Advisory is the starting point for relevant information. It includes the list of products affected, a summary of the security vulnerability, and a pointer to obtain the latest patches. Supported products that are not listed in the "Affected Products and Versions" section of the advisory do not require new patches to be applied.

Also, it is essential to review the Security Alert supporting documentation referenced in the Advisory before applying patches, as this is where you can find important pertinent information.

The Advisory is available at the following location:

Oracle Critical Patch Updates and Security Alerts

Oracle Security Alert CVE-2011-5035
 

MySQL

MySQL storage engines confusing you? You're probably not alone. Hopefully this spot the MySQL team tweeted from the documentation will clear up the fog between the NDB and InnoDB engines: 16.1.5.1. Differences Between the NDB and InnoDB Storage Engines.

Migrations

No, not geese, systems. The Reckless Logic blog points out a posting at Technet on How Dell Migrated 1700 Servers to Oracle Linux.

Performance

Jonathan Lewis shows us how evaluating bug documentation can produce more than just keeping up with bugs in this posting on Subquery Factoring.

RAC

The Oracle Instructor looks into how to Monitor RAC I/O with gv$iostat_function.

RDBMS

The AskDba.org Weblog promises to keep adding to this posting as they discover new problems, which makes it worth following on your RSS reader. They discuss 11gR2:Listener Startup Issues, giving us the first three problem causers to check for if you have problems bringing up the listener.

The Rulegen blog relates some interesting investigations they made on Statement-level constraint validation: MERGE + MTI while working on their product.

EMC and Oracle

Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage has a very good resource to share: EMC Oracle-Related Reading Material of Interest.