Monthly Archives: November 2011

I’m speaking at RMOUG

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The Big Picture of the R12.1.3 Upgrade

It’s coming! Don’t close your eyes. Face it head on. Ease your worries by attending this walkthrough of an upgrade from Release 11.5.10.2 to Release 12.1.3. We’ll describe the tried and true tips and techniques when we upgrade – everything from “oops – did you know about these extra patches?” to ways to decrease your down time.

The Big Picture shows at a high level the tasks and challenges of the R12.1.3 upgrade. The Big Picture describes how to get started, how to motivate business users to upgrade, and whether to re-implement or upgrade. It covers the technical upgrade steps with a few functional steps; understanding these steps helps all team members work toward a better upgrade.

OAUG Connection Point Atlanta 2011 Nov 15-16

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OAUG deserves a big “THANKS” from the Atlanta area BI and EBS upgrade customers. OAUG has recognized that travel budgets for training have deminished, and has therefore, brought the proverbial mountain to the users. Good job OAUG for recognizing the needs of the users.

Great Sessions. On Tuesday, the keynote featured Ognjen Pavlovic from Oracle, speaking on the EBS: Vision, Strategy and Roadmap.

I presented “The Big Picture: Upgrading to R12.1.3” at 9:45. After my presentation, I was asked to fill in for a missing panelist, on the OAUG Fusion Council – Fusion Applications Panel Discussion. The next session was the Best of OOW Panel – Four Presentation We Can’t Stop Talking About. I summarized Nadia’s presentation from OOW on Co-Existence if Fusion with EBS. Bill Dunham summarized Sara Woodhull presentation. In my opinion, Nadia and Sara have the two most important presentations from OOW. Alyssa Johnson summarized the EBS Vision, Strategy and Roadmap presentation from OOW.

In the last session of the day on Tuesday, I presented the “Release 12.1.3 Technical Upgrade Overview”. This is my favorite presentation because I go into alot of details about what breaks in the upgradee and why. I also present my opinion on hardware options.

On Wednesday morning, I went to Barb Matthews’ presentation on “Lessons Learned from the R12.1 Upgrade”. This presentation is based on my upcoming article in OAUG Insight magazine, that Barb helped write.

Then, I went to Donna Campbell’s presentation on “What you need to know about Identifying Customizations, before Upgrading to Release 12.1.3. This was co-presented by Barb Matthews, with an interesting story of a customization that she wrote years ago.

This is a picture of the Release 12.1 Upgrade Panel, with Anne Carlson, Mike Swing and Bill Dunham shown.

R12.1 Upgrade Panel

Connection Point Atlanta November 2011

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Tuesday November 15th

Today I had a very busy day. I presented “The Big Picture” after the keynote. The next hour I was on the OAUG Fusion Council – Fusion Applications Panel Disscusions, with John Stouffer and Alyssa Johnson.

Then, I summarized Nadia’s Co-Existence presentation, from the Best of OOW Panel with Bill Dunham and Alyssa Johnson, and finished the day with the “Release 12.1.3 Technical Upgrade Overview” presentation.

Connection Point – Atlanta

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I’m speaking at the Atlanta Connection Point next week on Nov15th and 16th.

I have two presentations:

The R12.1.3 Technical Upgrade Overview

and,

 The Big Picture of the R12.1 Upgrade

It’s coming! Don’t close your eyes. Face it head on. Ease your worries by attending this walkthrough of an upgrade from Release 11.5.10.2 to Release 12.1.3. We’ll describe the tried and true tips and techniques when we upgrade – everything from “oops – did you know about these extra patches?” to ways to decrease your down time.

The Big Picture shows at a high level the tasks and challenges of the R12.1.3 upgrade. The Big Picture describes how to get started, how to motivate business users to upgrade, and whether to re-implement or upgrade. It covers the technical upgrade steps with a few functional steps; understanding these steps helps all team members work toward a better upgrade.

 

Recent email asks, “Why not wait for 12.2 to upgrade from 11.5.10.2”

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One of the important things to consider with 11.5.10.2 is support. I think Extended Support ends Nov 2013 and without support I’m sure your business will want to upgrade.

You could wait for 12.2, but I wouldn’t want to implement a product with a brand new application server, until a few bugs settle out. 12.2 will use Weblogics.

The 12.1 upgrade is a functional upgrade and the 12.2 is a tech stack upgrade, probably with 11.2.0.3 for the DB. The big deal is WLS and the administration of possibly much more complicated configurations.

At OOW, a development manager at Oracle said that all the platforms, Peoplesoft, JDEdwards all have to run on WLS before they can attempt a “fusion” of the products. This seems a bit obvious, but illustrates the fact that Oracle will be really pushing us hard to 12.2.

