Tuesday, December 31, 2013

The 10 days of Blogging past: Day 10

Finishing up my 10 days of Blogging past feature, I'll be reviewing the "Database FLASH exhaustion" post from 8/2/13 with an amazing 170 views.

First off, a few weeks ago this post was slated for the #2 spot but over the last month it has received about 145 views which has boosted it to the #1 slot!  Why do I think this post has been so popular?  Well, it's the keywords silly!  There are SO many key words, commands, and error messages in this article that I am sure that it is hard not to pull it up with searches.  Maybe too, when doing an R12 upgrade it might be "easy" to run out of FLASH if you haven't prepared properly so that could lead to an increase of hits as well.

Technically, this was one of the more layered problems that I have tackled and is a little out of the normal zone for an application support specialist but I figured what happens if you encounter this problem?  What will you do?  Search MOS and the Internet.  Now, there is a post out there that has a lot of details that might be relevant no matter if you're in application support or DBA roles because of how much information is shared here: ASMCMD information and commands, log file messages, and what our event alert looks like when the system encounters this problem.

Thanks for reliving the past with me over the last 10 days!  I hope it has helped you find some new information that you might not have found before!!

Monday, December 30, 2013

The 10 days of Blogging past: Day 9

In the penultimate post for the 10 days of Blogging past is one of my first posts, yet one of the more influential in my blogging, "Concurrent:Active Request Limit (or how I finally learned to know what my system was saying)" from 8/16/12 with 126 views. 

While the title was certainly a mouthful, and a parody of Dr. Strangelove, more importantly it signaled the start of me looking deeper into "normal" things going on that I had been taking for granted.  Just because I've spent six or seven years seeing it happen didn't make it "normal" or "okay"!  What other type of articles came out from this train of thought?  Well, I would say that investigating RMAN when it was hanging up on us and also trying to figure out why Fixed Assets would error infrequently are top "normal" things that I started digging a bit deeper into.

So when I finally researched a bit why a request was pending in the Conflict Resolution Manager with an error message barking about 'Concurrent:Active Request Limit' being set, but I knew full well it couldn't be set, I was surprised to find out it actually WAS set.  Again, something I thought I knew, but the troubleshooting and research had to be done in order to make sure the set of facts I knew were in fact......facts.  Okay, maybe that's too many facts to get straight, but you get the picture.

On the blogging front, I think this has received so many hits because of how much text from the error message I put into the post which makes it very searchable if other people are trying to investigate their own issues with this.  The routine way this article gets hits makes me think this profile might be set as part of a patch or upgrade, or maybe legacy handed down from administrators way back in the day that might not make sense to the administrators of today.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

The 10 days of Blogging past: Day 8

As we wind down the 10 days of Blogging past, we get to review a rather enigmatic post in "duration not active: A Tale of Two Articles" from 1/3/13 with 91 views.

This post captures two very different My Oracle Support articles, which may not strike you as a surprise if you've been on MOS for any period of time, but it strikes me as interesting that this is in my top THREE posts all time.  Why is that?  I think this is another reflection on what I've been trying to do for the last year, and that is present relevant and NEW content on a regular basis!  Sure, but still why would THIS get a lot of hits?  Well, this was a new error that popped up after we went live with a new Exadata BP so the assumption is this is an unintended consequence that many different people have seen after getting this BP in their system as well.  We never saw any negative results or impacts upon our system due to this message, so I have to believe this is not really a cause for concern but many other people have seen it and likely searched the web for experiences that others have had with it.

Additionally, this gives us a good insight into KB articles and how they can be 100% accurate but not really give any content or help to your end user.  Don't let your KB articles at work get like this, or your blog posts, or your tweets, etc.  Sometimes the best examples to learn from, are those that aren't the best examples in the first place.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

The 10 days of Blogging past: Day 7

As we start hitting the home stretch of the 10 days of Blogging past, we will review a rather straightforward follow up post in "Learning more about DBA_ALERT_HISTORY" from 2/14/13 with 86 views.

As is often the case I learn the most about our systems when something "bad" happens or things go "wrong" in ways we had not anticipated.  I don't know if that is your typical experience in supporting an application, but that is certainly my experience!  While going to Exadata we were presented with the opportunity to uplift our entire infrastructure footprint, and one way we did that was going to a multi-database RAC node instance as opposed to a single database node instance that we were previously running.  We (and our DBAs) knew the flaws with the old design, but we had no idea all of the possible challenges that would face us with going to a RAC instance, of which this is obviously one of them.

