The Triora Group

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!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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…

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

As a kid I always read the sides of the cereal box where it mentioned the Recommended Daily Allowance for various food, vitamins and such. For that reason that acronym, RDA, will always stick in my mind.

But today we are talking about a different RDA, the Oracle kind. I’ve recently spent some time exploring the wonders of the Remote Diagnostic Agent and thought I would pass on my thoughts.

For those unfamiliar with RDA, it’s a PERL script (Perl 5.005 and later) that you can download from Oracle. Oracle likes to use it to gather support information for your site when you have an SR. However there is also value for your in-house operations from running it regularly. The Metalink information (metalink.oracle.com) information for getting started is at Note:314422.1. Information about options for RDA are found under Note:330760.1.

The download of RDA (without the System Configuration Manager Collector) is less than 5MB in size. The latest version of RDA from March of 2008, is designed to execute on all of the platforms listed below.

Once installed you answer some questions and send it off to gather information about your environment. The result is two-fold. You get a lot of TXT and HTML files that output. If you pull up the right HTML file (RDA__start.htm) you can browse through information about your database, server, Java, applications tier, forms and just about anything else you ever wanted to know. And it’s all nicely formatted in HTML with drill-down links.

I like RDA because it’s Oracle supported, offers lots of reporting options, is relatively unobtrusive and provides easy to read results. You can run it on just about any version of the Database or Oracle Applications or Operating System and it is smart enough to figure out where to go and what to gather.

Here’s a graphic showing a sample main screen.

What is shown here is only the top part of the actual page and as you can see on the left there is lots of links for drill-down research. Keep in mind that this sample only shows a subset of information that can be reported on because there are lots of options.

RDA has a number of options that determine what type of information it will gather. Here’s an overview list of areas it can report on, but keep in mind that Oracle is regularly extending the capabilities of RDA and may have new options when you next look.

• Oracle RDBMS Server (Standard and Enterprise Editions)
• Oracle RAC Cluster (Single/Multiple Nodes, Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Cluster File System, Data Guard)
• Oracle Application Server (iAS 1.0.2.x/9.0.x/10.1.2.x/10.1.3.x,10.1.4.x, HTTP Server,WebCache,J2EE/OC4J)
• Oracle Oracle Data Integrator
• Oracle Management Server and Intelligent Agent (Grid Server, Agent Server, DB Control)
• OLAP Products (Express Server, Financial Analyzer, and Demand Planning Server)
• Oracle Developer (Forms and Reports)
• Oracle JDBC/PRO *C/ODBC and other development client related information
• Oracle Collaboration Suites (Email Server,Calendar,Discussions,Content Services,Workspaces,WebClient, and Wireless)
• Oracle Identity Management (Internet Directory and COREid)
• Oracle Networking products
• Oracle Ebusiness Suite 11i and 12
• Oracle Portal Software 7.0, 7.2, and 7.3
• Oracle Retail (Retek)

RDA is currently available for the following environments:

• IBM AIX
• Intel Linux (Oracle Enterprise, RedHat, and SuSE)
• HP-UX (10.* and 11.*)
• HP Tru64
• Linux PPC
• Mac OS X/Darwin
• Sequent Dynix/Ptx
• Sun Solaris (2.6 - 2.10)
• Windows XP Professional
• Windows 2000 Workstation and Server
• Windows 2003 Server
• HP OpenVMS Alpha 7.3-2 and above
• HP OpenVMS Itanium
• ZLinux

One interesting feature about RDA is that it will RDA allow you to remove sensitive data from RDA reports by using a specific setting.

RDA uses Data Collection Modules (DCM), that you specify when running it, to determine which information to report on. Here are just a few of the approximately 80 DCM’s that you can specify.

But wait! There’s more!

RDA also offers options for running several tools. One tool will run the Oracle Database Diagnostic Collector and another will diagnose ORA-600 Oracle Internal Errors. It also has some test modes that it support (10+) that will test SQL Settings or local database access or…

Well, as you can see RDA is something of real value if you spend some time and get familiar with its options. Understanding the power of RDA benefit you both internally and also as a tool to improve sending information for Oracle Support. So with that in mind, be sure to get your RDA…

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

In March 07, Oracle released the Applications Management Pack (AMP) for Enterprise Manager. One of the interesting features about the AMP is that it provides the ability to do data masking when cloning data from a production environment to a secondary environment where testing is done. This data masking ensures that confidential information such as SSN, compensation and health information is not revealed to those with access to testing environments.

