Pythian Group

Hello Apps DBA,

I’ve just come across an old known issue again today. Was working in the greatest and latest 12.1.2 Oracle e-Business Suite environment. Surprisingly, I face the old issue when WF_LOCAL_ROLES and WF_LOCAL_USER_ROLES objects (among other objects) are set to NOLOGGING mode. Strictly speaking, the LOGGING attribute was set to YES at the table level, but several partitions of that table were set to LOGGING = NO! The SQL’s below will help you check if your environments are effected. Keep in mind that you should sound the alarm at your business if any other modules’ objects are in the list.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #3 – Focus on E-Business Suite + Oracle/Sun deal
When: April 28, 2009 5:30 PM
Where: As usual – Sydney Mechanics School of Art
How: just register at the SOM website.

We have to limit the number of people to 40 this time so make sure you RSVP timely!

We are gathering at 5:30pm and technical goodies are starting at 6pm so use this time to catch up with other members. We should finish by 8:30pm including a beaks and some post follow up. The presentation schedule is a bit floating this time.

As usual, we should have some pizza and beverages facilitating seamless peer networking. ;-)

In addition to the main topic, we plan to have some overview of Oracle / Sun deal and share what everyone thinks about it + report from the InSync09 conference. We will talk a bit about MySQL as it becomes Oracle technology now.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

About once a week, our team gets a request from the server admins to provide some information on why a database server is running slowly. This typically begins a painstaking process of finding the main processes on the OS side and tracing them back to database sessions (and possibly even to Oracle Apps Concurrent Requests).

As we all know, writing SQL to do this tie-back-when-the-issue-is-happening is not a good practice — there is always the chance to mis-type something or to forget a join and have the data come back as unusable for good decision-making. Not to mention that there is usually a time constraint involved when diagnosing high server load, etc.

We started fairly small with a solution to our problem and simply joined the v$process view to the v$session to get the OS process ID tied out to a database session. Once you have that information from v$session, you can start to going in other views such as v$sort_usage, v$sql, v$session_wait, v$transaction, and so on. Some of these additional views may have relevant information for your specific issue.

We had an additional issue in our case — the databases that sit on our servers run Oracle Applications, so simply tying to a database session provides only half of the picture. You also need to be able to pull information from the fnd_concurrent_requests table to be able to see if the OS process may be generated from a Concurrent Request within Oracle Apps.

Attached to this post (see bottom for link) is a general diagram that the team came up with for relating our tables together, taking RAC into consideration. Read the rest of this entry . . .

If you check out the “Butterfly Effect” on Wikipedia, you’ll find a rather interesting reference to, “sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory.” Fascinating use of phrase that probably doesn’t mean much to normal people until it happens to you. I could give you lots of theoretical examples, but perhaps a real-life one will make more sense.

Last week, a client of Pythian’s came to us with an environment that had recently been upgraded from Oracle Applications 11.5.9 to 11.5.10. In the past, Pythian has not supported the Oracle Applications environment for this client, but that is one of the strengths of Pythian — we have DBAs with a broad range of knowledge and expertise to support just about anything thrown at us. The emails from the client users suggested a myriad of performance issues, ranging from forms being slow to POs not being processed.

I can sympathize with the client, as I used to be one (that’s how I came to work for Pythian — but it’s also another story that I shall relate sometime). Performance issues in Applications can be tricky at best, as there are so many diverse factors to consider. Not having supported Oracle Apps for this client before means that we were starting with a clean slate and just looking for things out of the ordinary based on experience with other clients, sort of “searching for a needle in a haystack.”

The first thing was to just login to the application and take a quick walk about the area — did anything stand out? What was the first impression? It took a bit of time to get connected initially, but the forms seemed to come up without any undue issues. One of the early comments in the email we had received mentioned that POs weren’t being processed by the workflows. Maybe a trip to “View Requests” was in order . . .

Read the rest of this entry . . .

I recently implemented OID/SSO with E-Business Suite 11.5.10 CU2, and experienced some issues after the entire setup went smoothly. I hope this note might help others troubleshoot, as it took me a while to figure out the root cause of the problem.

Facts

1. E-Business Suite Version 11.5.10 CU2
2. 10G Version 10.1.2.2

You have done the install and everything went fine. After the bounce you see the following:

1. Login from a remote location
2. Navigate to Administrator System –> Security –> User –> create
3. Enter username and save. The error occurs.

Unable to call fnd_ldap_wrapper.create_user due to the following reason:
ORA-20001: Unable to call fnd_ldap_wrapper.create_user due to the following reason:
An unexpected error occured . Please contact System Administrator..(USER_NAME=OIDTEST)

Read the rest of this entry . . .

My name is Vasu Balla, and I’ve been with Pythian for about four months now. I have worked on Oracle E-Business Suite instances for over five years, and I’ve never had a moment where I felt bored.

I am constantly challenged with new technologies and new issues, and my Pythian team’s clients continue to present interesting issues. The most difficult are the ones that are very intermittent or not easily reproducible. If you try to get answers for these kind of issues from Oracle Tech Support by opening a SR, your chances are next to none. Our team recently encountered an issue a client had had with Oracle Configurator for two years. They had followed up with Oracle Tech Support for over a year and had eventually learned just to live with the problem. When Pythian came in, we were shocked to learn the history of the problem. It turned out to be one of the most exciting problems we’ve resolved.

I am new to blogging, but quite experienced in reading blog posts. My Google Reader collects over 100 articles per day, mostly around my interests, which are:

• Oracle 11i E-Business Suite Advanced topologies
  • Hardware Load Balancing
  • DNS based Load Balancing
  • Jserv Load Balancing
• Oracle 11i SSL Implementation at Load balancer level
• Forms load balancing using Jserv + forms servlet mode
• Oracle Concurrent Managers PCP setup
• Oracle 11i Apps with RAC configuration

Signing off, now — with a promise to post some interesting stuff on topics such as these. Stay tuned.