Monthly Archives: October 2011

We can Generate 11i & R12 BR100s and Find All your Customizations

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TruTek provides as part of our assessments the ability to generate BR100s and find all customizations using our favorite partner’s software, 2e2 / ConfigSnapshot. This is compatible with any version of the E-Business Suite from 11.0.3 to 12.1.3+ and for 130+ modules & technical areas. Free trial and web demos available on request – sherri@trutek.com or barb@trutek.com for details.

BR100s and customizations are just the start, see details below for a general summary of basic capabilities available out of the box:

Setup Management
•Automatically generate setup documentation for > 130 modules
•Plan configuration in ConfigSnapshot before deploying to the E-Business Suite
•Control setup for new changes
•Directly compare setups across multiple environments
•Compare operating units, sets of books etc. within or across environments
•Create date stamped copies of setup for historic reporting and comparison over time
•Covers key technical areas including workflow, database objects etc.
•Extensible to cover custom application setups
•Annotate important setup items to assist managing key setups
•Compare actual setups with model values

Reduce Time – Reduce Errors – Reduce Cost – Reduce Risk

Patching / Upgrades
•Identify customizations
•Compare setups across different versions – understand the impact
•Identify all components affected to help prioritise testing
•Manage any additional setup required
•Ensure each iteration is accurately repeated

Assess Impact – Determine Scope – Simplify Execution

Support / Audit
•Flexible reporting targets data effectively and ensure results can be formatted to simplify understanding
•Thousands of reporting requirements provided as standard
•Define additional reporting in minutes; assist system administration, problem resolution and enforcing policies
•Feature-rich online inquiry
•Consolidated reporting for complex setups, e.g. security and user access – including Role Based Access Control
•Identify changes to key setups

Support Proactively, Not Reactively – Enforce Control

Dead Connection Detection works in 11.1.0.7

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A couple of years ago I wrote a paper on how to adjust the TCP settings so that TNS would detect a dead connection. I also demonstrated how Oracle cleans up processes, but may leave sessions connected to the database. ALTER SYSTEM DISCONNECT SESSION is the new command for cleaning up the session and process at the same time in 11g.

In the white paper, “Improve Performance with Dead Connection Detection”, I showed with 10gR2 how blocking locks are not released when the user session was abnormally terminated. The same test in 11.1.0.7 shows the blocking locks released almost immediately after the first session was abnormally terminated.

I believe this is due to the new process, dia0, dia(zero), in 11g.

shell script to check for 11.5.10.2 rpms for linux 4

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echo “Checking for required RPMs, refer to note: 303859.1″

 echo ” ”

 echo ” * Required OS Components ”

 rpm -q compat-db-4.1.25-9

rpm -q compat-db-4.1.25-9

rpm -q compat-gcc-32-3.2.3-47.3

rpm -q compat-gcc-32-c++-3.2.3-47.3

 rpm -q compat-oracle-rhel4-1.0-3

 rpm -q compat-libcwait-2.0-1

 rpm -q compat-libgcc-296-2.96-132.7.2

 rpm -q compat-libstdc++-296-2.96-132.7.2

 rpm -q compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-47.3

 rpm -q gcc-3.4.3-9.EL4

 rpm -q gcc-c++-3.4.3-9.EL4

 rpm -q gnome-libs-1.4.1.2.90-44

 rpm -q gnome-libs-devel-1.4.1.2.90-44

 rpm -q libaio-devel-0.3.102-1

 rpm -q libaio-0.3.102-1

 rpm -q make-3.80-5

 rpm -q openmotif21-2.1.30-11

 rpm -q xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-devel-6.8.1-23.EL

 rpm -q xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-6.8.1-23.EL

 echo ” “

Oracle Demo Presentations

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Here are some of the URLs for the presentations at the Oracle Demo area:

http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/optimized-solutions-171609.html?msgid=QROOW11

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/em-oow2011-content-454204.html?msgid=QROOW11

http://www.oracle.com/goto/optimizedsolutions?msgid=QROOW11

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/index.html?msgid=QROOW11

http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/virtualization/oraclevm/index.html?msgid=QROOW11

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/overview/index-092391.html?msgid=QROOW11

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/soasuite/overview/index.html?msgid=QROOW11

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/em-oow2011-content-454204.html?msgid=QROOW11

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/overview/adf-mobile-096323.html?msgid=QROOW11

http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/soa/index.html?msgid=QROOW11

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/upk/index.html?msgid=QROOW11

http://www.oracle.com/webcenter?msgid=QROOW11

Oracle Open World 2011

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Oracle Open World 2011 was the best ever! Everything is big at OOW. Exadata was everywhere.

