The Triora Group

It seems that in every organization we work with that there are always as many people/organizational challenges as there are technical challenges. Often when doing assessments we find that there are organization problems that have contributed to the situation. Sometimes different departments don’t communicate well with each other and tasks fall through the cracks. Or maybe there is a lot of distrust between groups and the tend to compete with each other rather than collaborate. It seems we must tackle both to some degree if we hope to have better effectiveness.

Several years ago I was working in non-profit organization and this issue of improving team productivity became a big topic. How could we improve the way the various departments and teams worked together? How could we reduce the amount of friction and distrust that tends to build up over time?

We were fortunate to have a facilitator introduce us to a book from Patrick Lencioni, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”. Lencioni works with all types of organizations to improve productivity and he has summarized the issues that need to be addressed before organizations can improve their results.

The five dysfunctions he identifies are built one on top of the other. The first dysfunction that must be dealt with is LACK OF TRUST. Trust means that the team members have confidence that their team members intentions are good and that honest communication is ok. Teams without LACK OF TRUST don’t ask for help, hide their problems, jump to conclusions, waste time, hold grudges and have unproductive meetings. To build TRUST requires management involvement to help break down barriers between groups and create honest communication. The book provides recommendations on how this is done.

The next dysfunction is FEAR OF CONFLICT. All great working relationships inevitably require some conflict because of differing opinions. Teams that avoid conflict at all costs or those that are the opposite and are always involved in conflict are usually unproductive. Certain conflict in meetings is healthy and needed to find the best solution and get everyone’s input. If your teams have a FEAR OF CONFLICT, they will have boring meetings, use back-channel politics/personal attacks, ignore controversial topics and spend a lot of time posturing.

The next three dysfunctions of teams that Lencioni discusses include LACK OF COMMITMENT, AVOIDANCE OF ACCOUNTABILITY and INATTENTION TO RESULTS. As a team or organization builds trust, becomes comfortable with conflict, rebuilds commitment, encourages accountability and attends to the results then its productivity exceeds that of its competitors.

Since almost all of us work in teams to complete projects, it’s important to understand the dynamics within the team and work to avoid these types of dysfunctional team behavior. Just being able to identify the behaviors can help to work through them before the team productivity is impacted.

Lencioni has written several other interesting books on leadership and how to conduct good meetings. I encourage you to check them out. As I said at the beginning, the organizational issues can often be more difficult to address than the technical issues, but you can’t separate them. Teams that have strong trust inevitably perform more effectively and have more camaraderie. Who wouldn’t want that type of environment all of the time?

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Since its introduction in July 2005, 10gR2 has become the database version of choice for many E-Business Suite environments. Originally released as 10.2.0.1 it has been regularly enhanced with new patches to 10.2.0.3. In the last several weeks, the third patch set was released for 10gR2, raising its current version to 10.2.0.4.

Oracle Database 10gR2 is eligible for Oracle Premier support through July 2010 and eligible for Extended support through July 2013. Sustaining support is still listed as “indefinite” in Oracle’s Lifetime Support Policy located at http://www.oracle.com/support/lifetime-support-policy.html.

This new release is available on all platforms (HPUX, AIX, Linux, Solaris and Windows) in both 32 and 64 bit versions. Keep in mind that this patchset does not provide any additional functionality only applying bug fixes.

Digging into the Metalink documents (Patch# 6810189) it was nice to find that10.2.0.4 includes the January and April 2008 Critical Patch Updates (CPU), which consolidates the effort of doing them. The CPU for July 2008 (Doc# 467881.1) would still need to be applied after this patch. Three issues are noted with this patchset. The one of interest is that parameter “CURSOR_SPACE_FOR_TIME” is being deprecated.

So what are the primary fixes in this 10.2.0.4 patchset? You can check them out in Doc#401436.1 on Metalink (metalink.oracle.com). A quick read show that this new release includes over 3,000 individual bug fixes. In the patchset notes Oracle has identified 14 new issues/bugs that are introduced by this patchset, so be sure to read through them as well.

Stephen Chan has a brief article on the certification of 11i and 10.2.0.4 on his BLOG, so check that out as well. To summarize, it indicates that 10.2.0.4 is certified with E-Business Suite Release 11.5.9.CU2 and higher as well as 11.5.10.CU2 and higher. Real Application Clusters (RAC), Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and Automated Storage Management (ASM) are also certified. Database Vault is not yet certified.