What is confusing is that Oracle has also released a Data Masking Pack (DMP) for Enterprise Manager, however the data masking capabilities are different from those in AMP. DMP was announced in November 07. With this confusion in mind, here is some information about the data masking capabilities of DMP and a comparison of the two later in the article.

The Data Masking Pack ships with several mask primitives out of the box, such as Fixed values, Array of Values, Random Digits (zero padded), Random numbers, Random alphabetic characters of specified lengths, Random dates within a date range, Substring of original value, External table columns containing replacement mask data, and Shuffle within same table. If these options are not enough, it also supports user-defined functions written in PL/SQL to provide unlimited flexibility in creating mask formats. All of these mentioned primitives can be combined to create unlimited numbers of mask formats needed for masking any type of sensitive data. One note about Shuffling. The shuffling algorithm shuffles the data in the column, i.e. retains the data histogram, but removes the association of the original column data to the row.

The Data Masking Pack (DMP) supports only masking of Oracle database tables and columns and does not work on other data formats like Excel or plain text files. DMP generates logs of the masking process and Enterprise Manager has a built-in reporting engine that can be used to generate reports. It also provides the ability to preview the sample masked data prior to the masking process.

The key feature with any data masking solution is whether it maintains relational integrity. This requires that any data masking cannot break the relationship between one or tables. An example would be when masking is done for SSN and the SSN is used as a foreign key to another table.
For this reason DMP supports database enforced and application enforced referential integrity. It also supports the definition of any application relationships, including Oracle Financials and is certified for use with them.

Lastly, the Enterprise Manager has a built in scheduler that can be used to run the database cloning and the data masking processes. The script generated by the tool can be registered and run as a concurrent manager job.

Now that we’ve looked at the Data Masking Pack, let’s finish with a comparison of its features with that of the Application Management Pack (AMP).

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

The team at Triora Group isn’t happy if we aren’t sharing what we know. Check out these *FREE* papers/presentations that are available for download at: http://trioragroup.com/shop/

A Technical Roadmap for Oracle Fusion, E-Business Suite Release 12, and Oracle Fusion Applications - John Stouffer, Triora Group, LLC - Many companies who have purchased best of breed applications solutions over the years find themselves facing a difficult problem; should they keep each product as a separate entity, or is there a way to integrate the products, choosing the best qualities of each while taking advantage of new features and technology enhancements? The answer, of course, is what we will be discussing in this paper. This paper describes a technical roadmap tthat shows how Oracle Fusion Middleware, the E-Business Suite Release 12, and Oracle’s Fusion Applications will fit together. By understanding how these three pieces work together, you can plan your organization’s strategy for dealing with Fusion.

Release 12 Apps DBA 101 - John Stouffer, Triora Group, LLC - This paper describes the new features, functionality and utilities available to Applications DBAs with Release 12 of Oracle’s E-Business Suite of Applications. We will start by comparing the Release 11i and Release 12 architectures to lay the foundation for understanding the assortment of tools available to manage and maintain the Release 12 environment. Tools including Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM), Oracle Applications Manager (OAM), Applications Management Pack (AMP), Rapid Install Wizard, Rapid Clone, AutoConfig, AutoPatch, OPatch and napply CPU, Oracle E-Business Suite Diagnostics, and the Oracle Integration Repository (iRep) will be covered. This paper also discusses considerations for whether and when you should consider upgrading to Release 12.

Release 12: Are You Ready for Fusion? A Practical Guide to What You Need to Know - Robert McMillen, Triora Group, LLC -This paper covers the major points that decision makers need to know about Oracle Fusion. It will be done at such a level that it can be of value to business owners, technology owners and their staff. This paper covers five areas about Fusion - the Application Suite, the Applications Integration Architecture (AIA), Fusion Middleware, Application Server 10gR3 (J2EE) and RDBMS 10g/11g Grid Computing.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

The one bad thing about panels at Collaborate is that there generally isn’t any material available afterward. Of course, the good thing is that panels provide an opportunity for an audience to ask all the questions they want of a group of distinguished industry experts. So read on about three panels at Collaborate that we think were very important because they cover the three major areas that were on the minds of everyone at the conference – Release 11i, Release 12 and the Fusion Applications.

The Release 12 Upgrade Panel

John Stouffer, Triora Group, moderated the Release 12 Upgrade Panel, which sparked some lively discussion from the packed audience and panel members Sandra Vucinic, Vlad Group, Bill Dunham and Mike Barone, OATC, and Eugene Weinstein, Sharon Leong, and Max Adreruis from Oracle.

One of the best parts about this panel was getting to hear some insights from Oracle about their own Release 12 upgrade. Oracle suffered all thedisadvantages that comes with being on the very edge of the bleeding edge -running brand new code that was being changed throughout their upgrade process - and also working with an incredibly large database - starting with 12 terabyte, and finishing with 13.6 terabyte. Sharon Leong said that the upgrade took about a year, and that Oracle separated the database upgrade to Oracle10g from the E-Business Suite upgrade by a week.

The E-Business Suite part of the upgrade took less than 3 1/2 days and upgraded 8 years of history out of a total of 21 years. The fact that Oracle is using Release 12 internally is very important for decision makers in assessing when they should upgrade to Release 12. Oracle is clearly motivated to move as quickly as possible to resolve issues.

The audience asked, and the panel answered, many questions. Here are the highlights:

- Asked if the database grows very much between Release 11i and Release 12, general concurrence was to expect 10-20% growth, but understand that it really depends on what modules are implemented.

- Asked about the tradeoffs of upgrading versus re-implementing, the panel suggested that re-implementation requires more examination of data and business processes. Companies generally choose to re-implement if there is a substantial change in how they do business. Re-implementations always take more time than an upgrade. Reimplementation does have the advantage of allowing a fresh start to using the E-Business Suite.

- Asked if we should upgrade to Oracle11g, Sandra Vucinic recommended, and Max Adreruis agreed, staying with Oracle10g for now. While Oracle11g is certified with Release 11.5.10.2, it currently is only certified with Windows and Linux and is not yet certified with Release 12.

- One audience member asked how 7×24 hour businesses that can’t have any downtime do upgrades. According to the panel, 7×24 shops have to have a period where they manually take transactions (that is, they write them down and then enter them later after the upgrade is complete). Tuning the upgrade process is the key to minimizing this effort. Among the ways to make an upgrade go faster (this is true both for Release 12 and Release 11i upgrades):

o Consider leasing or borrowing (from development environments) additional CPU and memory for the upgrade so that more can be done simultaneously.

o Upgrade other parts of the architecture ahead of time - upgrade to the latest version of JRE and upgrade the database ahead of time.

o Use a pre-patched (staged) $APPL_TOP

o Use admerge to merge patches

o Document how long each step should take, so you know immediately if something is not working as fast as expected

o Adjust the number of workers (after testing thoroughly) to the maximum that the production environment can handle

o Test on the production server to avoid unexpected problems

Collaborate 08 Release 11i Upgrade Panel

John Stouffer, Triora Group, moderated the Release 11i Upgrade Panel. Panel members were Sandra Vuninic, Vlad Group, and Mike Barone and Bill Dunham from OATC.

A poll of the audience showed that most attendees were running either Release 11.5.9 or Release 11.5.10.2. Attendees were evenly distributed as to RDBMS Versions 9i and 10g.

Highlights of the panel discussion included:

- Several long running jobs were mentioned that have no resolution from Oracle. The audience was asked to send specific Service Requests (SRs) to Steven Chan at steven dot chan at oracle dot com.

- Steven Chan’s blog (http://blogs.oracle.com/schan/) was highly recommended as a great source of information about changes in the E-Business Suite, including Release 12 and Fusion as well as Release 11i. Steven is Oracle’s Director of Oracle Applications Technology Integration.