As a result, I was able to learn more about what the table DBA_ALERT_HISTORY would (and wouldn't) log and the timing behind it.  It seems obvious that a node which is offline or disconnected for some reason wouldn't be able to log to a table if it can't be connected to it, but what was not obvious is that the remaining node would reconfigure as if the other node is not there AND not log something to the table.  Sure, the server comes back online/available it logs to the table, yet what happens during that time if you think DBA_ALERT_HISTORY will tell you the facts in a real time manner?  You'll get alerted way too late and oddly enough, the original message was logged to the table AFTER a new message was entered saying everything was fine.

This is a great point that dovetails with a lot of things other Oracle experts go through with having a hypothesis or knowing something might be true but being able to test it out and actually verify if that is a true statement/hypothesis or not.

Friday, December 27, 2013

The 10 days of Blogging past: Day 6

Returning to our 10 days of Blogging past review, today the post we're visiting is "Concurrent Manager holding lock on a report" from 5/23/13 with 82 views.

Despite the obvious lazy sounding title, but today I don't know what else I would've picked to make it sound better, this is the first post in the top five that we're reviewing so it has found an audience out there regardless!  Like a previous review, when I read this today it sounds very clear to me since I experienced it yet I know some of my inexperience is showing through when I'm trying to explain what is going on because it sounds muddled because I need to get better at mixing "how to" with a narrative style.

That said, I have shared many posts on the concurrent manager:

http://theoracleemt.blogspot.com/2013/05/icm-will-mark-this-request-as-completed.html
http://theoracleemt.blogspot.com/2013/08/concurrent-reports-not-completing-for.html
http://theoracleemt.blogspot.com/2013/08/concurrent-manager-bottleneck.html
http://theoracleemt.blogspot.com/2013/09/what-happens-when-your-concurrent.html

and several of them have enjoyed pictures to go with the actual post content, which were my first attempts at using images on my blog to enhance the narrative.  Great idea if you have your own blog!

On the more application side of things, this post (and some the investigation done) has come in handy many times when trying to understand problems with the concurrent manager and the processes they run.  This may even lead into a "part 2" type of post when I answer some of the lingering questions I have about the relatively simple technology that is the concurrent manager platform and I'll try to focus on finding out more information about it while solving its riddles.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Thursday Twitter - 12/26/13

Taking a break from the 10 days of Blogging past feature to bring you an armload of Twitter presents!  I have a lot more tweets to share with you, but it looks like that will happen next year.  :}

Announcements:

https://twitter.com/virtualbox/status/413414240058224640 - Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.3.6 is now available!

https://twitter.com/myoraclesupport/status/413509006746210304 - Become a part of the Accreditation Program for My Oracle Support!!

Training/Free Stuff:

https://twitter.com/oraclemagazine/status/413375622225088513 - The newest edition of the Oracle magazine is now available, and you can sign up for it too!

https://twitter.com/enkitec/status/413379697334968321 - Karen Morton is having a SQL tuning class soon!!

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/413661820915027968 - Oracle SOA Black Belt cheat sheets available for download!

https://twitter.com/kylehhailey/status/413699469717155840 - Kyle Hailey gives us his UKOUG presentation!!

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/413707743707811840 - SQL Analytics Part 2, which is interesting enough you should review part 1 as well!


https://twitter.com/enkitec/status/413755922645671936 - Carlos Sierra is offering training on the SQLTXPLAIN tool.


https://twitter.com/oracle_edu/status/413783212440453120 - Oracle University reminds about the trainings they have available.

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/413858083358932992 - Virtual Sysadmin Day is happening again!!

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/413963485262135296 - Oracle Solaris Hands-On Lab is now available!

https://twitter.com/oraclepress/status/414072989794435073 - Learn the difference between SQL and NoSQL in this free chapter download!!

https://twitter.com/enkitec/status/414087457689202689 - Do you want 20% off your training from Enkitec?

General News/Information:

https://twitter.com/martinberx/status/413359352167161856 - Martin Berg comments on a tweet, which brings out some good information about PGA limits.

https://twitter.com/oaug1/status/413378853743374336 - OAUG asks what your big accomplishments were for the year.

https://twitter.com/oracle/status/413387158309724161 - Oracle Excellence Award winners!!

https://twitter.com/yvelik/status/413399207819501568 - Yury Velikanov was interviewed by IOUG!



https://twitter.com/leight0nn/status/413708214010929152 - Leighton Nelson asks a question about redo log threads, and starts a good conversation.

https://twitter.com/oracleexalogic/status/413715374077902850 - I've shared that the new Exalogic server has been released, but 720 cores per rack?!?

https://twitter.com/infosecuritymag/status/413781605950312449 - Who hasn't heard about the incident with Target?  This article makes it sound like it was an inside job.


https://twitter.com/arupnanda/status/413898079784669184 - Arup Nanda became a published author 11 years ago!!



https://twitter.com/oracle_ebs/status/413931786386038784 - Get help when Procurement performance is bad even after Purge Obsolete is run.

https://twitter.com/chrisantognini/status/413993990984564736 - See what parameter Christian Antognini thinks should be set as default in 11.2.0.4.

https://twitter.com/hdeiby/status/414047794115014658 - Latin America, Oracle and Exadata!

https://twitter.com/oracle/status/414059552212910080 - Oracle's Technology Year in Review!!

https://twitter.com/leight0nn/status/414063377632096257 - Leighton has a good insight about working with MOS!

https://twitter.com/thatjeffsmith/status/414073992426053633 -What is your request for SQL Developer training videos?

https://twitter.com/uwehesse/status/414081777222049792 - Uwe Hesse got some feedback from a class which is pretty awesome!

https://twitter.com/oracledatabase/status/414093757567758336 - A podcast on SQL Developer 4.0 featuring Jeff Smith!

https://twitter.com/kevinclosson/status/414097632106016768 - Kevin notices that Exadata's Flash Cache Compression needs a software license.

https://twitter.com/chrisantognini/status/414101153014890496 - Christian tells us that there is a new 12c feature with PL/SQL invoker's rights.

https://twitter.com/acolvin/status/414135945987108864 - Andy Colvin shows us a very confused Exadata V2!

https://twitter.com/oraclebase/status/414144703437996032 - Tim Hall has a very Christmas-y picture for us.

Conference News:

https://twitter.com/thatjeffsmith/status/413763961331662848 - Jeff Smith shares the top 4 KScope sessions he wants us to go to this year.

https://twitter.com/richardfoote/status/413779281450258434 - Richard Foote will be presenting at ODTUG's KScope as well!!

https://twitter.com/hotsosgg/status/414062842812182528 - Register for the Hotsos Symposium this year and see ME!!

Social Media/DevOps:

https://twitter.com/clicktips/status/413710489764368384 - Melinda Samson shares some tips about Google Analytics and benchmarking.

https://twitter.com/clicktips/status/414045737056354304 - Get to page #1 on Google without using/thinking about SEO.

https://twitter.com/clicktips/status/414086367417602048 - I didn't know you could segment your blogging traffic this way!

https://twitter.com/dbakevlar/status/414090449431715840 - Kellyn reminds us about getting an about.me page.

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

The 10 days of Blogging past: Day 5

Today for the Christmas episode of 10 days of Blogging past, I will be reviewing the "Supplier issue in Expense Report Import" post from 4/23/13 with 81 views.

I can't say that I'm really surprised this is in my top ten, as this has come up several times at work and highlights not really a design flaw but reflects a different way of thinking about problems that would come up eventually.  The good news was that there were many different articles on My Oracle Support which were able to direct me to a resolution rather quickly, but this is a sign that the issue has come up for a LOT of people over the past few years; that reveals what I think of as the different way of thinking that makes the entire process bomb out instead of allowing for issues and continuing to process what is not in error.  We've had processes similar to this designed over the past few years, and because of our experiences with programs like this we choose either to allow it to process with an error on the output, or a secondary program in the report set is built to kick out the errors so it is clearly visible to the business that there was an error with the processing.

We can also see what is a secondary difference in thinking by requiring additional "IT" work to provide the business the exact root cause when it is fairly easy to identify with the scripts provided in MOS and in this post.  If it is possible to clearly tell what has gone wrong, and how it might be able to be fixed, we should make every effort to do so in order to provide better service to the business and reduce unnecessary work for IT.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

The 10 days of Blogging past: Day 4

The 10 days of Blogging past continues today with our post "Your Oracle DB not playing nice with Hyperion products" from 4/27/13 with 72 views. 

This is a rather straightforward post, hiding a deceptively complex issue.  How many of you know that you have alerts on 100% of your disk volumes?  Is /flash monitored on 100% of your systems?  Do you know which disk volumes are critical to the continued success of your application?  If you're responsible for Hyperion products, are they linked to an Oracle database that you're monitoring appropriately?

Going off on another tangent, it's clear from this post that "something" was going on and it was this "something" which caused us to do a wholesale reboot of our environment.  Now part of the process needs to be a way to investigate further/faster next time so we understand more about how our environment is working together to communicate and provide services to our end users.  As this never happened again, and we upgraded our Hyperion environment as well, I doubt I'll ever get a chance to replicate this (or see it replicated) but it does make one wonder if this "flaw" exists now so I have an outstanding item to test next year.  This was also a type of sequel from another post, where one server worked and another didn't in a RAC setting which didn't make a whole lot of sense either, but having this happen to us months earlier helped us to make better troubleshooting choices to get to our problem resolution a lot quicker next time.