This patchset includes an update to the Oracle time zone definitions to Version 4 which includes the changes to daylight saving time in the USA in 2007. You can determine which version you have with this query, “SELECT version FROM v$timezone_file;”.

Happy Patching!

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We’re often asked about the different ways of auditing to help ensure security for an E-Business Suite environment. Here’s a quick summary of some of your options:

Operating System Auditing
Many types of auditing are available, especially if “sudo” is utilized. “sudo” should be utilized for ALL accounts, though we find that it often is not in our clients’ environments

Database Auditing

• Setting different “audit_trail” levels in the database initialization parameters - the more detail you audit, the slower the performance of the server. You have to really watch the audit tables’ growth - this is normally NOT set in an E-Business Suite environment
• Auditing of specific tables (or columns with Database Vault) by database id - this is used by most Apps DBAs as it has limited performance impact. To use this type of auditing, the timed_statistics setting in the database init.ora file may need to be set to true depending on the feature to be utilized

Applications Auditing

• Automatic current record audit information is the standard provided by the Applications, however, NO historical auditing is provided
• Auditing enabled via the System Administrator responsibility for specific tables captures Applications users and changes but usually is limited to select payroll and fnd tables. The audit tables will grow and auditing usually needs to be disabled for all types of upgrades to avoid performance issues
• Auditing enabled via the System Administrator responsibility at certain levels - user, application, responsibility, form - should ALWAYS be set to form for the most granular information when the Systen Administrator reviews users in the applications. Setting this option does NOT impact performance

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We here at Triora Group are big advocates of staying current on RDBMS versions, so we’re excitedly waiting for the next RDBMS 10g patch, Version 10.2.0.4. We know it includes more performance patches for the database - always a good thing. However, we have to stand by Oracle’s caveat - not until it’s certified for the E-Business Suite. In the meantime, though, let’s talk about the difference between a new database patch and a new database release.

Patch = Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Patch Set 3 (10.2.0.3) - the 10 is the major release, the .2 is the 2nd generation for this release and the .3 is the latest patchset. Much like with Oracle Database 9i Release 2 Patch Set 8 (9.2.0.8)

• Risk - Oracle is running Version 10.2.0.3 with Release 12 on RAC.  They are not running 11gRAC for their production database and, until they do so, we do not recommend getting ahead of them regardless of the differences between the two different Application releases in play, Release 11i and Release 12. This database version is also the first generation of a major database version certified with the Oracle Applications.  It’s not advisable to uptake the first release of a new database version and we recommend waiting for 11gR2 database certification.
• Certification - although the 11gR1 database version is certified for a 10gR2 RAC configuration, no document outlining the steps involved is available for public review on MetaLink.
• Database patch 10.2.0.4 documentation is publicly available on Oracle’s MetaLink website and indicates that we should expect to see this patch certified soon
• Database patch 10.2.0.3 or higher is required for the database portion of the April 2008 Oracle Critical Patch Updates (CPU) patches

Recommendation
Upgrade to or remain on the current database version, 10.2.0.3, until the database patch 10.2.0.4 has been released.  Once that database patch is certified with the Oracle Applications, apply that database maintenance patch if it makes sense to do so at that time.  There will be a variety of factors that will affect that decision including but not limited to projects in progress, scheduling, enhancements and fixes and Oracle recommended patches.

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Today, Oracle provided a view into their plans for the integration of the BEA Aqualogic products into the Oracle product line. Oracle is very experienced at this effort and it showed in the presentation. They focused a lot on reassuring BEA and Oracle customers that there would be no drastic changes and no forced upgrades.

For E-Business Suite users, they mentioned specifically that there will be no forced migrations from the Oracle Application Server. This will only impact those who have upgraded to the 10g version of the Application Server, which would be customers on Release 12 or those who have added new Fusion Middleware components such as Identity Management to their existing Release 11i environments.

Here are the key points that I took away from the presentations which focused, as expected, on Fusion Middleware.

