Pythian Group

One of the hot topics at the UKOUG 2011 Technology and E-Business Suite Conference last December was the upcoming release of Oracle e-Business Suite R12.2. The new release will bring us lots of new features, usability improvements and new versions of technology stack components (Oracle Database 11g R2 and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g R1 as the application server), but the most important and impressive new feature of course will be online patching. Online patching is supposed to change the game completely. All owners of E-Business Suite environments know that patching requires downtime. Although it can be reduced with various techniques (e.g. staged APPL_TOP), some downtime is still required to apply a number of changes. Online patching will not eliminate downtime completely, but will reduce it significantly by using  “Edition Based Redefinition” (EBR) at the database level and using a secondary applications file system for online patching. In fact, all patching activity will be an online operation; downtime will be required only to switch from one version to another. Read the rest of this entry . . .

For the final day of UKOUG there are quite a few Pythian presentations. Unfortunately a lot of them happen at the same time, so it won’t be possible to attend them all live.

Using Oracle GoldenGate to Minimize Database Upgrade Risk

10:10, Media Suite
Marc Fielding

Even the best-planned database upgrades can leave nagging questions: what happens if my upgraded system performs unexpectedly? Is there a way I can go back to the previous version without downtime and data loss? Oracle GoldenGate allows DBAs to give affirmative answers to these questions. Drawing on upgrade experiences ranging from mid-sized databases to a large 10TB 90-CPU OLTP system, this session will show how to optimally configure Oracle GoldenGate, minimize downtime, maximize replication performance, and integrate Oracle GoldenGate into existing infrastructure such as Oracle ASM and storage-based replication.

Learn the various deployment scenarios where GoldenGate can minimize upgrade risk and delivery business value. Find out how GoldenGate can help not only during the upgrade, but after the upgrade as well. Learn how to use GoldenGate in medium- and high-volume environments. See real-world, tested GoldenGate configurations. Find out lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid.

The Answer to Free Memory Swap and Everything

10:10, Hall 8A
Christo Kutrovsky

Do I have enough memory? Why is my free memory so low? Am I swapping to disk? Can I increase my SGA (db cache) size? Can I add another instance to this server? Are my system resources used optimally? These are all questions that often haunt DBAs. This presentation is The Answer. It covers in detail the different types of memory, how to monitor memory, and how to optimally use it with Oracle. Multiple examples in the presentation demonstrate how certain actions on the database side cause different memory areas to be allocated and used on the OS side. Key underlying differences in operating systems approaches to managing memory will be highlighted, with special attention given to Linux and Solaris. Using Linux as an example throughout, this presentation explains how to effectively use tools such as “top”, “vmstat” and “/proc/meminfo” to look into into a system’s allocation and use of memory.

Amazon RDS, EC2 and S3 for Oracle Databases

11:20am, Hall 10B
Alex Gorbachev

This technical session focuses on specific recommendations and guidelines for leveraging the Amazon Web Services platform to host Oracle databases. We will looks into traditional database hosting using EC2 platform as well as recently introduced Amazon RDS on Oracle. We will look into how to configure, provision, backup, restore, monitor, and secure your databases in AWS. We will also look on how you can leverage S3 cloud storage for hybrid cloud deployments, particularly for backup and archival storage.

Backup and Recovery Roundtable

11:20am, Roundtable Area
Michael Abbey

A discussion of backup and recovery technology, problems and solutions. We will poll the attendees for an agenda on the day and proceed with an informal discussion not limited to:

RMAN, OSB, Sans, Data Guard backups, RAC backups and other topics of interest.

Concurrent Processing Performance Analysis for Apps DBAs

2:25pm, Hall 10B
Maris Elsins

Concurrent processing is one of the key elements of Oracle E-Business Suite, that’s used by most of modules for scheduling and processing background jobs. Keeping this functionality healthy is important to get maximum performance out of it. The paper describes the key metrics to estimate the performance of the concurrent managers, discusses approaches and techniques that can be used to understand how well the concurrent processing is set up, what are the bottlenecks and delays in processing of concurrent requests and provides tips on how to deal with each of the identified problem. This paper is targeted for Oracle Applications DBAs and technical consultants.

Another December has started and you know what it means right? It’s the Christmas time? NO! It’s time for UKOUG Technology and e-Business Suite 2011 conference! There are not many things that can make a passionate Apps DBA more excited than that. UKOUG Tech & eBS conferences are the only ones in Europe that have such a rich content for Application DBAs and this year it will not be different. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hello everyone! After a bit more than 2 months, it’s finally time for my first Pythian blog post. In addition to getting accustomed to the “Pythian way” of doing things and learning as much as I can about my clients, I’ve really been enjoying getting to know the smart group of people that comprise our ERP team. It’s fitting, therefore, that my first post is “crowdsourced,” in that it grew out of several conversations with my teammates. We’ve been talking a lot about Fusion Apps, the upcoming release of E-Business Suite Release 12.2, and what it all means not just for our clients, but for us as Apps DBAs. One of the topics that’s been on our minds recently is:

The clock is ticking down on Apps 11i. What does all the new stuff coming down the line mean for those customers in the next 12-18 months?

Oddly enough, the answer to that question is:

Not very much. At least, not yet.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

On October 27th Oracle hosted a webcast of Sysadmin-oriented Preview of EBS 12.2. It was an enlighting webcast, which gave a very good idea about things coming up in Release 12.2. Today I want to discuss about one prominent feature of upcoming Oracle E-Business suite Release 12.2, which is Online patching feature. Below the screengrab of a slide from presentation gives a nice overview of the feature.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

In this post:

• Oracle Fusion Applications 11G is released and available
• My initial conclusions
• Other thoughts

Disclaimer: Please note that the conclusions in this blog post are my own personal opinions.

Oracle Fusion Applications 11G is released and available

For all of you who haven’t yet noticed, Oracle Fusion Applications 11G is now available! You can get the installation from the Oracle E-Delivery site in no time. This is the moment many of us have been waiting for, if not for many years then for many months for sure. For me the media availability isn’t the most important thing – it is certainly a very important factor and I am planning to get my hands dirty with it very soon (stay tuned ;). Keeping in mind the amount of effort Oracle have invested in the product and the fact that the product is going to be a flagship ERP system on the market for at least next 10 years the most important thing is to get an access to the documentation. For me to understand the concepts and fundamental principals of the product is much more important than getting it installed ASAP ( this must be a sign of age , *sigh* ;)

My initial conclusions

I am at the very beginning of the long, long, long journey. Read the rest of this entry . . .

I’m very excited to announce this somewhat old news — we have a brand new Oracle ACE at Pythian — Yury Velikanov. Fantastic addition to Pythian’s team of ACEs and ACE Directors — Fahd Mirza, Gwen Shapira, Jared Still, Christo Kutrovsky and myself. If you want to know more about Oracle ACE Program, the latest issue of Oracle Magazine has an article written by the fellow Oracle ACE Mike Riley — Everything Is Coming Up ACEs!.

I’ve known Yury for a while as I met him online on Oracle-L many years ago. The world is small and after living on different continents (North America and Europe), providence put us together on the third continent — Australia. As I was building our Australian business in Sydney, it took me a year to convince Yury to join Pythian. But I tell you it was worth the efforts!
Read the rest of this entry . . .

This is a short one. Yesterday I was asked to marry an EBS autoconfig feature to an Oracle 11G Cluster infrastructure. In particular the client’s intention was to use srvctl to manage Instances and at the same time keeping DB side Network related configuration managed by autoconfig.

The biggest challenge I faced during that work was how to change default TNS_ADMIN location for DB Network configuration files. The default location is $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/${CONTEXT_NAME}. This makes the location unique on each of the DB hosts. There is no way you can point Oracle 11G Cluster to Network configuration files located in the unique locations per instance.

There are several possible solutions. However, I used the following:

Edit $ORACLE_HOME/appsutil/template/adcvmdb.xml file and change line

      %s_db_oh%%/%network%/%admin%/%%s_contextname%

to

      %s_db_oh%%/%network%/%admin

The is the only way I found (in the given time-frame) to change TNS_ADMIN location to the default location used by Oracle Cluster to manage Listeners and sourcing tns configuration.

I would be glad to hear about any other solutions you guys are using out there.

OTHER:
– This is 11i EBS integrating with 11GR2 Oracle Cluster
– The client wants use a custom listener running under OS user running EBS DB Instances
– The following command could be used to point Oracle Cluster to network configuration files location (common for whole cluster)
srvctl setenv database -d SANDERP -t TNS_ADMIN=
srvctl setenv listener -l LISTENER_SANDERP -t TNS_ADMIN=
– I have considered using official customization approach rutting that file in “custom” directory. However in that particular case it didn’t work. It may be due the fact that it is DB side configuration or 11i issue.
– I tried to change many related CONTEXT_FILE values and didn’t get expected results. Therefore ended up with that customization.

Have a great week :)

Yury

Here is the latest and greatest DBD::Oracle for your programming pleasure.

You can find the Zip file here

DBD-Oracle-1.28-RC1.zip

This is a long overdue maintenance release that fixes a large number of bug and issues which are detailed below in the Changes.

Don’t worry there are some new goodies in this release namely I have added in 4 new
server side tracing/debugging attributes
Read the rest of this entry . . .

I just recently faced an issue on how to automate the Workflow Mailer override address for development and testing environments during the EBS cloning process. For the information of others, the “override address” is an email address you can set per EBS environment where WF Mailer will send ALL emails avoiding sending emails to real users during testing and development.

The problem is that the only official way to set the override address in the latest ATG releases is to go through the OAM portal and change the override email via the GUI interface. The GUI sends a verification code to the email address entered, asking to enter it on the next screen to confirm the change. The issue is that we as Apps DBAs do not always have access to the override address mail box. On top of that if we are looking to script whole EBS cloning process we need to find SQL-PL/SQL based solution.
Read the rest of this entry . . .