Oracle Priority Service Infogram for 31-AUG-2011

PeopleSoft

A quick rundown on security at PSoftPros: An Introduction to PeopleSoft Security

Bored with your PeopleSoft GUI? Here's a posting at the PeopleSoft Technology Blog on getting some excitement in there (well, other than having it offer a 'give me a raise' button, that is): Creating a Great User Experience in PeopleSoft.

And an official, suitable for framing press release on some of the new features: Oracle Updates Oracle’s PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 with the Release of New Features.

CRM OD

Speaking of releases, from NEWSBYTES: Oracle rolls out latest version of on-demand CRM .

Indexing

Invisible indexes are a really splendid 11g feature, something you had to spend a whole lot of money to do using a third party app in past versions, and I wanted to make sure our customers explored it. It's a form of conditional index you can use in delicate situations (like performance problems on prod). From Yet another DBA blog: Invisible Indexes in Oracle 11g.

Richard Foote wrote up a nice demo of Jonathan Lewis' article on BLEVEL 1 => BLEVEL 2. Just the kind of hands on, techie approach that wins the day.

WLS

Into each life, a little rain must fall, sometimes in the form of a service failing. Middleware Magig discusses: Managing Failure Conditions in a WebLogic Environment.

Backup and Storage

A new whitepaper out there: Creating a Hierarchical Database Backup System using Oracle RMAN and Oracle SAM QFS with the Sun ZFS Storage Appliance.

APEX

APEX 4.1. Come and get it: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/apex/downloads/index.html

Data Masking

Data masking can be invaluable. There's no better model of production than production. But often you can't use it because of the sensitive data. Good data masking can preserve the 'shape' of the data while sanitizing content. Read about it at the Oracle Enterprise Manager blog: Overview demo of Oracle Data Masking solution - Safely use production data for development, testing and sharing with partners.

EBS

This week at the Oracle E-Business Technology blog:

WebCast Replay Available: Tuning All Layers of EBS (Part 1)

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 now Certified on AIX 7

New Rapid Install StartCD (12.1.1.13) for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Now Available

and a couple from the blog that one of our ACS SDMs found particularly valuable:

Two Essential Tools for Diagnosing E-Business Suite Network Issues (Oracle

E-Business Suite Technology)

New Whitepaper: Symmetrical Network Acceleration with EBS 12 (Oracle

E-Business Suite Technology)

E-Business Suite ATG Advisor Webcast

E-Business Suite - RAC & Parallel Concurrent Processing (PCP)
· Overview of RAC
· Overview of Parallel Concurrent processing
· PCP with RAC: How it works
· Configuration
· Failover/failback scenarios and examples
· Common Issues and troubleshooting

Session Details:
EMEA / APAC session:
Tuesday, 13-September-2011 at 10:00 am CET, 01:30 pm India, 05:00 pm Japan, 07:00 pm Australia (Sydney)

US session:
Wednesday, 14-September-2011 at at 17:00 UK / 18:00 CET / 09:00 am Pacific / 10:00 am Mountain / 12:00 Eastern
For Registration- and Dial-In Details, please log in to My Oracle Support to see Note 1342343.1

For any other Advisor Webcast scheduled for the Applications Technology Group of the E-Business Suite, please check Note 1186338.1.

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

High Availability Best Practices
Oracle has released a new whitepaper on HA Best Practices for RDBMS 11g R2. It is a comprehensive document with in depth technical information on how to get the most out of your HA environment. Check it out at: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/focus-areas/availability/ha-best-practices-112-452463.pdf

Oracle Priority Service Infogram for 24-AUG-2011

WLS

Online Apps DBA gives other Oracle users a heads up on something they encountered: WebLogic Startup fails with Unable to obtain lock on Server may already be running.

RDBMS Performance

Craig Shallahamer, an author of many articles and books on Oracle performance over the years, posts this article at his A W i d e r V i e w blog: Why tuning oracle works and modeling it. Give it a read and tell Craig your thoughts.

Always one of the joys of performance (well, for engineers, anyway), trace files come in many flavors. the Structured Data blog gives us a new angle: Creating Optimizer Trace Files.

Computing and the Future

Ok, so it wasn't in our labs, but this is seriously cool: IBM unveils chips that mimic the human brain

JDeveloper

Shay Shmeltzer's Weblog has a few semi-sneaky tricks in the realm of Java Class and UML Modeling with JDeveloper. Did you know that many people never do a full, proper design process the way we did in the 'good old days'? I am shocked.

GoldenGate

The Oracle DBA – Tips and Techniques blog posted a useful method for GoldenGate users: Using the GoldenGate column conversion functions - CASE and EVAL.

Exadata

Martin's Blog is subtitled 'Another Oracle DBA blog'. I like that, though I probably would have used YAODB (Yet another...). It seems a very useful part of the crowded field, though. Here's a link to Martin's article on Essential tools for Exadata performance experiments.

ECM

Oracle WebCenter Content Alerts blog lets us know that the next quarterly customer update is rolling around soon.

EBS

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

Reminder: ATG Live Webcast Aug 24: Tuning All Layers of E-Business Suite (Part 1)

Managing EBS 12 Physical Standby Databases with Oracle Data Guard Broker

ATG Live Webcast: Tuning All Layers of E-Business Suite

Hyperion

The Cubegeek discusses Attribute Drilling and In 2 Hyperion fills us in on: How to Maximize Excel by Using Customer Functions.

Book Reviews

Charles Hooper brings us a very detailed review on the new edition of Beginning Oracle SQL at his Charles Hooper's Oracle Notes blog.

Also of interest is this review of Oracle on Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud over at the One Size Doesn't Fit All blog.

Oracle Supply Chain News

Supply Chain Best Practices at Oracle OpenWorld 2011
Oracle senior vice president Rick Jewell outlines the overall direction for Oracle supply chain management strategies in a keynote session at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 on Monday, October 3. Additional sessions focus on key business issues and solutions for manufacturing companies in today's uncertain business environment, along with supply chain best practices in complex global business environments.
Read More

Oracle Slated to Introduce New Electronic Kanban Capabilities
Oracle is expected to announce that new electronic Kanban, or eKanban, features will be included in an upcoming version of Oracle E-Business Suite designed to improve the flow of resources in manufacturing operations.
Read More

New Safeguards Protect Workers in Hazardous Areas
An upcoming release of Oracle Enterprise Asset Management is slated to include additional controls for protecting maintenance and technical workers against accidents in hazardous environments.
Read More

Contributions by Angela Golla, Infogram Contributor

Advisory Webcast: Making EBS Upgrade From 11.5.10 Easier
A successful upgrade requires careful planning, correct upgrade processing, detailed testing, and user (re)training prior to upgrade. There are a number of tools available via My Oracle Support and as part of the E-Business Suite product offerings to assist customers in a successful upgrade. To learn more about these tools and how to use them, join us for a two part webcast series, Making The EBS Upgrade from 11.5.10 Easier available at Note:1342291.1. The first webcast will be on September 8, 2011 at 8:00 a.m. Pacific.

TOPICS WILL INCLUDE:
Overview of Tools Available for Upgrading
Upgrade Community
Upgrade Product Information Center Page
Detailed Look at Upgrade Advisors
Detailed Look at Patching and Maintenance Advisor

Oracle Priority Service Infogram for 17-AUG-2011

PeopleSoft

Over at the PeopleSoft Technology Blog this week there's a peek into the future: Related Content Framework--Great Things Happening.

Enterprise Computing

A couple of interesting posts from Kevin Closson of late, both of them looking back at the past while keeping up with the cutting edge of high powered systems of today:

File Systems For A Database? Choose One That Couples Direct I/O and Concurrent I/O. What’s This Have To Do With NFS? Harken Back 5.2 Years To Find Out.

and

Facebook Adopts Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Replaces Tens Of Thousands Of Servers. Memorable Conference Keynote Addresses.

EBS

At In Depth Apps - Oracle eBusiness Suite - Gareth Roberts we have some useful material on how to Track and Trace E-Business Suite Concurrent Request - EBS Logs, O/S Process IDs, Locks.

Over at the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog this week:

Sun JRE 1.6.0_27 Certified with Oracle E-Business Suite

Security

An overview of Oracle Audit Vault over at OracleApps Epicenter.

Performance (and how to maintain it, and your sanity)

Over at Coskan's Approach to Oracle there a really nice technical rundown on what can happen to your I/O when you move from 10.2 to 11.2 without enough of the right kind of testing: What happens, when you did not do a load test before release upgrades ?. The I/O display is a colorful picture, but pretty only in a very abstract sense. If it's your system, it's not pretty at all. And it's loud, with all those application managers and directors yelling at your over the phone and around your desk. Take home lesson: You can get some great improvements from upgrading the RDBMS, but you can also produce some really bad short term situations. Please test thoroughly! And yes, this may require a battle with some of the other divisions in your company, but if you can get across to them that it is precisely their interests at risk, they may wise up and give you the time and resources you need.

SOA

Okay, I don't know a whole lot about SOA, but the folks at A-Team - SOA sure do, and they want to tell us about Coherence in SOA Suite 11g.

Oracle Support

An outstanding listing of self-help (and help us help you) resources at Chris Warticki's Blog - Oracle Support: 8 Habits of Highly Effective Oracle Support Users.

OOW

Structured Data has a run down on: Sessions By OakTable Members.

RDBMS

Some interesting material over at a blog I haven't posted from before: iMERGE Group : Bhavik Fuletra : (OCE)

Oracle 11g Release 2: CTSS and NTP Service

Oracle 11g Release 2: ASM Intelligent Data Placement (IDP)

RDBMS Class

Education is expensive, but Stanford seems to be giving away a valuable course for techies for free: Introduction to Databases. I particularly recommend this kind of course for non-DBAs. Application developers often don't understand what the DB is capable of and try to stuff all the functions into the code, to the determinent of both. If they understand the logic of the relational model, etc., they can design and write better code.

Links to Links

Finally this week a link to Log Buffer #233, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs, a blog with a similar links to the links format as the Infogram.