Monday, December 23, 2013

The 10 days of Blogging past: Day 3

Continuing the 10 days of Blogging past feature, the post we will be reviewing today is "System Wait Events Part 2" from 10/17/12 with 71 views.  This is a bit of nostalgia for me, as this was one of my first real "serious" posts after we installed the Exadata platform in our environment and it has actually lead to some discussions with individuals from Oracle about the problem we encountered.  I can say that about no other blog post I've written, and while I fancy that maybe if I can share my thoughts and problems with my ever growing network of Oracle employees I can have some type of influence, maybe the sharing of this event will have that type of influence and help Oracle improve their design or systems in some way.  That's an incredible thought!

On another train of thought, looking at this post makes me think about better ways to format text with the Blogger tool.  Also, I think I've grown at explaining problems and giving attribution a whole lot better because this seems a bit rough around the edges plus I completely missed giving credit for this the first time around due to my inexperience.  This leads into another good tip: you need to start writing to find your voice, understand what your style is, allow your abilities to grow with time because none of that will happen if you don't start writing and sharing your passion.

On the technology front, when something like this happens it can rekindle your passion for learning and I know this had a similar effect for me as I started diving more into the ZFS, cells, and Exadata in general after this happened!

Sunday, December 22, 2013

The 10 days of Blogging past: Day 2

Continuing on the new feature introduced yesterday, the second post we're going to review for the 10 days of Blogging past is "Disconnected Concurrent Manager" from 9/29/13 with 61 views.  Right off the bat, I notice that this post has been online for almost 8 months less than yesterday's but it has more views!  Why is that?  I believe it is absolutely due to the amount of error messages in the post and how many times the messages pop up for people in their daily lives which leads to them searching online for a fix.  Sure I had a clear example in the post from day one, but it is targeted at just the Fixed Assets module and this post has errors from a lot of different areas/modules so it has a wider appeal.  That's a lesson learned for me just now as I compare the posts!

So what if you aren't blogging, what can you get out of this review?  Well, great question!  Breaking this down a bit, I can see that the log and output files have some very clear indicators of a problem and that these indicators will probably crop up time and time again when you have similar problems.  Why is that a big deal?  Do you have any tools in your environment that can look at the log files?  If you do, can you fine-tune them to be looking for some of these errors and then alert you when they happen?

Fast forward a few months after this event, and the next time we had work planned for our network guess what?  We were a lot more conscious of how network outages/interruptions affected us, so we went the extra mile to protect ourselves from another such incident.  This is a take away that anybody can enjoy!

Saturday, December 21, 2013

The 10 days of Blogging past: Day 1

This holiday season I'm going to take time to review the top 10 blog posts, as measured by hits per post, and offer new information in some way so you get something out of it too!

The first post we're going to review is "Purging concurrent and Fixed Assets" from 2/1/13 with 60 views.

While I had already created the alert before putting up the blog post, I learned something afterwards by having our team act upon the alert: it is possible to CREATE a problem instead of resolve one taking action.  The alert was created to look at problems when the Calculate Gains and Losses or Depreciation Run concurrent reports error in the Concurrent Manager within the past 2 hours, but it does NOT require action to be taken in our example since we don't run into problems until we get close to the request getting purged within 3 DAYS time.  I've seen a few times when we clear out fa_book_controls.mass_request_id too quickly it seems to cause some issues.

The lesson to take away from this is, building alerts is great as long as they are followed with clear documentation and make sense 100% of the time.  If an alert goes off too much, or gives a false positive, you are setting yourself up for failure eventually.

Friday, December 20, 2013

EBS 12.2.3 is released!!

Okay, I'm cheating a little since I shared a tweet about this yesterday, but being an "apps guy" I think this some pretty big news!  Follow this link to Steven Chan's EBS blog where he has the files available, the readme linked, says what is included like a new look and feel plus a Worklist feature which sounds pretty darn cool to me!!  On top of all of this, are the usual upgrade path documents that you should be reviewing and getting familiar with if you're not on R12 already (or if you have been on a lower version for years, and want to be getting the latest and greatest version of R12).

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Thursday Twitter - 12/19/13

Getting ready for the holidays, I'm starting the gift giving early with these tweets!

Announcements:

https://twitter.com/JLOracle/status/411837449820585984 - Wikipedia is asking for donations, and Jonathan Lewis asks us to think of giving to them.  Who out there doesn't use this site, even for looking up the most trivial things?  Not a bad idea, not bad at all.

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/412665332550361089 - EBS 12.2.3 has been released!!

https://twitter.com/OracleCloudZone/status/412958425195499520 - Oracle Exadata Elastic Cloud X4-2 has been released too!!