- Oracle’s R12 Upgrade forum was recommended as a good source of information.

- The panel recommended using a pre-patched (staged) APPL_TOP for final upgrades to remove the need for running the C/G portions of the U (unified) driver during an upgrade.

- One conversation about a different approach for zero downtime upgrades was discussed in detail - the panel members stated that the approach seemed plausible but would not be documented on MetaLink and Oracle support would be of limited help.

- Bill Dunham spoke about the need for controlled project management to closely monitor the upgrade for success.

The Fusion Council Panel

John Stouffer moderated the Fusion Council Panel. Panel members were JPL’s Floyd Teter, OAUG Fusion Council Chair; Basheer Khan, Innowave; and Steve Miranda, Vice President of Fusion Applications Development at Oracle. The OAUG Fusion Council shares knowledge and information about the next generation of the Fusion Applications. They provide education via presentations and eLearning webinars on Fusion Applications components.

Panel highlights included:

- There were several questions concerning the functionality that would be available with the Fusion applications. Steve Miranda said that CRM and GRC would be included in the new applications, but manufacturing would not. Steve also stated that the release would be limited to early adopters and would not be made generally available. Core Human Resources and Financials functionality will also be included in the first limited release as well as silo applications based on the AIA Foundation. Steve encouraged the use of the AIA Foundation Pack now instead of waiting.

- Steve said that Applications modules can be upgraded independently.

- Purging of unused historical or system data before upgrading to the Fusion Applications was recommended.

- Oracle Forms and PeopleTools will finally be obsoleted with the Fusion Applications.

- Licensing will be on a “like” to “like” basis, but any new functionality will require additional licensing.

- Floyd Teter, Fusion Council Chair, explained that the upgrade to the Fusion Applications will be an A to B upgrade, where the target. environment will need to be created first and then the old data will be upgraded into the new Fusion Applications.

- BI will be embedded in the Applications (including Hyperion)

- New Fusion Council plans were announced at the panel meeting with a “stay tuned” for details message.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Here are some of my random thoughts about the OAUG event this year.

I found it interesting the Oracle significantly played down the Fusion Applications at this event. I was certainly expecting more focus on what it is and what it will do. The CRM versions have been announced but early versions of the other Fusion Application modules are being demonstrated privately. The use of embedded operational analytics within the applications has been discussed publicly and Oracle is delivering on that.

The winner of the OAUG trip to Las Vegas was an attendee from Japan. I wonder if they budgeted enough monies for her trip across the Pacific? They probably assumed it would be someone in the upper 48 states.

As noted in another post, AIA got a lot of sessions and attention by Oracle presenters. Someone in OAUG confirmed that this change in emphasis began in the last 60 days before OAUG. Based on my previous posts on this blog I’m feeling very aligned with Oracle this week.

The brief snow on Wednesday was nice. I was up on the 35th floor and got a nice view of the results as it settled in during the afternoon. It was gone quickly the next morning but the trees were beautiful on my drive in.

The OAUG sessions in the Wells Fargo Theatre were good, but it was painful to watch the speakers try to read the teleprompters which were located below the stage. I suggest they toss them for next year. The attempts at humor fell flat and every video shot showed the speakers looking down to determine what to do next. Kudo’s to Floyd Teter and Steve Romeo who managed to make it look the most natural.

I was pleasantly surprised with the attendance at my session. Since it was the last session period of the week and many attenders were already hoofing it to the airport I was expecting two or three in the audience. When over 30 people showed up I was re-energized. The session went well but I managed to leave my cellular USB stick in the room somewhere. I’m still depressed about that.

My tiny rental car for the week morphed into a dual-cab RAM pickup truck that required me using a handle to get up into the vehicle. The wind had been blowing out of the north when we arrived in Denver. It carried the strong scent of manure which stayed with the interior of the vehicle all week. Maneuvering “the beast” around town was a challenge. I never realized how narrow the lanes are on most streets and for a real test of courage try getting down one of those spiral drives in a parking garage. Once I figured out I had a whole 6 inches of clearance in the garage I was much more confident but I’ve never felt so claustrophobic in a vehicle.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!