Oracle is extending support of several products for both companies to reduce the upgrade requirements. The integrations of BEA/Oracle products are expected to occur over 12 to 18 months. Oracle will provide a single integrated development toolset that incorporates both BEA/Oracle products. JDeveloper, ADF, and Oracle Forms/Reports will remain. A new Eclipse Pack will be released to help BEA development users migrate.

Oracle Data Integrator, TopLink, Coherence, AIA, Web Services Manager, Service Registry, BPA Designer, BAM, WebCenter, and Business Rules will remain. The Oracle Applications Server will eventually be replaced by BEA’s offering (JRockit, Weblogic) but the OAS will be maintained for some time. Inside the Fusion Middleware, the Oracle Enterprise Service Bus will be merged with BEA’s offering.

BEA’s Aqualogic BPM Designer will be kept and used as an agile process modeling counterpart to the Oracle BPA Designer. Both will be updated to share a common metadata model so that model information can be shared between them.

Oracle will revise their BPEL processing engine and introduce BEA’s Enterprise Repository (SOA governance). Pricing for the BEA products has been simplified and country-specific pricing has been replaced with a worldwide pricing model.

Several BEA products will be included in new Oracle Enterprise Manager Packs. In particular, a new Diagnostics Pack for Java Virtual Machine tuning based on JRockit Mission Control has been added.

Several topics were not discussed, but I want to note them. What about BEA Tuxedo? How will these changes impact the middleware stack for the Fusion Applications?

To summarize, Oracle is not making radical changes that will impact current E-Business Suite users or BEA users. Instead they will be cherry-picking the BEA product line to introduce some new products and bulk up existing products with better technologies from BEA. Existing products will continue to be supported, some up to 9 more years.

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If you are hear to learn more about caffeine or performance drugs, I’m sorry to disappoint you.

Instead I want to offer my humble recommendations for improving your daily performance on your laptop/desktop.

**Warning** This is one of those posts that isn’t really Oracle-specific, so my apologies in advance.

Instead I want to highlight some software tools and web sites to check out. Now… go forth and be more productive!

MOZY - I love using this web-based software that helps me automagically backup my laptop via the internet. You can use their free option or spring $50 a year for unlimited storage. Mozy works in the background and ensures that even if I lose it all I can get it back. Recently purchased by EMC it can be a life saver. www.mozy.com

ROBOFORM - If you are like me and have 200+ websites you need to access then it’s nice to have a tool that automates your login, remembers your password and encrypts all of that so that you can focus on working, then you are here. I’ve used RoboForm for several years and it’s great. It will create custom passwords based on my specifications. Here’s a secret I want to share with you…. I don’t even know some of my passwords. It’s true because they are hard to remember (sort of like this “A23h098n%oij1Pe”). But! RoboForm knows them and recalls them whenever I log in to the specific web site. I do back them up though… www.roboform.com

TightVNC - a free version of VNC software that lets you access Unix Servers with a GUI interface. You have to start the VNC daemon on the server but after that it’s simple to connect in. Your session stays up even if you are disconnected. www.tightvnc.com

FolderShare - this is a beta service offered by Microsoft. It allows you to share your folders in a peer-to-peer relationship between computers. Great for simple collaboration and works silently in the background to keep files synced. https://www.foldershare.com/welcome.aspx

FireFox - if you haven’t tried this alternative web browser, it’s definitely time. I have both Microsoft IE and Firefox installed. Firefox is faster and lighter but there are times when you must use IE (such as when accessing Microsoft’s sites). Firefox even has a plug-in to load the IE engine when that happens. All of my links are synchronized between the two browsers, so it’s no headache to move back and forth. www.firefox.com

Picasa - this is another goodie from Google. It manages your collections of pictures and is better than anything else I’ve found. Plus it’s free…. I quickly analyzes your graphics and builds collections for you. You can use it to order prints, create collages and do cool edits/fixes to your pictures. It also provides the ability to upload your pictures to a free website and share them with friends who can download them if desired. Lots better than emailing picture after picture to someone. www.picasa.com

Procmon - Microsoft purchased Sysinternals several years ago and added this one. Procmon shows real-time files system, Registry and process/thread activity with all kinds of filtering options. It’s great for figuring out what is slowing down your PC. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

That’s all I have time for now. Hope you find something here that makes your life (and PC) better!

