Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Get Proactive!
The "Get Proactive!" initiative provides guidance related to three important customer objectives:


• Prevent: Maintain optimal system health and performance and prevent known problems from impacting operations.

• Resolve: Rapidly identify and resolve issues to minimize or negate downtime and free up resources for critical projects.

• Upgrade: Remove risk and time from the upgrade process, enabling cost savings and faster adoption of new product capabilities.

This is a FREE program available to Oracle Support customers and consists of live and recorded presentations for customers.
More information on Get Proactive! is available at the following links:

http://www.oracle.com/us/support/best-practices/overview/index.html
https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&id=432.1

Oracle Priority Support Infogram for 25-JUL-2012

Performance

From the Oracle at Delphix, some good material on the optimizer: NFS versus dNFS.

Tanel Poder tweeted a white paper that’s a bit long in tooth, but if Tanel says it is a great source of info on Understanding Shared Pool Memory Structures I take him at his word.

At Upgrade your Database - NOW! a very useful posting on: How to select statements from AWR?

Support

Eddie Awad reminded everyone in a tweet that the My Oracle Support blog has a good article on the MOS 6.2 (KM) Release.

Chris Warticki, no stranger to tweeting, pointed out this: Diagnostic Assistant v1.3 now available provides a common interface to (ADR, RDA, OCM, Explorer).

Apache

I know when I was a DBA Apache always seemed a bit confusing. Eddie Awad tweeted a good guide to clear the fog: An Introduction to Apache.

VM

Wim Coekaerts Blog brings us the Oracle VM VirtualBox virtual appliance images for Oracle VM 3.1.1 server and Manager.

Oracle Linux

From OTN: How I Got Started With The Btrfs File System for Oracle Linux.

EBS

From the ORAERP.COM - Blogs : From the E-Business Suite 12.2 – Online Patching Cycle.

MySQL

InnoDB kernel_mutex Contention and Memory Allocators from JamesGolick.com.

And from Oracle corporate, an announcement of interest to techies: Oracle Unveils Migration Tool for Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL.

It’s a good week to read about MySQL (free login required to access): Guide to Optimizing Performance of the MySQL Cluster Database.

And Everything Else You Need to Know Is At….

Pythian’s Log Buffer #278, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Oracle Real Application Testing
Oracle Real Application Testing combined with Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition allows businesses to quickly adopt new technologies while eliminating the risks associated with change. It helps you fine tune changes before putting them into production.  Learn more here.

Oracle Priority Support Infogram for 17-JUL-2012

Security

The recent data breach at Yahoo was another reminder that we need to keep our guard up and be creative about our passwords to keep ahead of the bad guys. There’s an article on it at c|net: Yahoo breach: Swiped passwords by the numbers

OBIEE

Navigating to BI Content in OBIEE11g and Passing Multiple Parameters at Rittman Mead's blog.

New Stuff

Brand new Oracle Tuxedo 12c in a posting at Tuxedo Tidbits.

The Latest Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise 11g Update Patch For BI Publisher Enterprise 11.1.1.6.0 at MOS.

From YABAOAE: APEX 4.2 EA2 coming, APEX 4.2 EA1 going away.

SQL

The Oracle Scratchpad explores the exotic world of ANSI SQL: ANSI Outer 2.

Performance

At A Wider View, Hard Parsing is Bad! ...But How Bad? And Craig Shallahamer proceeds to show us. In Technicolor, even.

RDBMS

Live Webcast: Reducing Database Testing Efforts While Maximizing ROI coming up on August 8th.

MySQL

At Rajiv's blog: Scaling lessons learned at Dropbox, part 1

And from MacLochlainns Weblog: PHP for MySQL Striped View.

Take the Survey

Oracle and Intel are sponsoring a survey on database management.

ERP

The ORAERP blog had an interesting post to offer: E-Business Suite 12.2 – Online Patching Cycle.

...And Finally

Cubegeek links to an interesting and entertaining RSA Animate on trees vs. nets.

Which got me thinking about how that relates to ancient Chinese metaphysics, for instance the tree form of Yi Jing figures shown here.

And of some hints at how a tree can be transformed into an interconnected net based on the works of the great Chinese scholar Shao Yong.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Accessing PeopleSoft Patches
My Oracle Support has changed the way PeopleSoft customers search and access patches.  Check out Note:1465172.1 for the details.

Oracle Priority Service Infogram for 11-JUL-2012

Support

As Chris Warticki's Blog - Oracle Support puts it: MOS Flash Going Bye-Bye...Welcome MOS HTML(ADF). Also of note from Chris this week: Three Fusion Applications Communities are Now Live.

And from the My Oracle Support tweet-stream: Get familiar with Siebel CRM Community.

WebCenter

Kyle's Blog on WebCenter Content brings us another good item: Adjusting the Score on Oracle Text search results.

PeopleSoft

PeopleSoft Customers Receive Updates & Fixes and Update Gateway Retirement Notification

As part of the My Oracle Support upgrade that is currently planned for July 13, 2012, PeopleSoft patches will migrate to My Oracle Support. Please see this note for details: Knowledge article 1465172.1.

RDBMS

At Technet: Case Study: How We Improved SAN and NAS Performance with Oracle Database Hybrid Columnar Compression.

I would have titled it: 'Just give us five minutes alone with your data and a huge hammer and we will achieve meaningful compression.' But that's probably why I'm the editor of the Infogram, and not of Technet. 

At the Hans Forbrich Blog, a back to basics article on roles that, as it says, is worth repeating: DB Roles - it's worth repeating ...

Big Data

The Data Warehouse Insider links to a new white paper: Big Data Connectors White Paper.

Also at the Insider: Big Data Videos.

Performance

Our secret plan to seed the world with chaos, one plan at a time. Alas, revealed by Jonathan Lewis at Oracle Scratchpad: Random Plans.

This looks to be an interesting script as tweeted by Timur Akhmadeev: Stats compare: Oracle session statistics improved!

And at Oracle related stuff: Forced Cursor Sharing And Virtual Columns.

Agile Development

Eddie Awad tweeted a good article defining Agile Development: The Principles of Agile Development.

Definitions vary. Mine for instance is:

Agile Development: Diving under a desk without bumping your head when the customer hears that you are pushing back the release date again and throws a coffee cup at you.

Demantra

From the Oracle Demantra blog a posting on an interesting use of Demantra's data loading: Data Loading Issues? Try the new Demantra Data Load Guided Resolution.

Opinion

At the Oracle Musings blog: Hate the player, not the game — or my case for Data Engineers.

…And Finally

Unprecedented’ discovery could propel quantum computers to reality. 

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

PeopleSoft Newsletters
Did you know that there are several newsletters for PeopleSoft products?  Check out the following notes for great information concerning PeopleSoft:

     Note:1469840.1 PeopleTools Support Newsletter
     Note:1461918.1 PeopleSoft Receivables and Billing
     Note:1470232.1 PeopleSoft Advanced Benefits

Oracle Priority Service Infogram for 03-JUL-2012

RDBMS and RAC

You can't beat the accuracy of this article title: Using Physical Standby with transient Logical Standby (SQL Apply) for near zero downtime upgrade of two node Oracle RAC database from 11.2.0.2 to 11.2.0.3.

And if you are even one digit off, the whole thing is a no-go. Well, on the other hand, I'm betting you can find some good content on the principle of the matter in there as well. It's from Guenadi N Jilevski's Oracle BLOG.

Also in the realm of the DB, one of our favorite blogs here at the Infogram, the Upgrade your Database - NOW! blog, posted an informative article on some of the foibles of the Data Pump: Data Pump: Consistent Export?

PeopleSoft

Over at the PeopleSoft Technology Blog there's a pointer to resources (actually a renaming of a resource, but with some very nice additions): Introducing the PeopleSoft Interaction Hub.

Performance

I don’t think I’ve ever linked to the Databases and Performance blog, and I’m not sure why. This article called All Outer Joins Are Not Equal certainly seems interesting.

OBIEE

A down to hard tacks, blow by blow on the new OBIEE from RittmanMead: OBIEE 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 : New Features, Oracle BI Mobile HD, and Patching & Upgrade Considerations.

APEX

I like the YA genre. Adding 'Yet Another' is still managing to be amusing through the years, like the numinous term 'I like pie' (many mathematical types write it as I like Pi, but that's just silly). So here is some recent good news from the (YABAOAE) Yet Another Blog About Oracle Application Express: Application Express 4.2 Early Adopter 1 available.

WebCenter

Speaking of resources, here's a pointer to some goodies for WebCenter from the Oracle WebCenter Alerts blog: WebCenter Content Technical Resources.

Applications

We in Oracle Support love Oracle Consulting. We have a friendly rivalry more or less akin to those between the Greek and Persian empires of antiquity or the Hatfields and McCoys of more recent television fame. And I still can't resist linking to the My Consulting Experience blog for a discussion of how to create a Custom Key Flexfield (KFF) in Oracle Applications.

Mobile Computing

An op-ed piece from someone at the curiously named iHeavy, Inc +1-212-533-6828 blog who has tried both side of the Apple/Android fence: Why The Android Ecosystem is Broken.

It seems in computing, as often in history, one has to find a middle ground between freedom and security, but reality tends to go one way or the other with no middle ground.

…And Finally

More sad but true wisdom from the Mock Sage of Central Asia's cousin in IT:

“Every of devops team is have at least 3 shell script which is critical and is not in source control or backup.”

Tweeted by Devops Borat

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

New My Oracle Support Interface
On July 13th, My Oracle Support will be discontinuing the flash based interface.  Learn more about the new features of the HTML version in Note:1385682.1.  It contains links to online training classes for the new release.