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 . . .

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 . . .

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

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 . . .

As many of you know a cloning is one of the most DBA time consuming operations. For the first few times an Apps DBA may enjoy it. However, after the 20th cloning it becomes a boring routine.

For some time I have been interested to get the EBS cloning process 100% automated and I must admit that for many customers we have been quite successful with the process; saving them tons of DBA boring hours ;)

If you have tried to automate EBS cloning then you definitely know that you can’t get through without hacking and customizing the Oracle-provided Rapid Clone utility. One of the areas we should “hack” the code to make it running in batch scripts is the services startup bit. The problem is that by default straight after Rapid Clone is completed Oracle starts all the services on the Apps node and until now there wasn’t a way to change it. There are many reasons why you wouldn’t start Apps processes straight after Rapid Clone is completed. Among them are APPS user password change (this is typical operation for cloning), SSO integration, CM/CR disabling etc.

R12.1.2 brings on board a small but very nice feature. From now on, Rapid Clone will ask you if you would like to start services at the end of Rapid Clone call:

Do you want to startup the Application Services for EBSPRD? (y/n) [y] : n

How great is this? Now we can specify that we don’t want to starup services and run after cloning steps before we are ready to start the environment.

My best regards to all Apps DBAs around,

Yury

I would like to share with you the virtual hosts set-up (two nodes each on the application tier, and two on the DB tier) for a customer using 11.5.9.

The Facts

• DB Version: 10.2.3
• CRS Version: 10.2.0.3
• ASM Version: 10.2.0.3
• APPS Version: 11.5.9

Set-ups by Sys-Admins

Sysadmins must set up a virtual hostname amongst the two available middle-tier (Applications) hosts. In our case, the hostnames are erpapp01, and erpapp02. Then the sysadmins set up a VIP as erpapp.

We also require from sysadmins virtual hostname amongst the two available backend (database) hosts. Hostnames in our case are erpdb01, and erpdb02. They then set up a VIP as erpdb. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hardware

My Dell desktop:

[root@erp RPMs]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz
cpu MHz         : 2793.022
cache size      : 512 KB

[root@erp RPMs]# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:      2073404 kB
...

Operating System

Download Centos Linux, and install the Linux operating system.

Kernel Version

Download kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL.i686.rpm and apply with:

$ rpm -ivh  kernel-smp-2.6.9-42.0.3.EL.i686.rpm 

The kernel should look like this:

root@erp RPMs]# uname -a
Linux erp.itskills.com 2.6.9-42.0.3.ELsmp #1 SMP Thu Oct 5 15:04:03 CDT 2006 i686 i686
i386 GNU/Linux

Read the rest of this entry . . .

For those of you who have been under a rock for the last several years, there is a buzz-phrase floating around—cloud computing. If you haven’t been paying attention, it is time to wake up.

While I could spend an entire blog post—if not several—on a definition of cloud computing, I will be talking only about cloud computing in the sense of companies moving servers from their building or network operations center to running virtual servers in this computing cloud.

While there are a number of companies providing virtual servers, the most visible is Amazon, with their Amazon Web Services (AWS). I will be talking about AWS in this post as it is the service with which I am most familiar. It seems like every month, AWS rolls out new options and services. Just recently Amazon announced that you can now run on AWS the Windows operating system along with SQL Server.

Amazon also announced a service level agreement (SLA) of 99.5%. The SLA is important. It is a guarantee of service uptime. If Amazon don’t meet the SLA, then you get money back. As any of you will know, you have to be able to count on your data center. 99.5% is a pretty good level of coverage.

Beyond that, one of the new features Amazon will be implementing during the next year is the use of regions and availability zones. Regions are distinctly different areas of a country (or completely separate countries); availability zones are designed to be insulated from failures in other availability zones and provide inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity to other availability zones in the same region. What does this mean? It will soon be very easy to deploy a set of servers in different areas and/or regions so that your data and servers are spread out and not vulnerable to a single point of failure.

I am not going to go into any detail about how virtual servers work. That’s not the point of this post. I am going to concentrate on what you can do with virtual servers.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hello everyone,

I have a senior Oracle Applications DBA opening here at Pythian’s headquarters in Ottawa. Working at Pythian is different than working in-house or as a consultant, because you’ll be making your contributions available to each of the customers assigned to your team, allowing you to see more use cases, more technologies, and work with more and varied environments, all the while building interesting and long-lasting working relationships with your peers.

I will gladly sponsor a work visa to come to Canada for the right candidate anywhere in the world.

We support some of the most interesting and mission-critical Oracle Applications environments in the world, including one that is FDA-regulated in support of a global biosciences company. Meaning lives are at stake. It doesn’t get any more mission-critical, or more personally rewarding, than that.

Top criteria:

• Outstanding Oracle Apps DBA on UNIX skills, bonus points for Apps RAC and major implementation and upgrades experience
• Exceptional troubleshooting, problem-solving and learning skills
• Superior productivity per hour and overall getting-the-job-done-right abilities
• Fluent communication skills in English, both written and oral, are mandatory. Second or third languages are also a huge benefit (we have customers all over the world and are always eager to add a language to our repertoire)
• Core DBA skills are a prerequisite for Apps DBA at this level, but you know that already
• Publications, blogging and presentations experience and interest a plus
• Experience with Oracle Applications Server and Portal a plus
• SAP, Peoplesoft and other ERP experience a plus

Job highlights:

• Work in an elite team of Apps DBAs for an elite group and growing of customers; you’ll learn more here in a year than in any in-house DBA job no matter how long you stay; I personally guarantee it.
• Work and gain valuable experience on every mainstream platform, including AIX, HP/UX, Solaris, Linux, Tru64, Windows, etc.
• Support every mainstream database technology and feature, including Oracle RAC, advanced queuing, advanced replication, every flavour of dataguard, RMAN, streams, etc. etc.
• Work across multiple industries including health care, manufacturing, media, dot-com, education, retail, services, and many more.
• Work in a company that values hard work, not long work.
• Work in a company that will allow you to research and write articles, presentations and blog posts on company time, and pay for you to present your research at just about any user conference worldwide where it gets accepted.

Learn more about Pythian and see our customer list at http://www.pythian.com.

To apply:

Send me an email with a one-paragraph introduction of who you are and why you are exceptional to me at vallee@pythian.com. Feel free to attach your resume in any format (Word, PDF, RTF, ODT, whatever makes you happy.)

More information about Ottawa:
Ottawa is a city of around 1,000,000 and is a great place to live.
Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa
Cost of living: http://www.finfacts.com/costofliving.htm
Quality of life:

http://www.finfacts.com/irelandbusinessnews/publish/article_1000846.shtml

http://www.canadaka.net/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=3052 (Globe & Mail article reprint)