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.

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