Awesome presentations including some of my favorite presenters/authors, Tim Gorman, Cary Millsap, Debra Lilley, Dennis Horton and Deep Ram, Tanel Poder, Nadia Bendjedou and Cliff Godwin.

My Favorite presentation was from Cary Millsap on his presentation on “Skew”. Skew is everywhere. Did you know the average number of legs per person was 1.99? Why is it not greater than 2, because there are no three legged humans. (This is the best picture I could get of Cary, he thinks best when he’s moving).

The James Bond joke, if you don’t know what a Thermos is and someone tells you that it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold, why didn’t it work when I put my coffee and my popsicle in my thermos?  Understand your data.

Skew exists everywhere, especially in systems, charaterized by CPU, memory, disks and networks. In 11.2.0.2 there are 1118 system calls, 6 dba calls and 2 psuedo calls. The system  processes are dominated by system calls, with a few critical DBA calls.

The Upgrade SIG

From Oracle: Nadia Bendjedou, Max Arderius, Lester Gutierrez , Anne Carlson

Chairperson – Barb Matthews, Panelists included: Sandra Vucinic (moderator), Kaberi Nayak, Bill Dunham, Michael Brown, Susan Behn and Mike Swing.

 Oak Table dinner sponsered by our gracious host Mogens Norgaard of Miracle AS included Tanel Poder, a real superman. Tanel has an excellent book out on ExaData.

The dinner was held at the Franciscan Crab Restaurant and the crab was truly better than I’ve ever had.

The conference had lots of exhibitors, two of our favorite are 2e2 (with a product called ConfigSnapshot) and ePrentice.  

One of the exhibitor gifts was a sumo wrestler from Hitachi Consulting, who looks interested in the Oracle Racing Team.

 

 

 

But the best gift of all, was winning back the America’s Cup. Thanks, Uncle Larry. The first model ship I ever built was the America, after reading a book about sailing.

 

 

Best two quotes from OOW on Monday

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The first quote came from the presentation of the day, when Cary Millsap said. “When I look at the sky I see Mickey Mouse’s head”, in relation to understanding skew in idle wait events.

The second best quote came from Debra Lilley with regard to upgrading to R12.1.3 or waiting for Fusion. “Don’t Do Nothing”.

Monday at Oracle Open World

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Awesome presentations including some of my favorite presenters/authors, Tim Gorman, Cary Millsap, Debra Lilley, Dennis Horton and Deep Ram, Tanel Poder, Nadia Bendjedou and Cliff Godwin.

My Favorite presentation was from Cary Millsap on his presentation on “Skew”. Skew is everywhere. Did you know the average number of legs per person was 1.99? Why is it not greater than 2, because there are no three legged humans.

The James Bond joke, if you don’t know what a Thermos is and someone tells you that it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold, why didn’t it work when I put my coffee and my popsicle in my thermos?  Understand your data.

Skew exists everywhere, especially in systems, charaterized by CPU, memory, disks and networks. In 11.2.0.2 there are 1118 system calls, 6 dba calls and 2 psuedo calls. The system  processes are dominated by system calls, with a few critical DBA calls.

This system basically makes calls to the system and to the database.

The main idea was to illustrate the common misconception that idle wait events can be ignored. The answer is, you have to drill down to the exac cause of the wait and not look at summary data that represents median values or averages.

Cary summarized his Method R process: Identify the Important Task, Measure the Response Time, Optimize Response, Repeat until satisfied.

Check out Simpson’s paradox, a baseball statistical conundrum. Bobby Bragan the 1966 manager of the Atlanta Braves, was quoted as saying, “If you have one foot in the oven and one foot in the icebox, the percentages would say you’re fine”.

Drill down on each issue and remove the skew from each case by understanding the details of each wait.

 

 

Nadia’s clarifications of the R12 Upgrade SIG Summary

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 Corrections to my earlier summary of the R12 Upgrade SIG from Nadia. Thank you Nadia.

1)      [Mike said] Some initial promises about that capability have been nixed and the rule is Oracle will support 11.5.10.2 and 12.1, but when 12.2 comes out 11.5.10.2 is history.

a.       [Nadia edits]: The rule is that Oracle supports upgrade path from the last 2 releases of EBS, for example for Fusion V1 only 12 and 12.1 are ! the supported releases for Upgrade to Fusion. Hence 11i10 will not have an upgrade path to Fusion directly (of course the alternative for 11i10 customers is to re-implement in Fusion).