Training/Free Stuff:

https://twitter.com/brost/status/412309649983942656 - Bjoern Rost asks a simple question about what people think the 3 more important things to learn about RAC, and starts a pretty good conversation!

https://twitter.com/OraclePress/status/412623407742980096 - Download a free chapter of the Applications Development & Extensibility Handbook from Oracle Press!

https://twitter.com/OracleDatabase/status/412633239141232640 - Oracle WebLogic and Cloud 12c Integration webinar.

https://twitter.com/Enkitec/status/412655775706652672 - Learn how to patch Exadata from the experts at Enkitec!

https://twitter.com/IOUG/status/412718833242484736 - A very high level break down of 12c basics courtesy of IOUG and Enkitec.

https://twitter.com/DBAKevlar/status/412770111221948416 - Kellyn comes through with 29 free books on several hot topics right now!

https://twitter.com/OTNArchBeat/status/412940274881802240 - This post on ADF mistakes is a. really good and b. has links to other conference papers/articles presented at UKOUG Tech this year!

https://twitter.com/ORCLGoldenGate/status/412987323140550656 - A new interactive e-book has been released to showcase Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c entitled "The Path to the Future".

https://twitter.com/fritshoogland/status/413019131621814272 - Part 2 of "When the Oracle wait interface isn't enough" by Frits Hoogland.

https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu/status/413044880420524033 - Oracle University makes a good observation while including a Pinterest link?

https://twitter.com/OracleCert/status/413074326737276928 - Oracle Certification wants to help you gift this holiday season!

https://twitter.com/DBAKevlar/status/413094643027279872 - Join RMOUG!

https://twitter.com/Enkitec/status/413314367875067904 - Learn more about GoldenGate memory usage.

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/413362562861133824 - A teaser for the new ebook on Securing Oracle 12c.

General News/Information:

https://twitter.com/oraclehardware/status/412145026240888832 - Oracle and optical links?

https://twitter.com/History_Pics/status/412315576565235713 - Netscape Navigator 1.0 turned 19 this week.  Wow.

https://twitter.com/Oracle_EBS/status/412478466605735936 - Are you on 11.5.10?  Here are the Extended Support required patches!

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/412590181217484800 - Do you know why OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE should not be set?  Find out!

https://twitter.com/DBAKevlar/status/412600012120793088 - Kellyn Pot'Vin wins the tweet of the week award.  :}

https://twitter.com/BrianPardy/status/412630143568728064 - Brian Pardy is seeing some odd behavior from 12c.  Have you seen this too?

https://twitter.com/grantunez/status/412838659516162048 - How good does your profession look for the future?  Rene Antunez shares some projected growth figures from the US Department of Labor.

https://twitter.com/karlarao/status/412935409492979712 - Karl Arao shares a way to easily forecast Exadata storage space.

https://twitter.com/DBAKevlar/status/413015970966302720 - Learn how Oracle offers some built-in savings with the database.

https://twitter.com/OracleMiddle/status/413096300633411584 - Want to learn more about double blind identity?  Read the latest blog from Oracle Middleware.

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/413104084686995457 - The most used Payables Knowledge Content this year!

https://twitter.com/DBAKevlar/status/413150739708407808 - Kellyn was interviewed in the Oracle Magazine!

https://twitter.com/grantunez/status/413165917543997440 - Tips for how to change the language in Grid Control.

https://twitter.com/brost/status/413263470759772160 - I wonder.  Do you think Fujitsu ordered enough pizza from this place?

https://twitter.com/OracleCloudZone/status/413310257063272448 - Rex Wang breaks cloud myths!

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/413331881082773504 - A new Oracle ACE!

https://twitter.com/kylehhailey/status/413353208979787776 - Kyle Hailey has an insight which expands on something I stumbled upon earlier this year, and brought forth in my presentation in Pittsburgh!

Conference News:

https://twitter.com/Enkitec/status/412708626780803072 - Don't forget to register for Enkitec Extreme Exadata Expo 2014!  Call for papers is still open too!

https://twitter.com/markrittman/status/412910273667039232 - The Rittman Mead BI Forum has opened their call for papers too!

Social Media/DevOps:

https://twitter.com/ClickTips/status/411853783925133312 - What are Twitter's 7 deadly sins, and how do you avoid repeating them?

https://twitter.com/potus98/status/412077379037573122 - Mainframers interested in DevOps?  That's awesome!  Everybody should be interested!

https://twitter.com/ClickTips/status/412594044045258752 - Using Google Analytics Trackbacks!

https://twitter.com/ClickTips/status/413031600658460672 - Additional tips for generating content?  Yes please!

https://twitter.com/dba_hba/status/413236225940520960 - Allan Robertson shares a site trying to build the learning base for SysAdmin.  He also shares another link that has a scorecard with 32 topics where a SysAdmin/group should excel.  How well do you do?  https://twitter.com/dba_hba/status/413242744853626880

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Following up with Karen Morton