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What do you know about the E-Business Suite and statistics? Come with us for an inside view of gathering statistics in Release 11i. One of the areas we like to look at when doing performance tuning for Release 11i systems is to review our clients’ approach to gathering database statistics. Now, gathering statistics can spark some interesting conversations, but it is not my intent, for this article at least, to cover how often statistics should be gathered, but rather to discuss some of the more interesting finer points regarding statistics and Release 11i, including why analyzing statistics for the Applications uses a different package than if you were gathering statistics for a non-E-Business Suite environment. For more details, take a look at the resources listed at the end of this article. Read on, though, because I think I’ve discovered at least one “finer point” that most of you won’t have seen before, and that could prove very handy.

So, we are left to explore the finer points of statistics gathering as they specifically relate to Release 11i systems. I must admit I still have some unfinished research for Release 12’s take on this topic, but I’ll write another article when I’m done to compare the two releases.

Oracle provides the Release 11i E-Business Suite with a very specific way to generate statistics. This mechanism is a concurrent program named “Gather Schema Statistics” whose short name is “FNDGSCST”. This concurrent program belongs to the Application Object Library and is assigned to the System Administrator responsibility. Inspecting this program reveals that its heart is a PL\SQL stored procedure named FND_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS. Now this is important because most DBAs are familiar with using the “analyze” command and/or the DBMS_STATS package for statistics gathering. “Analyze” was the command that we all used in the early days to populate the metadata about objects in our Oracle databases. Then, Oracle released a newer version for us to use called DBMS_STATS. Rather than being a command, we now had a stored procedure that improved on certain aspects of the analyze command. Interestingly enough, the FND_STATS package actually uses the DBMS_STATS package. Confused yet? If that is true, why do we use FND_STATS in Release 11i?

The FND_STATS package contains procedures required for the E-Business Suite. For example, FND_STATS references a table named FND_EXCLUDE_TABLE_STATS that is a repository for Application Interface Tables (AITs). The AITs are the tables that Oracle did NOT want statistics gathered on. This is important knowledge because although Oracle no longer skips Application Interface Tables we now have a structure we can use to programmatically “ignore” objects we do not want statistics gathered on. If your environment uses External Tables, you may want to insert those table names into the FND_EXCLUDE_TABLE_STATS table. One caveat to this approach is that any table you insert into the FND_EXCLUDE_TABLE_STATS table must be associated with an Applications module, because the APPLICATION_ID column is a driving column on the table. In addition, you need to know that adding a “-“ (hyphen) to the beginning of an application id will cause FND_STATS to pick up the table for statistics gathering. So, a row with an application id of “20003” will be ignored, while a row with “-20003” will have statistics gathered on it. Is that all? Nope… Read on.

Another reason for using the FND_STATS package with the E-Business Suite is the FND_HISTOGRAM_COLS table. This table contains the names of columns that are susceptible to “skewed” data. Skew happens when the distribution of data is not equal. The Cost Based Optimizer needs histograms on these columns to provide the best access path to the data. The system we used when researching FND_STATS had 1,856 rows in FND_HISTOGRAM_COLS with none being associated with a custom table.

Is that all? Nope… There are a few more interesting tidbits. Let’s move away from the package and look at some of the inside information about the concurrent program. Why is it that custom schemas do not get picked up with the gathering schema statistics concurrent program? Why don’t SYS or SYSTEM objects get analyzed? The Gather Schema Statistics concurrent program uses a Value Set named FND_STATS_OWNER_ALL to determine the schemas eligible for selection within the program. The code behind this value set also provides for an “ALL” selection, which will cause statistics to be gathered for all schemas in the FND_ORACLE_USERID table.

The specific code for this is:

SELECT ‘All’ oracle_username, ‘All Schemas’ description, 1 seq FROM DUAL UNION SELECT oracle_username, description, 2 seq FROM fnd_oracle_userid ORDER BY seq ASC, oracle_username ASC;

Based on this select statement, we know that if your custom schema is not registered, then the Gather Schema Statistics concurrent program will not pick it up. There are several different ways to register your custom schema, so make sure you review the System Administrator guides for specific instructions. In the end, there are three tables your custom schema should be listed in:

• FND_ORACLE_USERID
• FND_APPLICATION
• FND_PRODUCT_INSTALLATIONS

Yes, you can register the SYSTEM and SYS schemas with your FND_ORACLE_USERID table to make them eligible for statistics gathering. This could be a potential solution to insure that statistics are being gathered for all of the schemas in your database. It is important to mention, however, that statistics should NOT be gathered for SYS or SYSTEM objects on Version 8i or earlier databases (hopefully everyone is off of those versions). The Version 9i database saw neutral recommendations regarding SYS and SYSTEM in that Oracle said you could run statistics for these objects but that you were not required to. Of course, anyone doing upgrades with the E-Business Suite and the Version 9i database saw instructions on gathering statistics for better performance. But, you also probably noticed that there were still several procedures run by Oracle that were “rule” based and therefore could be negatively impacted by statistics.

All of this changed with Oracle 10g, though. This later version of the database, which is certified for higher versions of Release 11i, requires statistics to be gathered on the SYS and SYSTEM objects. Simply put, the “rule” base optimizer is out in 10g and the “cost” based optimizer is in. Unfortunately, Oracle did not update the FND_STATS package for this occurrence and actually wrote in code to prevent the gathering of statistics on SYS objects. No doubt this was a hold over to prevent statistics gathering on the earlier versions of the database. We hope that Oracle will remove this in Release 12, as Release 12 is only certified on Oracle 10g and above. For now, however, you will need to use DBMS_STATS from the command line to gather statistics on SYS objects. For this, we recommend using a script that is run out of the crontab on a periodic basis.

In the end, we have shown you how to use the concurrent program Gather Schema Statistics to run statistics for every schema in your database with the exception of the SYS schema. Unless you have custom scripts already meeting all of your statistics gathering needs, we recommend exploring the preceding option. Doing so would make it simple to insure that all schemas are picked up, that histograms can be correctly identified for all objects, and that management for gathering statistics can be handled in this one well known interface.

Finally, as promised earlier, there are many experts on statistics in our community, but I find that I gravitate towards the following (in no special order):

• Jonathan Lewis => Mr. Lewis wrote the book on it, literally. We consider him to be an invaluable resource for the Oracle community and very much appreciate his sharing his knowledge with us. His website is http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/ while he can be found on his blog at http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/ Jonathan will be teaching classes (Troubleshooting and Tuning , Writing Optimal SQL and Explain Plan) in Salt Lake City and Minneapolis from September 8-12 and is a terrific instructor.

• Wolfgang Breitling => Mr. Breitling has written numerous articles on statistics gathering and frequently presents at some of the industries best conferences. His website is http://www.centrexcc.com/

• Christian Antognini => Mr. Antognini is a recognized expert in the field of performance tuning and has written several articles / presentations relative to statistics and their impact on performance. His personal website is http://antognini.ch/ while his blog is at http://antognini.ch/blog/

• Oracle’s Optimizer Team => The team’s blog is at http://optimizermagic.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

We hope you enjoyed the entry and hopefully some of you learned something new. As always, we are interested in your feedback or ideas you have for other articles. Please fell free to let us know…

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There continues to be confusion about the role of Applications DBAs in supporting the E-Business Suite (EBS). We still encounter organizations that believe that any Oracle DBA can easily transition over to being an Applications DBA (it is still a database after all!). For them, EBS is seen as just another commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) application with some initial configuration work.

This assumption rarely works out and we often find that those new Application DBAs (APPSDBA) struggle to understand their new role. Actually, we sometimes find large gaps in the maintenance of the E-Business Suite environment and less than stellar Applications performance because the new APPSDBA has no idea what they don’t know. Even if they are lucky enough to get some training or good mentoring, they may still come back to an environment carrying a long list of responsibilities while not necessarily understanding how it all fits together.

Traditional Oracle DBAs can also be hampered by their natural focus on monitoring database performance, ensuring backups, resolving database issues, installing releases and improving database performance. These are important tasks but in the EBS environment they are only a portion of the ongoing needs for the environment. The appropriate solution for an E-Business Suite backup is much different from a standard database backup, since it must include backing up the entire E-Business Suite, including database and code. Often it is assumed that the Application Tier is relatively static and can be backed up anytime, but that may not be the case.

