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.

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