I've posted several times about the webinar's that Karen Morton hosts, but I've never provided you the follow up posts that she adds to get the videos or presentations that she used!  There's no time like the present, and actually, let me call this my present to you.  I've attended most of these, and the ones I've missed are going to be my homework over the holiday break.  :}

http://karenmorton.blogspot.com/2013/05/follow-up-using-optimizer-hints-for.html

http://karenmorton.blogspot.com/2013/11/webinar-follow-up-everyday-oracle-pro.html

http://karenmorton.blogspot.com/2013/09/webinar-follow-up-execution-plans-learn.html

http://karenmorton.blogspot.com/2013/07/my-day-with-ohio-oracle-users-group.html

http://karenmorton.blogspot.com/2013/07/follow-up-visual-sql-tuning-webinar.html

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

OPT_PARAM in-line hinting

As I learn more about writing SQL queries and system parameters, every so often I'll come back to some old blog posts from other authors.  This type of review allows me to get a handle on something that I didn't understand at first, and then share it with you after that.  Tim Hall created this post about a badly performing query throwing ORA-00600 errors, and the suggestion was to alter a system parameter for the session, but instead he chose to actually use the OPT_PARAM hint within the SQL query.  I thought it was smart enough to save for later and I suggest you read the article, and the other post that he linked within as well.

Monday, December 16, 2013

Date Formats and Oracle Alerts

I've been on an Oracle Alert kick lately with a few posts on the subject, and here comes another article with an different error message.  Looking for reports in Error leads me to find another Oracle Alert, but I can't see exactly what the issue is off hand because choosing the Verify option yields no errors.  When I choose Run, it is a different story as the alert gives me the following error message:

APP-ALR-04108: SQL error ORA-01850: hour must be between 0 and 23

Interesting to say the least.  What did I find?  Investigating further I found that the select statement for the alert is pulling in data from a table that has non-numeric characters and trying to apply a date format function to them which is making it so the alert will never run right.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Weekend Listening: Oracle ERP and EPM integration

While this isn't in the normal vein of posts, getting to listen to John O'Rourke VP of Product Marketing with Oracle making the point of how much work (and thought) they are putting into the integration between their ERP and EPM products is almost priceless.  Not only does he share technical bits that most of us are concerned with, but he dives into the business processing point of view as well which sometimes we can easily miss while we're fighting fires.  Worth the time to listen to this the next chance you have!

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Weekend Twitter - 12/14/13

Sure I could've waited until Thursday for this, but there are a LOT of announcements worthy of getting ahead of the game on the weekend!

Announcements:

https://twitter.com/oraclehardware/status/410772285940056064 - Oracle Exadata Database Machine X4-2 is officially released!  Frits shares the data sheet for it too: https://twitter.com/fritshoogland/status/410778894636032001.

https://twitter.com/mfild/status/410836882251980800 - Speaking of Exadata, Marc Fielding is on the bleeding edge of 11.2.0.4.2 just being released!

https://twitter.com/thatjeffsmith/status/411135593566175233 - The official release of Oracle SQL Developer 4!  Jeff Smith shares some reasons to upgrade https://twitter.com/thatjeffsmith/status/411135921946656768 and Rika Ng posts another release from Oracle on this topic https://twitter.com/rikang/status/411137923367849984.

https://twitter.com/oraclecert/status/410510231295127552 - The Upgrade to Oracle 12c Administrator exam is now available!

https://twitter.com/oracle_ebs/status/410837660882984960 - Procurement RUP on top of R12.1.3.

https://twitter.com/oraclehardware/status/411088060294889472 - The newest version of Oracle Key Manager is now out!

Training/Free Stuff:

https://twitter.com/jloracle/status/409335966285828096 - Jonathan Lewis shares his presentation on HCC from UKOUG this year!


https://twitter.com/oraclecloudzone/status/409608318324604929 - Cloud to on premise weekend reading.

https://twitter.com/dba_hba/status/409696029387132929 - Allan Robertson shares an Oracle whitepaper on Unstructured Data Management with 12c!

https://twitter.com/oracle_edu/status/410151090567782400 - Oracle Education is having WebLogic training.

https://twitter.com/thatjeffsmith/status/410483106307932160 -Jeff Smith will be having a webinar on Oracle SQL Developer!

https://twitter.com/msewtz/status/410503167067971584 - In the New York area?  Get some training from NYOUG on Oracle SQL Developer.

https://twitter.com/oraclepress/status/410835357127942144 - Oracle Press shares another free chapter, this time "Using and Managing Large Databases".

https://twitter.com/enkitec/status/410886569289973760 - Only a few seats open for Enkitec's Exadata Optimization class.

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/410898700161277952 - Get trained on the Sun ZFS Storage 7000 Appliance!

https://twitter.com/jloracle/status/411106006819540992 - The Jonathan and Maria double act from OpenWorld this year on the Optimizer.

https://twitter.com/otnarchbeat/status/411154187255578624 - Interested in a free book on WebLogic?


