Secure Testimony

Contributions by Sherron Garnett, Infogram Contributor

Secure Testimony

Mary Ann Davidson is the Chief Security Officer of Oracle. She is responsible for securing development practices and security evaluations and assessments. She represents Oracle on the Board of Directors of the Information Technology Information Security Analysis Center (IT-ISAC), and has served on the U.S. Defense Science Board. Read her article Secure Testimony on advising the United States Congress about cybersecurity.

Performance, PeopleSoft, IT Philosophy, Links, Hyperion

Performance

Over at Alberto Dell'Era's blog we have the start of a series on the statistical density of "cardinality" in the CBO.

I wish I could say my math and logic skills were anywhere near close enough to keep up with Cary Milsap, former VP of Oracle for all things performance and originator of the Method R approach to optimization, but they're not. But I still advocate them in principle, if not personal practise, and so recommend this article on the Importance of Diagnosing Before Resolving at his blog.

PeopleSoft

Need to find how many concurrent users there are on PeopleSoft? Here's a handy script at ERP Associates' PeopleSoft Corner.

IT Philosophy

One of keys to solving complex IT problems, especially the tense situations when a key server is down and the fingers are pointing in flocks, is finding a likely cause. That search is often more difficult than it first appears. Let's say the database is down: Call Oracle, right? But what if you go through the steps and it turns out that the DB is fine, but someone wrote over a firewall configuration that didn't include its ports and ... kerfluey. These chains of causation can be lengthy and multifactorial. It is rare to have the opportunity to do full RCA on the matter. The main concern is usually getting the users reconnected, assigning blame, and moving along smartly. But I would ask you to keep the scientific approach always there. A majority of people nodding and saying: Yup, it's the application server, does not necessarily mean that it is the cause of the problem. Logic, not majority sentiment, should always prevail in IT troubleshooting. With that long and tedious preface, please read this item from the adhd ocd blog on nonsense correlations. And for another viewpoint on statistics and the manipulation thereof, have a look at Kosher Visualization over at the I'M JUST A SIMPLE DBA ON A COMPLEX PRODUCTION SYSTEM blog. Want to meet some of the bloggers you read here at the Infogram? Get together with them at Oracle Open World as described in this posting at the same blog, along with a batch of other links of interest.

RDBMS Links

A few handy links in this posting by Eddie Awad, all of interest to the DBA/Developer/Designer types out there. Oh, and 36,000 scripts. For those of you who really need something to do for the next ten years, test them out.

Not Oracle related, more like amusing psychology, but this link at Eddie's blog is fun too.

Hyperion

A good Hyperion posting recently over at Rittman Mead Consulting: Oracle Essbase 11.1.1.3 – Integration with Relational Sources and Applications.

Contributions by Linda Corniola, Infogram Contributor

PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 is GA

PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 is now generally available. Customers can start downloading it from the Electronic Product Delivery (EPD) site now. Physical shipment delivery will be available on October 1.

The upgrade scripts are usually available 6 - 8 weeks after GA. A great site to monitor is PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Documentation Home Page on My Oracle Support Just log into My Oracle Support and search in knowledge for document ID 845867.1

Hyperion, EBS, AIA,, Forms, Performance

Hyperion

A handy posting today over at Tim Tow's Hyperion blog on Running Essbase on an Alternate Port.

EBS

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

Using Transportable Database 11gR1 with E-Business Suite

Database Vault 11.1.0.7 Certified for E-Business Suite on Windows Platforms

Firefox 3.5 Certified with E-Business Suite

AIA

Several valuable postings at the Official AIA Blog, including this one on AIA 2.0.1 and MLR # 18

Forms

Using Forms? There's a link to a webcast on Web cast with Oracle Forms Support Experts coming up on October 7th at OTN over at Grant's Blog.

Performance

Jonathan Lewis has been one of the leading lights of Oracle performance for as long as I've been involved in it. His blog is always worth a look. For instance this posting with links to forum posts on processes. Is it really a good idea to use the overkill approach and allocate lots of processes up front 'just in case'.

General Availability (GA) of PeopleTools 8.50

Contributed by Linda Corniola, Infogram Contributor


General Availability (GA) of PeopleTools 8.50

We are pleased to announce the general availability of PeopleTools 8.50. This release is important to Oracle and PeopleSoft customers since it demonstrates Oracle's commitment to the PeopleSoft product family and continuing to provide significant enhancements to these products. The new PeopleTools features and capabilities have created more customer excitement than we have seen in years. Since this release is available to customers running all of the recent PeopleSoft applications (eg. 8.8, 8.9 and 9.0) and is the foundation to the 9.1 applications, we are sure to see rapid and enthusiastic adoption of PeopleTools 8.50.

PeopleTools 8.50 is now available for download through Oracle Electronic Product Delivery and the Oracle Store. Check EPD for specific platform downloads, which are updated regularly.

Reference Material
To review additional documentation for the 8.50 release, please visit My Oracle Support at https://support.oracle.com/. Search for Doc ID: 847882.1. This document includes all documents related to the 8.50 release: release notes, install guide, cumulative overview, data sheets, links to the 8.50 PeopleBooks, technical certifications, etc.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Hard to believe it, but Oracle Open World is almost here. Oracle TechNet is sponsoring a wide array of activities. Learn more at:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/events/oracle-openworld/index.html

Exadata, Hyperion, EBS, APEX, AIA, Performance

Exadata

Interested in Exadata? If you are running an enterprise scale RDBMS you really should investigate it. Kevin Closson has a link to a good white paper to help you along your way:

Fresh Oracle White Paper Covering Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Server and Database Machine

Hyperion

You've seen a lot of links here to the Look Smarter Than You Are blog, and here's another one. They have their book out, and it's available in all forms on Amazaon (yes, including on the Kindle!):

Essbase 11 and Smart View Books On Amazon Kindle

Amazon Printed and On-Line

EBS

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

Six Options for Getting Help for E-Business Suite Issues

APEX

APEX is one of Oracle's best products. I don't feel it gets the publicity it deserves, but it's out there, day after day, plugging away, running a formidable amount of online apps. Tom Kyte was one of the early adopters and advocates of APEX, and has an interesting under the covers article on the move of his AskTom site from a conventional RDBMS (with him as DBA) to running completely on APEX.

Did you take part in the APEX Developer Competition for 2009? David Peake has the results here.

AIA

Another of the phalanx of new and/or newish products at Oracle is AIA. I have deep knowledge of AIA, or at least enough depth to recognize the acronym as one of our products. Any product that can discuss interoperability between PIPs with a straight face, as this one does over at the official AIA blog, is a cool product.

Performance

Great news in the realm of performance blogs! James Morle, Oak Table Net member and author of one of the best performance books back in the 8i days, has started a blog. Here are links to the first couple of postings:

Spotting the Red Flags (Part 1 of n)

Forget I/O Bound, You’re Latency Bound, Bub