Wednesday, July 31, 2013

OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech - Day 2 + me

The final day of the OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech conference here in Pittsburgh, and my schedule of events for the sessions I attended today include:

9:00 AM - R12 Surprises in User Management - City Center A - Susan Behn and Karen Brownfield with infosemantics.com

While I was going into this presentation expecting just to find out the "surprises" with User Management, I was pleasantly surprised myself to find that Susan and Karen covered a lot of basic core UMX concepts so that we could then understand the "surprises" they were going to present to us.  Great explanation of what the function security and data security layers were and some of the building blocks related to them.  Especially to know that Oracle is adding new roles in UMX so you have to be proactive, instead of reactive.  Some of the notes they shared were 737547.1, 804296.1, 553290.1 and 1162403.1 in this very good presentation.

10:15 AM - Tuning the eBS Middle Tier - City Center B - Arian Stijf

Unfortunately, I was kind of disappointed that Arian decided to condense a day long training into 45m-1h and kept saying "I won't get into that" several times to open his presentation.  My take away was "don't offer a presentation and then tell the audience that you won't be sharing anything they can take back home, with the veiled hint they should talk to you later for consulting".  Even worse, he didn't include any personal or professional details to contact him for the work!  He does seem like a very personable individual and has some good presentation skills keeping the room laughing from time to time but when asked a direct question he avoided answering it and on one occasion said something very strange which isn't what I've heard or experienced.  Doesn't mean it's not true, but again it made me pause.

All that said, I did get a few nuggets of information about notification mailer, advanced queues and different parameters you can change (but not really what you should change it to) for container and component level settings.

11:30 AM - Oracle - Minimizing Oracle EBS Downtimes - Grand Ballroom - Elke Phelps

From a big picture perspective, this was a really interesting presentation.  She gave us several ideas on how to create a maintenance strategy, make sure our system stays healthy and is up-to-date, reduce downtime tips, table AD_TASK_TIMING.  Another big idea shared is that you should define SLAs with your business group to agree on planned/unplanned outages, what Prod and non-Prod outage windows are, and daily/weekly/monthly/yearly regular planned maintenance windows are.  Also, when I get back to work I need to look into Application Testing Suite Accelerators to automate testing!  The My Oracle Supports that were shared in this session were: 1400757.1, 1078973.1, 228779.1, 1077709.1, 387859.1, 236469.1.

1:45 PM - Deployment and System Administration of EBS 12.2 - City Center A - Elke Phelps

First, I need to say it was pretty awesome how Elke had the room setup with a microphone so her voice wouldn't die on her and she didn't drop a beat while the mic was getting set up all around her.  If that was me, and it was the hour following, I would've freaked out and started blubbering like an idiot.  Not that I can't do that on my own, but anyways...I think this session may have been mislabeled because I was looking for changes in how the system would be administrated but it really wasn't a bad session overall because we got a LOT of technical details about 12.2 that isn't even released yet!  The big thing for me is the replacement of the OC4Js in favor of Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) and WebLogic Server (WLS) for 12.2, since I'm not a DBA and I don't use RapidWiz(ard) to really care too much about out of the box RAC install being available.  On the other hand, hearing that we're going to be required to have a dual file system (and a potential 3rd) for the Online Editioning really scares me.  I mean, I'm really glad that the system is getting more complex to allow patching to be entirely "online" (maybe in-line is a better term since concurrent is already taken?) and that Oracle is working with real world customers to get sizing requirements for the multiple filesystems down before release but complexity means problems I usually find.

3:00 PM - Analyzing Oracle Workflow Data for increased System Performance - by Erwin Schmidt (Me!) with Apollo Group, Inc.

Of course I did good! Are you crazy?!? Okay all modesty aside, I was happy to have met people during the conference that were planning on attending my presentation because they had a problem with this or were interested enough to spend time in my session when there were several other good options available. Very humbling experience and I hope it stays that way because after getting done and hitting every note I wanted to, Karen Brownfield (from yesterday's session that I did NOT get to go to) was among several people that came up to let me know that they enjoyed the presentation!  Just blown away and really invigorating on top of everything I've been doing with the blog....I'm floored and humbled and excited and.....yeah you get the idea.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech - Day 1

Continuing my coverage from the OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech conference in Pittsburgh, here is the schedule of events I went to including my reviews of the sessions:

8:30 AM - General Session, Steven Chan - Oracle EBS Technology Latest Features & Roadmap - Grand Ballroom

Here I had the chance to talk with Steven one-on-one for a moment before he gave the opening session, which was a very pleasant experience because he seems like a very genuine and relatable individual. He even remembered my name from a brief e-mail encounter (I had completely embarrassed myself by sending him a comment meant for my team because it was too early in the morning to be online for an Oracle webinar) which happened almost six months ago, and tells me that he takes his blogging and role at Oracle very seriously!

On to the session itself, there was SO much that he went over that my head felt like bursting but then I reminded myself that I'd read a lot of his work already and that this was a refresher course almost.  Except for actually finding out: what Endeca really was, that 12.2 will likely (since it hasn't been officially announced) be replacing the OC4Js with WebLogic, the code name for 12.2 is Skyros (if I spelled it right), a move towards more SOAP & REST services, there are new whitepapers coming out for each module with relation to Exadata and Exalogic, Oracle saved 231 TB of space with Advanced Compression on their own systems, then a few notes 1484997.1 and 1195034.1 that were referenced.  Whew!  And I cut that list in probably 1/4th too!

9:45 AM - Workflow Performance Tuning in R12 - Salon 6 - Karen Brownfield - Scratch that, Working Effectively with Oracle's Public APIs - Salon 5 - Rob Lepanto with API Wizard

Why? I was thinking that the name of Karen Brownfield. sounded familiar but I didn't know why until I started doing a run through of my presentation last night and it dawned on me that she was the author of the Solution Beacon PDF that I referenced in my presentation! I don't remember reading her whole presentation, so I had made a mental note to review it anyways so now that she has updated her presentation for R12 (and is no longer with Solution Beacon) I'll read the new one when it becomes available but since I'd already seen some of it I went with the APIs to learn something new.

This was a fairly basic introduction to APIs with a distinction between those that are Public (for customers to use) and Private (not not supported to use) and while there are 1500 APIs in R11 there are 2500 in R12.  We were provided with a pretty good query for DBA_OBJECTS to find what are potential APIs in our system, as well as a nice listing for what could be considered Oracle API standards.  We also had types of API failure, tips for improving API performance, wrappers (no not Dr. Dre) and information about a seeded responsibility called Integrated OA Framework responsibility with R12.  Good session!

11:00 AM - Getting ready for 12.2: Edition-Based Redefinition - City Center B - Michael Brown from BlueStar Inc.

When this one started, I was really chomping at the bit to get a sneak peek at this, and the OAUG Member of the Year for 2013 did not disappoint!  Again, Michael was under a NDA so he could not speak about his direct experiences but the public information out there tells us a great deal about this feature which is basically a type of change control within the database for only certain objects.  There are of course new types of objects to enable the editioning to happen and while I'm not going to dive into the specifics here (because then you won't visit any of his future sessions) there are a few new tables that I will share that are deployed with 12.2: dba_editions and dba_editioning_views.  There, you got a few nuggets of information after all.  :}  Really great session for the "download" and then mind boggling live demo of editioning.

1:15 PM - Oracle EBS 12.1 Upgrade Best Practices - City Center B - Elke Phelps

I thought this was going to be one of the best sessions in the conference, and I wasn't disappointed at all as I got a lot of content out of the session!  Explanation of Rapid Install and the comparison between the file sizes for 12.1.1 and 12.1.3, many reports, customer stories, and the meat and potatoes of the best practices that are recommended.  I found a lot of these were covered more in-depth during Mike's presentation the day before, but it wasn't Elke's fault I went to the pre-conference session now was it?  That said, with the wealth of knowledge that was transferred to us it was hard for our eyes not to glaze over (since it was after lunch) yet she kept us engaged and the topic was lively so we all stayed focused.

Here are all the notes she went over: 761570.1, 1290886.1, 1327399.1, 1446430.1, 1448102.1, 16791553, 384248.1, 734025.1, 399362.1, 8557019, 244040.1!

2:30 PM - Advanced Management of Oracle EBS with Oracle Enterprise Manager - Grand Ballroom - Vasu Rao

For an "advanced" type of session, this wasn't that advanced as it was more a prep for starting to use OEM which was okay with me since I don't use it today and now I want to badger my DBAs to let me use it a bit!  The way Vasu started the presentation by highlighting the top 10 CIO business and technical priorities had a great lead in to getting value out of implementing OEM, so I really started feeling like I was in a sales presentation a bit even though I was learning just about every minute about more modules or features available with the Application Management Suite which is a separately licensed product from Oracle, of which the application management pack is a part of.  I thought we got some real value when he was modeling how RUEI (Real User Experience Insight) worked to help replay a user's entire session which was a WOW moment for me!  Note 1434392.1 was mentioned, as well as I'm sure quite a few more but I have a LOT of documentation to catch up on for OEM and now excuse me I need to go bug somebody about getting me access to OEM.

4:00 PM - Ask Oracle ATG Panel Discussion with Steven, Elke, and Vasu - Grand Ballroom

Oddly, I don't have any questions on my mind to ask Oracle at this venue but maybe it isn't so odd because I'm a speaker and didn't come here with all of the "baggage" from work expecting solutions. I hate to put it that way, maybe a better way to say it is that having a complimentary registration from being a speaker has put things into perspective and I respect the other people that have had their company pay (or even out of their own pocket!) to come here to get something in return.

Talk about single sign-on and how complicated it is, but Elke and Steven indicated they have simplified the documentation from 50 pages down to 20 pages and are working on roadmap items such as changing the architecture to use WebLogic which should reduce the complexity.

Every group in Oracle has been told to integrate with OEM.  Great news to me!

Are there any thoughts to a shared oracle_home?  No.  Different risks, certs, and they still have plans on getting EBS certified on 12c.

"Sales" is pushing Fusion applications so how do we get ready?  Fusion is not the successor to EBS, as they really do different things, yet you can have some Fusion and EBS running at the same times doing their different things.  A big hint was being dropped at 12.2 (or some future release, but one that isn't TOO future) supporting touch devices.

Is your database and application supported on VM?  VMware runs their installation of EBS on VMware, and Oracle will give support until they decide it is a problem with VMware. 

DBAs are asking to upgrade the database that is currently 11.1.0.7 while the app is on 12.1.3, is that supported or suggested?  The database and applications have been decoupled, so they CAN upgrade the DB to 11.2.0.3 but may have to apply some interoperability patches for it to work.  Also, R12.2 has to be on 11.2.0.3 at least so you might as well go now.

Is Oracle going to provide archiving for EBS?  Current applications on the market are only going to really come from Oracle developers or from former Oracle developers, and now that the former Oracle employees don't have access to R12 Steven suggests rather strongly that those tools may not have all the hidden secrets figured out just yet.  An idea on using 12c heat maps to help subset data in the EBS in some way.

Monday, July 29, 2013

OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech - Day Minus 1

Got into Pittsburgh last night without any issues for the OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech conference, and was ready for the pre-conference R12 workshop to get started today a little after noon local time.  This meant that I had some "free" time in the morning to walk around a bit, catch up on a few of my blogs, and work on getting my blog roll updated as well.  Mike Swing from TruTek presented part of his "the little r12.1.3 whole nine yards workshop" since we only had 4 hours, but I walked away really glad that we got the chance to be introduced to the upgrade process for R12!

I'm not a DBA by any stretch of the imagination, so since this was born in Mike's step-by-step self-documentation I think that some of it wasn't targeted for me but I could follow along and stay on top of what he was explaining to us.  It was really interesting to see how he presented in general, as well as on the topic at hand, so I did get a few pointers for my presentation on Wednesday also but the best was seeing some of his instances not behaving exactly as he predicted so we were getting troubleshooting with our "hands on" session too!  Good session as a warm up to the conference!

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Windows and R12

Closing up our spotlight of Steven Chan's EBS blog for the week, is this article where R12 is certified for running on Windows 2008 Servers in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V clients.  Why is this important?  Oracle on Windows is now fully certified inside and outside VM clients!  I remember several years ago when we were going to Solaris VM containers at a company level to save resources in non-PROD environments yet our group wasn't able to shift solely due to the certifications or support that was available at the time.  That leads me to wonder just what environments are NOT supported or certified to run Oracle?

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Where Should EBS Concurrent Managers be Located?

This article is chock full of goodness in our next spotlight of Steven Chan's EBS blog!  This is particularly interesting to hear that it seems like there are several different ideas about the best way to complete this, even if technology has advanced to make some of those options no longer relevant.

Outside of what is listed in the title of the article, if you follow the link in the article, you'll find four MORE potential problems you could encounter with your EBS installation.  More information is good information!

Friday, July 26, 2013

Oracle EBS Demos on YouTube

Today in the spotlight of Steven Chan's EBS blog is a more straightforward type of article where Steven announces the opening of a new YouTube channel which is really EBS-centric in the introductory and demo videos that are posted.  I'm even looking forward to watching the videos about Oracle customers upgrading to R12 and their experiences with it.  How can you turn down free information about the EBS or R12?  You can't!  To that end, I'd click through on some of the other links in this article as they will help guide you to more information.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Are you wise to SAML? Does that make you SAMLwise?

What is SAML?  Great question, glad you asked!  In our continuing spotlight, I didn't know either until I read this guest author article on Steven Chan's EBS blog about SAML, XML, WS-Security, and the interaction of the Oracle product mix.  Not only do we get an in-depth explanation of what these ideas/objects are, but Rekha offers us a nice visual aid which helps to pull the article together.  Worth a read, especially if you utilize SOA and looking to help change the landscape at work to make sure your EBS platform stays secure.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

What is RBAC and how does it affect EBS?

In today's entry of our spotlight, comes a guest author detailing Role Based Access Control (RBAC) which shifts the access paradigm from our traditional (old) ways of directly assigning responsibilities directly to user accounts to a better (new) way of using responsibility assignments in conjunction with grant assignments as another layer of security.  It may surprise you to know that this isn't just for R12 either!  Plain old R11 can utilize this as well so give the whitepaper a read, if only so you are sure of what RBAC is and is not.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Why should we care about iPads if we're on R12?

Continuing my spotlight of Steven Chan's EBS blog, is a solid article on the certification for iPads with use of R12.1.3 and higher on the iOS 6 platform.  While the headline doesn't spell this out this certification is targeted just at the SSWA (HTML-only) EBS pages, yet doing our homework now will allow us to answer executives when they ask about being able to use their latest and greatest iPad to do everything their laptops used to do.  Right?  Who doesn't like to be ahead of the curve!

A few nuggets about what applications/platforms Oracle will test the Oracle Workflow product against as well as a suggestion that the Android certification is being worked on but nowhere near being ready for prime time yet.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Blog spotlight: Steven Chan's EBS blog

Quite a while ago, I threatened to start spotlighting blogs I follow but this week I'm going to do better than just spot light a blog; I will share with you each day a different article, which has given me food for thought, taught me something about Oracle technology or just showed me how to be a better blogger.

If you aren't following Steven Chan's EBS blog, you need to! There are SO many snippets of good information that come out of this blog, that I eventually signed up to get the e-mail digest when a new post has gone up that day and I regularly send the information out to my team so we can all stay informed.

Recently we had a problem which we thought might be a load balancer or the firewall, so to My Oracle Support we went to try and find out what was happening.  To my surprise several articles linked back to this post from 2007 on Steven's blog that very simply details out the interaction between loopbacks, firewalls, virtual IP, and load balancers which is so useful it is still a reference documentation Oracle uses today SIX years later!

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Introduction to Data as a Service via Social Media

I read this article several weeks ago which introduced me to the concept of Data as a Service (which does seem to be a natural extension of the I(nfrastructure)aaS, P(latform)aaS and S(oftware)aaS that we all know and love already.  The slides really do the introduction justice as the example is easy to understand for how social media is digested and analyzed between "public data" or application data among many different dimensions.  It is also an extension of the Oracle Cloud offering as well, since the KPIs and other devices which you can use to gather data really belong in a large repository type receptacle with easy to use features.  Great article, very informative, and just touches the surface of a new concept enough that I want to go out and learn more.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Oracle Multitenant

Here you can find a podcast about Oracle Multitenant, which is of course a new solution provided with Oracle Database 12c, but you should start your research with this visual right here that shows the new Oracle Multitenant architecture containing memory, processes and the containerized databases.  Also from the second link you can get access to the webcast for Oracle Database 12c as well!

Friday, July 19, 2013

Containing Oracle Linux

When I originally read this article on the Linux Containers project I was surprised this virtualization technology is being proposed for use on Oracle Linux.  Today I re-read the article, and saw this note emphasized:
Note: Linux Containers on Oracle Linux 6 with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 2 (2.6.39) are still marked as Technology Preview - their use is only recommended for testing and evaluation purposes.
I think using this to test and maybe offset some costs is a great idea, but then you're getting outside the prospect of having the same approved and supportable configuration in your PROD, QA and DEV instances.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Two weeks away from Oracle Certification Retirements

Several days ago I updated you about Fusion Certifications being available and certain tests and paths being retired at that time.  Well, it appears some older tests are also being retired on July 31, 2013 also which makes sense with the whole 12c announcement since 9i and 10g exams are getting the boot with Hyperion 9.3 too.  If you have the skills, or have been studying for these tests, there is no time like the present to get them done.  Actually, the only time is the present because if you wait 2 weeks you won't have any time left!

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Hotsos Symposium 2014: Call to arms!

I can realistically say that if I didn't attend the Hotsos Symposium in 2012, I wouldn't be here where I am today with being able to give a presentation to OAUG or celebrating a year of blogging.  That is why I'm happy to help announce that the Hotsos Symposium 2014 call for papers has been opened!  I'll update this post when the Hotsos blog shares this information too, but as they haven't done so yet consider this breaking news!

I'm really tempted to submit an abstract to them again, so I'm sure I'll share that with you too when I do it!

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

R12 and Encumberance accounting: What you need to know!

From the "looking for R12 bugs" category comes this article via the Oracle EBS Support blog letting us know that after applying a RUP patch we can start to encounter INSERT_PACKET_CREATE_EVENT-020: ORA-01400 errors when trying to cancel Purchase Order lines under a specific condition.  Worth looking into if you are going to, or are on, R12 to see if this patch has been applied since there is also a fix patch listed in the article as well!

Monday, July 15, 2013

Jonathan Lewis on how to hint

With this post Jonathan shares a recent example of how hinting can not work, go horribly wrong, and what you need to be doing in order to resolve the issue by addressing not just 1 hint but several in order to have the CBO actually do what you want it to be doing.  This also has a link to an article by him on SQL Baselines which starts a very interesting discussion in the comments of the post on if you should manually code in the hints (with comments of course) or introduce SQL Baselines instead.  I lean towards the code updates, because having it available to us visually when there is a problem instead of having another step of checking for SQL Baselines is potentially a better avenue since it would be easy for us to forget about that step and be spinning our wheels for hours.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Fusion Certifications

Back in April, the new Fusion certification path was announced and there are many different certifications in those paths which you can see on the pages for Fusion Accounts Receivable, Fusion Accounts Payable, and Fusion General Ledger.  These announcements are important for me because they fall into my career and education path over the next 2-5 years since I want to get completely on top of all these modules.

Of course with new certifications, come new certification retirements as well.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Karen Morton: Visual SQL Tuning webinar

Karen has announced that she will be holding another webinar on July 23rd.  This time it is on a new subject to me, visual SQL tuning, so I'm absolutely going to be online and ready to learn!

Friday, July 12, 2013

Not all tests are created the same

Coming at us from this blog entry, the author wants us to know that the SQL Tuning certification test I mentioned a few months ago is not a joke and should be taken quite seriously.  Great news and a warning for me personally, because this is something I see as being on my horizon over the next 12-18 months.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Jonathan Lewis: v$lock and OEM

Jonathan Lewis introduces us to a problem with the performance of the v$lock table with OEM, the v$resource table, and how we can gather stats on individual x$ tables to increase performance.  I thought this was a good read because a. we might encounter this in the future since we're on 11.2.0.2 and b. it's yet another good example of how to identify performance issues that may be small in nature but could have a large effect on your system.  From a few of the posts over the past week, you can see that I find the prospect of digging deeper into the system very interesting and something I'm looking forward to!

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Is Exadata the beginning of Skynet?

I ask the question because that is what this article, by way of Pythian, makes me think of with Oracle processes being aware of what type of platform it is running on.  Also, did you know what the project name for Exadata was?  Well if you read this, you will!  Besides getting that small nugget which will of course impress your friends, I also really liked how detailed and deep into the guts of the machine Frits was in the article.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

DTrace and Linux

At the OTN Garage, a recent article got me thinking about how far I've come and how far I still have to go.  All of that because I haven't really had the pleasure of running DTrace even on a Solaris system because I haven't had a need to travel far enough down the guts of the Oracle machine.  Doesn't that make you stop and think?  There is just SO much with Oracle products that we can learn, that when we peel back one layer of the onion we're presented with yet another layer which we need to learn about.

Monday, July 8, 2013

Patching R12 to fix SLA and GL data

If you weren't aware, SLA (Sub Ledger Accounting) is a new feature introduced with R12 and as expected with new features is the shaking out of bugs identified by the early adopters. Not only do we find out what the possible bugs are between the SLA intermediary and the GL, but included in the article is a new note with the root cause fix as well as data fix in case data corruption has happen AND in the comments the author has given us another note which will lead us to learn more about SLA in general.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

What is the future of Oracle ERP?

Okay so this post, found via Archbeat, doesn't give us a whole lot of details but I do think it is interesting and worthwhile to keep our eyes on the horizon.  When we're being told that ERP's future lies not in the application but as a platform from how the user experience group is developing it, I think we need to sit up and take notice.  What is this going to look like?  Keep wondering!  This session was so top secret, they didn't allow photography!

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Arup Nanda on the topic of Big Data

In his article on Big Data, Arup starts by showing us how recent events can spark thoughts of a professional nature and gets our minds on a completely different track than most people when discussions start happening about something "big". Speaking of big, I learned what the "Three V's of Big Data" are in this introduction to Big Data and it's associated concepts like key-value pair, NoSQL (and why that's not really the best term for it), Map/Reduce, Hadoop, and HiveQL.  Fantastic read, and it really did demystify a lot of what I didn't know about Big Data!

Friday, July 5, 2013

Blooming onions or bloom filters?

Another great article from the experts at Pythian, this time from Christo Kutrovsky, about join offloading and bloom filters with links to some articles on storage indexes and predicate filtering that I need to read in some detail as well.  If you're interested in any of this for Exadata, visit the article and read/click through because it is a really well thought out and presented write up on the topic.

I did learn something about the "cell_flash_cache keep" attribute for tables and the PX_JOIN_FILTER optimizer hint available to force the CBO to use join offloading; both of which I've never used, or seen used, so I feel like I got my money's worth (isn't it awesome that blogs are free?) especially if I can pass this along to some of our developers to help expand their awareness as well

Thursday, July 4, 2013

More is better: Oracle and Microsoft together

Along the "in case you haven't already heard this" vein, Oracle software can now run on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Server Hyper-V installations.  If you're curious, My Oracle Support notes 1563794.1 and 417770.1 are your reference documents for these installations.

R12 PO diagnostic

Did you know that there is a new, non-invasive, analyzer script for Purchasing in R12?  No?  Well look no further!  Yes we can use it when we have a problem, but the best part of this is the non-invasive part because it means it is a new tool we get to use in a proactive manner when we implement R12.  Sure we can use it to investigate problems, but a tool that helps us before a problem?  Priceless!

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Slow database? Are you suuuuuure?

Very intriguing article from Gorjan Todorovski with Pythian about how we can start monitoring the health of our DB in some surprising ways.  This really has my mind spinning about how to implement some monitoring for the Support group, even though the article was more geared towards a DBA, I think that this is something crucial for Support to be aware of.  I'm thinking of a temp table, or several, so that we can record the information and have it available for our own historical purposes of tracking performance even when some of the tables Gorjan references (which were new to me, so yay!) get their information purged out by design or DB reboot.

Extending this idea further, I'd like to see what I can do to track not only a few metrics (obviously Gorjan picked just a couple of well known wait events to model his idea with) in the DB but go into the Exadata storage cells to gauge their performance as well!  Additionally, I've never worked with the epsilon subquery so I've got a new tool that needs to be sharpened for my toolbox!

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

LA Tour 2013!

No, I'm not touring Los Angeles, and as a matter of fact this isn't about me at all.  Shocking huh?  Well since the blog is pretty much global at this point, I thought it'd be polite to share out a tour Oracle is doing of Latin America.  You don't need to be able to read Spanish or Portuguese to click on the details for the tour, and see some very high profile individuals within the community have been invited on the OTN tour.  If you are in the Latin America region at that time it may be worth your time to check out!

Monday, July 1, 2013

Cloud Control to Major Tom

In case you hadn't heard already from here, or here, or here, or here, or here, or here, or even here, 12c has been released for download.  That's not the whole story though, since you'll want to know why to upgrade or even how to do it step by step as a RAC on your laptop, on Linux 5 and 6, and on Linux 6 using VirtualBox.

So all of that really leaves us in the what do we already know category.  Luckily for us some of the top Oracle minds are already sharing with us:  Kerry Osborne is making a recent presentation on 12c Adaptive Optimization available to us, Jonathan Lewis is giving us great ideas about how to start debugging with 12c, letting us know about a new view naming constraint, and whether or not the with function is deterministic yet, and there is an introduction from Tom Kyte to a new error logging package named UTL_CALL_STACK and a new feature called SQL Text Expansion driven by EXPAND_SQL_TEXT.  All said, no release is complete without webcasts, or certifications!

Whew, I think that's the most links I've ever put in a single post!  I hope you've enjoyed this "metapost" which has brought together some of the best 12c links of the week.