General News/Information:

https://twitter.com/yvelik/status/409077294268178432 - Yury shares a great interview response!

https://twitter.com/hdeiby/status/409886716216877056 - Deiby Gómez tells us more about ASM and REMOTE_LOGIN_PASSWORDFILE.

https://twitter.com/chrisantognini/status/409987591887675392 - Christian shares a tip that you need to know for a multitenant environment!

https://twitter.com/lucacanalidb/status/410100966667472896 - Luca Canali learned a new trick from MOS in dealing with AWR.

https://twitter.com/seth_m_miller/status/410235897108389888 - Seth Miller shares something that I've thought a LOT over the last few years!

https://twitter.com/jloracle/status/410439191697182720 - Jonathan shares some really good feedback that he got from the conference.

https://twitter.com/oraclealchemist/status/410487435747803136 - Steve Karam has a tweet that reflects a feeling I've seen a lot over the past few months from several people.

https://twitter.com/thatjeffsmith/status/410534657936347136 - Do you know how to get to the last row in an Oracle SQL Developer resultset?

Have you seen the #FiveWordTechHorrors?  Here are some of the better ones I've seen:


https://twitter.com/oracle_ebs/status/410793618895818752 - MOS article on R12.1 asset workbench errors where you get ORA-20001/XLA-95103.

https://twitter.com/leight0nn/status/410825738493759488 - Leighton has run into an issue with EM agents crashing in 12c on RAC nodes due to memory leaks.

Andy Colvin has several new things to share about the new Exadata:


https://twitter.com/jarneil/status/411057674848333824 - It looks like Oracle Advanced Compression Option comes with some new licensing.

https://twitter.com/oracle_edu/status/411061036025151488 - Uwe Hesse has some detailed insight for the new Oracle Database.

https://twitter.com/dba_hba/status/411159578395439104 - More Exadata cores, more licensing?

https://twitter.com/enkitec/status/411214888535470080 - The last part in Kerry Osborne's series of answers on 12c Adaptive Optimization!


https://twitter.com/jloracle/status/411509606800560128 - Jonathan Lewis shares a explanation by Martin Priess of some pre 12c limitations on dynamic_sampling.

https://twitter.com/raysmithace/status/411525118670557184 - Ray Smith tells us not to bounce our DB, and why this post saved his life.

https://twitter.com/oracle_ebs/status/411534754652368898 - Certification and reference information for MS Office 2007 and 2010 for R11 and R12.

https://twitter.com/tanelpoder/status/411573919871946752 - Tanel shows us a bloom partition pruning post from Vishal Desai.

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/411624116035530752 - Oracle Linux spotlight on Ksplice.

https://twitter.com/kahnan/status/411646553007198208 - A great endorsement for Jonathan Lewis' work!

Conference News:

https://twitter.com/pfierens/status/409288474513379328 - Some post UKOUG conference thoughts from Philippe Fierens.

Social Media/DevOps:

https://twitter.com/oracle/status/409062924842311680 - Members of the  OracleACE program share their experiences with Oracle User Groups.


https://twitter.com/clicktips/status/410393600216674304 - Three tips on making your blog/website better.

https://twitter.com/clicktips/status/410813927811854336 - SEO tips for getting traffic from Google!

Friday, December 13, 2013

R12: ARCH wait on SENDREQ

Days after our R12 upgrade our wait event alert showed that "ARCH wait on SENDREQ" was quite high, so further investigation showed 9 different sessions in the wait event within gv$session with all of them having the program set like "oracle@server (ARC0)".

The next day, this is what our wait event alert looked like:

  Waits                                                                                      Wait Time
  gc buffer busy release                                                               6515.7246
  gc buffer busy acquire                                                               6243.267722
  ARCH wait on SENDREQ                                                      4103.947898
  Backup: MML write backup piece                                           3537.058172
  log file sync                                                                              3190.876444
  SQL*Net message from dblink                                                2942.456672
  SQL*Net break/reset to client                                                 1443.085918
  gc current block busy                                                               1434.390776
  FAL archive wait 1 sec for REOPEN minimum                         1156.983756

Referencing the official documentation again for the definition of "buffer busy waits" and "log file sync" helped us to pin not only the ARCH activity, but everything else going on the next day, down to the SLA conversion process that was still being running post-deployment.  What we were seeing was the archiver and archive logs processing from the amount of redo/undo being created in the system, which was why gc (global cache) was so high in the system and the "FAL archive wait" was being generated.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Thursday Twitter - 12/12/13

I may have missed some tweets during the week, and may not have caught up entirely yet, but here's a lot of new stuff for you!

Announcements:

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/408406878159659008 - A reminder that IE7 is no longer a supported browser.

https://twitter.com/pythianbabbey/status/409003586295955456 - Pythian is receiving an award from the Toronto Board of Trade.  Pretty cool!