2)      [Mike said] Nadia explained that some products used in EBS, such as Forms, will be continued to be supported by the EBS group, even if they are desupported by the development group.

a.       [Nadia edits]: If a technology, that is used by EBS functionality, is desupported by the technology team at Oracle, then EBS will take over the support for that technology as long as it is needed by EBS functionality. A good example is the Oracle Workflow, which is a pre-req for EBS and is now supported by Oracle EBS development team and not by the Oracle Technology team. If one day, Oracle Forms are desupported by the technology organization and as long as Forms are required by EBS, then EBS will guarantee its support through the life of EBS.

      A few CEMLI questions came up and I thought Nadia said the CEMLI tool would become available without requiring a consulting engagement.

a.       [Nadia edits]: CEMLI is a great tool to report on the customization, but what is also interesting is to understand where those CEMLIs are being used in the customization. There is a session at Oracle OpenWorld that talks about the CEMLI Analyzer, a tool to help customer figure out the impact of CEMLIs, figure out where each customization is being used. The session is called “20920 – Oracle E-Business Suite: CEMLI Impact Analyzer”  on Thursday at at 3pm, Moscone West, Rm: 2014:

OOW Sunday Sessions I Liked

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The R12 Upgrade SIG, see below post for the details.

Craig Shallahamer, as usual, had spectacular data points, charting and graphic representations of complex ideas in his presentation “Introduction to Oracle Buffer Cache Internals”. This was not an introduction, but a detailed thesis on the proper configuration and troubleshooting of the Buffer Cache. Bravo.

Kamran Agayev gave a very good overview of “11g RMAN New Features”. I was very impressed with his research, demos and presentation skills (video in his powerpoints!).

Tim Gorman, the godfather of Data Warehousing, presented “Partitioning – Scaling to Infinity and Beyond”. Excellent, I seen this presentation a dozen times and still learn something new each time.

 

OOW R12.1 Upgrade SIG

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Chairperson – Barb Matthews, Panelists included: Sandra Vucinic (moderator), Kaberi Nayak, Bill Dunham, Michael Brown, Susan Behn and Mike Swing.

This was a very informative panel with major interaction with the EBS product team including Nadia Bendjedou, Max Arderius, Lester Gutierrez , Anne Carlson and another lady from support who seemed well integrated into the development cycle.

The first question is the question Nadia gets asked all the time; Why not wait for Fusion to upgrade from 11.5.10.2? Some initial promises about that capability have nixed and the rule is Oracle will support 11.5.10.2 and 12.1, but when 12.2 comes out 11.5.10.2 is history.

I answered the question based on Nadia’s presentation, that we should strive to stay current on our application release and prepare our customizations for Fusion by converting to a Fusion supported framework:  OBIEE, BI Publisher, JDeveloper/ADF and Enterprise Manager.

The second question was, “Why not wait for 12.2. and skip the 12.1.3 Upgrade?”

My answer was that the tech stack change to the application server, WebLogic, would complicate the upgrade and since R12.2 is not released, there is no guaranteed upgrade patch from 11.5.10.2 to R12.2. Michael Brown added that customers waiting for the R12.2 upgrade would run out of support before 12.2 was released. I stressed the importance of the 12.1.3 Upgrade, as not only the biggest financial change to EBS in years, but that users will need time to fully utilize the new SLA  functionality.

Floyd Teter interceded, though I chastised him for not asking questions, but making comments, even though he was no longer on the Upgrade SIG panel. This is pure jest, as I had invited Floyd to make comments, but had to give him a “hard time” for jumping in without a formal invite from Sandra, the moderator.

A further qualification of support as it relates to when the products are released was offered by Nadia. For instance, R12.1 was released in May 2009 and will be supported with premium suppport for 5 years. There will be another 3 years of extended support, followed by sustaining support. The bottom line is, you don’t want to be on sustaining support. If you’re using Payroll, that requires yearly updates, these updates are not included in Sustaining support. That means extended support for 11.5.10.2 will end November 2012. Any customers on Payroll will want to be upgraded before 2013.

Max added that extended support for R12.1.3 would be valid through June 2017.

The next question was about upgrade or re-implement. Everyone agreed that the upgrade process from 11.5.10.2 to R12.1.3 was robust and well documented and was far cheaper than re-implementing.  Someone pointed out that Oracle re-implemented, but that was before the advent of Upgrade by Request. In addition, Bill Dunham suggested that many Chart of Account changes may not really require re-implementation. Furthermore, ePrentice has a product that can map the new COA to the old COA eliminate the need to re-implement.

Nadia explained that some products used in EBS, such as Forms, will be continued to be supported by the EBS group, even if they are desupported by the development group. From this we found out that the 10.1.2 Forms home currently in R12.1 will be maintained by the EBS group and that Forms will be with us even in 12.2.

A few CEMLI questions came up and I thought Nadia said the CEMLI tool would become available without requiring a consulting engagement.