The new APPSDBA also needs to configure monitoring tools and backups, understand and control release management, and proactively evaluate potential performance enhancements for the Application Tier (Forms, Reports, Java, Discoverer and Apache), and understand how those changes will impact EBS clients. When that is done they need to know how to properly clone for testing (a more complicated task because of the complexity of the E-Business Suite environment), monitor performance of the JVMs, forecast application server/storage requirements, sort out and apply relevant patches, and maintain application security at the Operating System and database levels. The nuances of the E-Business Suite, it turns out, require both a broad and deep understanding of not just the database, but the tools that are used with the database.

The result is that in smaller environments, one properly trained and experienced APPSDBA might keep on top of it, but that is rare in medium and larger environments. Some Applications DBAs just do the best they can and never get around to patching or maintenance. As long as the end-users are not asking, they can keep everything working, even though the backlog of future work may be growing rapidly.

So why does the APPSDBA role differ so much from that of a traditional DBA? At a high level I think it is because of the close integration of the database and applications, and the introduction of additional technologies that are required.

The close integration of the Oracle database and the E-Business Suite leads to high levels of dependencies. These many dependencies create limits on what can be done and when. Tuning, configuring, patching and upgrading always require plenty of review before proceeding.

The area of application patching is enough to confuse most people (including me!). First, there are multiple types of patches and a whole dictionary of patching terms (RUP, Emergency, Mini-Packs, Consolidated Updates) whose definition may change over time.

Then the APPSDBA has to read the Release Notes and decide where to get started. Many APPSDBAs then download the patch and examine the detailed steps of the patch just to make sure they understand what is really happening behind the scenes. They try to determine beforehand whether the patch will fix the problem users are experiencing, or cause some other problem. But what if Oracle requires the patch, but the users are experiencing no issues? Will applying it create a whole set of new issues that will cause sleepless nights?

In each case, the APPSDBA is challenged to understand new technologies but also work with an environment that has some technologies that are over 5 years old. A good example with Release 11i (as well as Release 12) is that there are multiple Oracle Homes to support the technology changes that have occurred since its introduction in 2004.

If you recall, a new release of the E-Business Suite is normally eligible for Premier support for 5 years by Oracle. During those five years there will be tens of thousands of patches released just for the Applications alone. While it is getting easier to apply them, it’s not getting easier to decide when, how and what the impact will be. And the windows for planned downtime continue to narrow.

Upgrading the Applications or database isn’t plug-and-play either. Upgrading to new versions of the database requires thorough testing and practice to ensure that the Applications perform correctly under the new database. Also, just because a new version of the database is available doesn’t mean E-Business Suite users can begin using it. Oracle RDBMS Version 10.2.0.4 provides a good example - it’s available now, but is not yet certified to run with the E-Business Suite.

Also, moving to the latest certified version of the RDBMS isn’t enough - you need to thoroughly read the documentation to determine if init.ora parameters need to be changed or if Oracle has made other significant changes. One example is Cost Based Optimization. Over the years, Cost-Based Optimization has slowly permeated the E-Business Suite database, requiring different settings depending on the database used. On the 9i database, SYS and SYSTEM objects can optionally be analyzed, but on 10g, it is mandatory to analyze those objects. That’s a detail that only comes out by reading through the manuals.

How about Applications upgrades? Upgrading to new Applications releases is a planned multi-month process (often 6-12 months) requiring a camping permit on Metalink as a prerequisite. Often you find yourself opening multiple Service Requests just to get through the process.

The additional technologies are not just limited to the database. Java is a key component of the Application Server and it has regular new releases. At the client level, many organizations are in the process of moving away from Oracle’s JInitiator and replacing it with the Java Plug-In. Should they use Java 1.5 or 1.6? How do they regulate what the user’s desktop will choose if the user has multiple versions of Java installed? Are there tools for tuning Java?

Suffice it to say that in any one calendar year there is some version of the EBS technology that is being retired while new ones are introduced. As the Applications DBA, you are responsible for ensuring that it happens without impacting the critical business processing of the organization.

Now, if I had more space I’d jump into the need for a separate Applications System Administrator and Workflow Administrator, two other important roles in the EBS environment. But for now, I’ll leave you with these questions: What are your thoughts about APPSDBAs? How does your company handle the challenges of this job? Let me hear your thoughts.

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PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU START!