If you really want to take on the complexity of educating your users in a completely new way of accounting and trying to resolve new undocumented AS issues at the same time by doing a 12.2 upgrade, good luck.

I think the more sensible approach would be to upgrade to 12.1.3 and then 2 years later upgrade to 12.2. Since, it’s primarily a tech stack upgrade with bug fixes, the users should not need to be retrained.

Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Database Tuning for Packaged Applications

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December 7th at 14:25, Track 1

Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Database Tuning for Packaged Applications

Packaged Applications such as E-Business Suite and Demantra may require significant hardware and performance tuning resources. Large investments in hardware will benefit from periodic tuning of the application and underlying database. Tuning the database for these packaged applications can utilize similar techniques, however the hardware resources required may be vastly different. We are faced with the constraint that we can’t tune the sql in these packaged applications, but we can make the database run faster and thereby, “fix” the offending sql. In addition to the generally used techniques of reorg-ing tables or gathering better statistics, there are six more tuning techniques that can be used to help improve the performance of your packaged application.

This is a practical presentation for those packaged application users that need better performance but without the purist’s focus on tuning sql.

 

 

 

 

 

Meetings with Gustavo and Max at Oracle

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The two Senior Development Managers I met this morning were Max and Gustavo.  We talked about 12.1.3, 12.2, Fusion Applications and Fusion Middleware. This is  my recollection of our discussion.

First, topics from 12.1.3:

OATM – TruTek suggests that OATM be run we before the upgrade to 12.1.3, but  running OATM after the upgrade will remove fragmentation by running “ALTER TABLESPACE MOVE TABLE” on all the tables in each tablespace .  However, in the interest of minimizing downtime during the upgrade, TruTek recommends running OATM before the upgrade and run OATM  after the upgrade, to remove any fragmentation, if present.

Parallel Concurrent Processing and Dead Connection Detection using 11g – with versions of the database before 11gR1, dead connection detection was dependent on TCP Keepalive settings. Now, with 11gR1 and above the dia0 database process eliminates dead connections within 10 seconds and sometimes seems almost immediate.  Special setup of TCP parameters is no longer necessary to perform PCP failover.

Edition Based Redifinition (EBR) was introduced in 11gR2.  Hot Patching uses this database feature in 12.2 with the introduction of “adop” AD Online Patching, the new admin tool for patching that keeps a copy of the Apps Tier for ADOP patching.

TruTek suggested an enhancement to adpatch: to allow a different number of workers for different phases. For example, normal patch jobs run better with fewer workers, in part because of less contention for deferred jobs, while the ad parallel compile runs fastest using all available CPUs.

Topics from 12.2:

In 12.0 and 12.1 the application server is 10gAS and the configuration parameters are incorporated into AutoConfig, leaving out the AS Control management console. In 12.2 the application server is WebLogic and while some parameters, such as DBC configuration parameters for AOL/J are still managed by AutoConfig, the WebLogic Server (WLS) is managed through the WLS Console. This allows admins to configure domains, managed servers,  server clusters, machines, node managers, virtual hosts, work managers and security realms.

All the AOL/J components are essentially the same, including calls to FND_GLOBAL.APPS_INITIALIZE. This sets the FND_GLOBAL_USER_ID, Function Security, NLS and Multi Org parameters. The call to the NLS setting is especially expensive, which is why the JDBC Connection pool will save this session info and try to reuse it if possible.

In 12.2 the OHS will connect to Weblogic with a reverse proxy using the Apache Plugin that supports the APG14 protocol.

12.2 supports EBR and needs the functionality of 11gR2 for EBR. Therefore, 10gR2 and 11gR1 will not support 12.2. Steven Chan’s blog mentions that 11.2.0.3 is on the horizon.

Fusion Applications:

Get ready for Fusion by upgrading to 12.1.3

Introduce SOA to begin to replace existing non-Fusion compatible customizations

Co-Exist with Fusion to take advantage of new functionality in Fusion and use SOA interface with EBS.

ADF does not support flexfields, but OAF still supports flexfields. These pictures are from Nadia’s presentation at Open World. You can launch ADF pages from OAF:

ADF objects can be embedded in in OAF pages.

ADF no longer supports flexfields, but OAF still supports flexfields.

Begin using ADF extensions for EBS to help protect your investment, better enable co-existence with Fusion Applications and ensure your upgrade path to Fusion in the future.

 

 Fusion Middleware:

Prepare for Fusion by implementing Identity Management and Access Manager:

 

 Prepare for Fusion by Implementing OBIEE:

 

 Prepare for Fusion by implementing BI Publisher: