Thursday, May 30, 2013

A thousand thanks!

Well yesterday was the day!  I went over 1000 visits to the blog, and met my goal of having 300 visits in a month as well with 2 full days still to go in the month.  I'm really happy so see milestones such as this as it's been a long "ramp up" to 1000 visits, so now I guess the next big milestone is 2000 visits which could be as soon as 3 months away or as long as 12 months away; it really is anybody's guess.  I'm going to work even harder to make the site useful to the target audience, system administrators and support individuals, so that something I share today will have relevance a year or two from now at the same time I'm trying to keep everybody up to date on trainings and seminars which I think will have value to you.

Again, thanks!
-The Oracle EMT

P.S.  If you have feedback about the blog in general, please feel free to add comments to this thread!

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Internet Expenses - import and approval statuses

Have you ever wondered what import status an Internet Expense is in, or if it's been approved even?  Fear no more Oracle traveller!  I've bookmarked the My Oracle Support note 107849.1 entitled "Explain the Meanings of SOURCE and WORKFLOW_APPROVED_FLAG Column values in Internet Expenses" and this table has come in handy several times when I need to get quick at a glance information about the expense data in the tables.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

What's PROD and not PROD?

A blog entry from a Pythian team member helps us change some of our daily tools so we can easily distinguish a PROD environment connection from a non-PROD environment connection.  I haven't been able to sit down and come up with my own schema with colors for PROD, QA, DEV, PROJ, SANDBOX, etc. but I'm planning on doing it when I get a chance and hopefully before I make a mistake in one of them!

Saturday, May 25, 2013

An Oracle podcast on the ACE program

From the ArchBeat comes a podcast in three parts, which I really enjoyed listening to as a. I've wanted to become an Oracle ACE for quite some time and b. Bob Rhubart is a really good host for the panelists to talk about their experiences and how they became involved with the program.  Great motivation to keep doing what I'm doing with the blog!

Friday, May 24, 2013

New certification goodness


Not only is there a new certification available for Oracle Exadata Database Machine X3 Administration which I'm really looking forward to investigating more and one day maybe obtaining, but even more interesting to me is the certification that just came out on Oracle Database 11g Release 2 SQL Tuning.  Both certifications require only a single test, although the SQL Tuning has more than one class available for training from Oracle, and may be something which is a worthwhile goal as the investment of time could be advantageous for you.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Concurrent Manager holding lock on a report

For some reason, we had a report which was locked up with “Could not reserve record x tries” so you couldn't View Details or Hold Request and even running a script to change the HOLD_FLAG was just hanging out.  Looking at gv$session, the user didn't have any sessions which would've lead me to believe they had this locked up so I ran my handy dandy Exadata lock script to find the session holding my script up.  The session had nothing for MODULE or ACTION, but the CLIENT_INFO "0                                                     0         " looked familiar so I bounced the Conflict Resolution Manager without any changes happening.  I started looking closer, as the report was sitting in the Quick Manager so I issued a Deactivate which took it down to only 1 Actual process and a Target of 0 but it just kept sitting there.  Looking at the log files via Processes showed just one thread Active but when I clicked on Manager Log I received this error message:

APP-FND-01632: Cannot open file <directory>/w<process ID?>.mgr for reading

Cause: [Routine] encountered an error when attempting to open file <directory>/w<process ID?>.mgr for reading.

Action: Verify that the filename is correct, the environment variables controlling that filename are correct, and the file exists.

Action: Verify that protections on that file permit reading by this program.

Knowing that there was a problem with this thread, I then issued a Terminate for the Quick Manager and once it was completed with the Actual/Target both at 0 my script finally finished running as it no longer was encountering the locking condition.  After committing my script, so the report was now Inactive/On Hold rather than Inactive/No Manager, I did an Activate for the Quick Manager and once it was back up I removed the hold on the report.  It ran to completion in 2 seconds.

Now there are obviously some questions I have about this, as to why the manager thread had just locked up when it tried to pick up or start running the request, or if the string of numbers in the file name is actually a process ID which I can then backtrack later and give you more information in a later posting.

Monday, May 20, 2013

Exalogic sysadmin documentation

Interesting article on how sysadmin tasks for Exalogic are designed to be hours instead of weeks.  This also has a link to the Exalogic Enterprise Deployment Guide, and a whitepaper PDF (yes that seems to be a reoccurring theme lately) for Managing Oracle Engineered Systems - Exalogic (Physical) that has sections titled "How is Exalogic different?", "Monitoring and Alerting" and "Tuning" which may be of interest to you.  Until now, I'd never heard of Exabus but now I know something about it.  Do you?

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Arup Nanda on deadlocking

Great in-depth article from Arup on deadlocks, even though I can say I don't have a 100% handle on everything he's saying, where I can follow along it's extremely useful and helpful for the next time I might encounter such a situation.  Highlights of it for me were the definition between TM and TX locks, the deadlock graph, and the special cases listed.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Learning some about AQ tables

After having some data that didn't seem quite right with items flowing into one of our AQ tables, we went looking for information out there on the web as one usually does and this nugget may interest you.  Not only is there a bug for timestamps to be incorrect with AQ tables, but there is also a very strong suggestion not to change the tables in a certain way.  Short, but good read.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Migrating Oracle EBS Database to Exadata

I thought this had an interesting whitepaper PDF detailing just how one can migrate their EBS database over to Exadata without losing a drop of data!  This makes use of the Cross-platform Transportable Tablespaces (XTTS) technology, so not only do you get to find out how Oracle Data Pump works in this situation but you can read up on yet another Oracle based solution with XTTS and maybe pick up a thing or two like I did.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Getting alerts from OEM 12c

A through article detailing how to set up alerts, adding notifications and rules, with a link to a whitepaper PDF on how to implement this for an enterprise situation.  Well worth the read!

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

EBS Tax Training

This training session looks like an interesting one about the setup and data integrity for the EBS Tax module in general.  I might sign up for it, just to see the case study!

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

SPAM (and not the meat product either)

With my blog growing, it appears that I've been recognized by external individuals running spamming or some other kinds of websites as random websites are visiting my blog even though I haven't done much promoting or linkage out there.  So in that vein, I go searching by the domain names when I find a new one and as a result I found a great resource which lists a lot of these sites out.  It even looks to be updated regularly, so as fast as these sites can pop up, that's a great asset in a site like this so I thought it may interest my fellow bloggers out there.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

A new Exadata book!

I'm really interested to get my hands on a copy of this new book by John Clarke! Reading this book by Rick Greenwald really helped me prepare for our implementation of Exadata, so now that we're almost a year in it'd be nice to see a new perspective for how we could solve some problems or address new problems which may lie ahead for us.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Purchasing R12 RUP patches

From this post, the latest and greatest Procurement Family 12.1.3 Rollup Patch 15843459:R12.PRC_PF.B was released at the end of March which may resolve some issues you are facing in your current 12.1.3 environment or may help avoid issues if you are just starting to work on an upgrade.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

New Gather Schema Statistics errors

After moving to Exadata we were able to change some of our operational tasks, and one of those was to run our Gather Schema Statistics with the ALL parameter instead of chunking it out by our biggest schema names because of how fast it runs.  With that, comes finding errors we never saw before and one of which was "ORA-20001: invalid column name or duplicate columns/column groups/expressions in method_opt" for these items:

Schema       Object
--------       -------
FIIFII_FIN_ITEM_HIERARCHIES
APJE_CH_PAYMENT_REF
JE_FR_DAS_010
JE_FR_DAS_010_NEW
JG_ZZ_SYS_FORMATS_ALL_B
JG_ZZ_SYS_FORMATS_ALL_TL
GLJE_BE_LINE_TYPE_MAP
JE_BE_LOGS
JE_BE_VAT_REP_RULES
ALLJE_BE_LINE_TYPE_MAP
JE_BE_LOGS
JE_BE_VAT_REP_RULES

Searching My Oracle Support I was able to find a direct hit with note "Gather Schema Statistics fails with Ora-20001 errors after 11G database upgrade [ID 781813.1]" that was able to walk me through the way to identify which items were an issue, and how they could be resolved.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

SOA, OSB, Fusion Middleware

I found what I think are some quite useful articles detailing the Oracle Service Bus architecture and SOA and Fusion Middleware with some detailed PDFs attached to the end of those articles as well.  Along this same vein, I found a great intro to Fusion Security as well from the same ArchBeat entry!

You may be asking yourself: why this sudden interest in all things Middleware?  Honestly, it's not such a sudden interest.  We have a web of servers and services and the spider in the middle of the web most times is SOA, OSB or some other Middleware layer technology.  This isn't really a bad thing most of the time, yet I feel as if I need to know more about the technology and interworkings so this may not interest most people visiting my blog but those people in the same boat (or about to go sailing on the same journey) may find these articles valuable.

Monday, May 6, 2013

ICM will mark this request as completed, will it?

From time to time, when trying to access concurrent requests you can be presented with this error message:

Request [ID] can no longer be cancelled.  The Concurrent Manager process that was running this request has exited abnormally.  The ICM will mark this request as completed with error.

That would be fine if it actually happened, but the problem is that I've seen this error message on many different EBS, Tech Stack and database versions over seven years and I've never actually seen the ICM mark the request in any way when the request gets into this state.  There are 2 ways that I know how to resolve this.  One, go into Help -> Diagnostics -> Examine (if you have this available) and change the fields PHASE_CODE to C and the STATUS CODE to X in two separate "transactions", Ctrl-S to save the record and when you refresh the form the request should show as Completed/Terminated.  The other way is much more simple, where you write a script to update the same columns for the request in fnd_concurrent_requests as such:

update fnd_concurrent_requests
set phase_code = 'C', status_code = 'X'
where request_id = [ID]

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Child cursors

Christian Antognini presents us with an existential database question asking how many children can a parent cursor have.  What I find the most interesting about this, is how the answer to that question differs based on what database version you have as well as what bug patches you've applied.  Again, I haven't had to encounter issues regarding this but it will be in the back of my mind going forward.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Community Manager, or Support Manager?

Recently there were a couple of blog posts from the Oracle Social Spotlight which caught my eye, one of which had a wish list that a recent Community Manager put together and it could absolutely go for any individuals in a Support organization while the other shows the "What, Who, Where, Why" of what Oracle believes a good Community Manager is and this list could also double for what a good Support Manager is too.

Amazing!

Going into the month of April, my small blog had just crossed the 400 hits mark and I was hoping to hit 100 hits a month for the first time.  I'd be lying if I said that I didn't think the blog would be able to hit that, but I'm staggered at how far that mark has been broken by!  Last night, the blog hit it's 700th view for a little under 300 hits during the month of April!!  Simply amazing, and judging by the viewership, you enjoy what I'm doing just as much as I am so let's keep rocking and rolling shall we?

Thanks,
The Oracle EMT