While performing a recent upgrade FROM Release 11.5.9.2 / RDBMS 9.2.0.8 TO Release 12.0.4 (with the 12.0.5 Financials Family Pack) on RDBMS 10.2.0.3, we encountered many issues that stemmed from the same root cause. With a little research, we determined that two database options, OLAP and Data Mining, needed to be installed as pre-requisites for the Release 12 upgrade.

Given that these options are listed at $20K/CPU on Oracle’s price list, this caused some concern, as you can imagine.

We opened a Service Request (SR) with Oracle and they confirmed that the options needed to be installed for the worker jobs to finish. After a lively discussion, we’ve now done so after being assured by Oracle that this was a “runtime” requirement and, as such, did not have a charge associated with it. The MetaLink documents to refer to are: 552973.1and 362203.1

We have verified this at another Release 11.5.9.2 / RDBMS 10.2.0.3 RAC client site with different modules and the requirement to install the database options still exists. We have asked Oracle to create a MetaLink document addressing this specific issue because many Applications upgrades will encounter this issue.

Here are some of the metrics from the two major patches we applied:

- The 12.0.4 RUP ran in approximately 24 hours with 140,000 worker jobs.

- The 12.0.5 Financials Family Pack patch ran in approximately one hour.

Good luck on your upgrade!

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Do you get a kick out of Oracle? I, for one, enjoy Oracle because there is always so much to learn. And, although no one can know everything, Oracle certainly provides a wealth of learning opportunities. If you are reading this, then you are most likely involved with the Oracle E-Business Suite. You may be functional or you may be technical, but most of all you should be inquisitive.

My first priority after joining Triora Group was to get some servers to get our research lab off the ground. I then needed to install Oracle, including Release 11i and Release 12 of the E-Business Suite, as well as RAC, Oracle’s Grid Control (OEM) with AMP, and a few other pieces of software necessary to support the “typical” Oracle E-Business environment.

The laundry list of installs kept growing as I sat down and thought about all the areas we covered as a company along with what technologies we needed to be familiar with as field consultants. As an Applications DBA, I was really looking forward to getting the installs done so that I could start investigating. I don’t know about you, but everyday I seem to end up with a “hmmm, I wonder what that is really doing…” question. So, how do you work through these types of issues?

One instance every organization should have is a DBA instance. This instance is where your DBAs can investigate to destruction. This is your “hmmm, I wonder what that is really doing…” instance. This instance also serves as the first stop for any patching intended for production, as well as any DBA-sponsored changes for production. But what I’ve just described is the normal use for this instance, rather than the cool use, so let’s get back to the cool stuff.

Now that you have an instance in which to play, make sure you play. There are hundreds of helpful scripts out there that need to be explored before they can be used. And now you have an instance to try them on. There are also hundreds of useful blogs sharing a wealth of information. Pick one and work on testing their assertions. Perhaps you want to test an Oracle process. What are all the files touched when Autoconfig runs? Maybe performance is something that you want to test. How much memory does does a concurrent process consume? What about a background process? These are all things that can be investigated in your DBA instance.

The power of being a good technologist is in your ability to learn. It is in your inquisitive nature. Recently, I was sitting in a hotel lounge (!) working with a colleague, and as we discussed the various entries of an XML file we started to wonder… If it is normal for people to comment out a line they don’t want to be read in a shell script or a .conf file, can you comment out a line in the XML file? Will Autoconfig read it anyway? My guess is that it would be read despite the leading pound (#) sign. However, I am not 100% sure. So, what should I do? As soon as I get my work done for the weekend, I guess I’ll test it on my DBA instance and see for myself what happens.

I was lucky in my early years as a DBA to have found the Oak Table Network and folks like Cary Millsap, Tom Kyte, Jonathan Lewis and Craig Shallahamer. These guys were as good as they come and were willing to share their knowledge. The best part of finding their websites was that they believed in showing their work. This allowed me to follow their notes and test their assertions on my own. Where did I test? Again, I was lucky to have a test instance. This instance was a company instance but was later removed for space considerations, so I installed it at home to continue my education.

I spend a lot of time reading books about Oracle, whitepapers, industry presentations, and blogs to see what others are working on and what they have learned. Our Oracle community has some very smart people that are also very willing to share. In future newsletters I’ll highlight some of these sources so that we can all learn together. I’ll be learning in my instances – where will you be learning?

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