Training/Free Stuff:

https://twitter.com/oracleweblogic/status/408640779574599680 - WebLogic in practice, SSL configuration.

https://twitter.com/oracleotn/status/408663333429338113 - A webcast giving you five reasons to go to Oracle VM.

https://twitter.com/enkitec/status/408669106557030400 - Frits Hoogland's presentation on multiblock reads!


https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/408995794952658944 - Some Exadata training and resources from Oracle!

General News/Information:

https://twitter.com/oracle_ebs/status/408616771101659136 - Getting rid of additional HZ_PERSON_PROFILES data.

https://twitter.com/chrisantognini/status/408621424551936000 - Christian Antognini starts a good conversation about PDB logging.

https://twitter.com/oraclealchemist/status/408702334928027648 - Steve Karam starts a good conversation on DB compatibility options and you should visit the MOS note listed here: https://twitter.com/mihajlotekic/status/409003140634013696.


https://twitter.com/grantunez/status/408801100372799489 - Rene Antunez shares a few quotes from Nelson Mandela and this one too https://twitter.com/grantunez/status/408801125802835968.

https://twitter.com/leight0nn/status/408972404275167234 - Leighton Nelson shares a good use of 12c.

https://twitter.com/ukoug/status/408988239748689921 - UKOUG shares their Tech13 conference.

https://twitter.com/dbakevlar/status/408995658549301248 - Kellyn makes a good point that bloggers everywhere should take to heart.

https://twitter.com/chrisantognini/status/409026459865341952 - Christian with another great point to make!

https://twitter.com/oracle_ebs/status/409035785112150016 - R12.1.3 AR Receipts form issues relating to Customer name.

https://twitter.com/grantunez/status/409057232332926977 - Rene asks why he is getting an ORA-01017 error message after changing the dbsnmp password.

Conference News:

A series of tweets about Collaborate14 this year:

Social Media/DevOps:

https://twitter.com/kelloggs_ville/status/408937687194693633 - Is it worth joining an OUG (Oracle User Group)?

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Blog spotlight follow up: Tanel Poder

The last spotlight I did was on Tanel Poder, and even though it has just been a few months he's absolutely published some gems which are worth visiting.

Did you know that it is possible for the SGA to be larger than the amount of HugePages in Linux?  It is possible and maybe you'll learn something about USE_LARGE_PAGES and SGA_MAX_SIZE too.

Tanel has introduced a new version of his ash_wait_chains script!  Looking forward to using this, and to see what's in his next version of the script too.

Want to learn more about Oracle Parallel Execution?  Click here for part one and here for part two of some very seriously in-depth articles on the topic!

Ever have to replace a hard drive for Exadata?  Tanel breaks down exactly WHY the system believes the drive has failed in a very methodical way that will be easy to replicate the next time we have an issue.  I've even picked up a few new tricks here to look at disks in a proactive manner!  Also, a great reminder that he has some webinars lined up that I know are worth signing up for.

Here is an interesting post on the difference between "cell flash cache read hits" versus "cell writes to flash cache" metrics.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Blog spotlight follow up: Oracle Support EBS blog

My second spotlight was on the Oracle Support EBS blog, so tonight we turn back to the blog for many a good update!

The EBS Techstack landing page for R12 has been redesigned.

Procurement development is focusing on the Buyer Work Center, and here are the top Enhancement Requests for it.

An update to the PO Approvals Analyzer!

Looking to reduce downtime while upgrading to R12?  Look here too!

I mentioned this before, but it needs repeating; there is a new Procurement Enhancement Request Community that is the future of how Oracle will be working with the customer.

September 2013 Recommended Patch Collections have been released.

The Critical Patch Updates for October are out!

Oracle lets us know that Chase Paymentech PTK is retiring.

Looking for Troubleshooting Assistants (old Search Helpers)?

WebADI has changed with R12.

Help for stuck payments in R12 has arrived!

The "About this Record" function returns for the Customer webpage/form in R12.2!!!

The year end checklist for HCM users.

A new analyzer for iProcurement has been released.

General Data Fixes (GDFs) for Payables are now available.

A great reminder about My Oracle Support.

The 1099 patches for 2013 are out!

Recommended patches for Procurement in R12.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Blog spotlight follow up: Steven Chan's EBS blog

Several months ago, I started a feature of spotlighting blogs and now I want to start a follow up feature so where else would I start but with Steven Chan's EBS blog?

First off, Steven and crew have added a lot of updates which I'll break down into several different categories:

Certifications:

Java 1.6.0_60, 1.6.0_651.7.0_40 and Java 1.7.0_45 are now certified with EBS.

Now you can use Transportable Tablespaces on 10gR2, potentially saving you time in your upgrade processes.

IE10 on Windows 7 is now certified with EBS.

The Application Management Pack is now certified with the latest version of 12c and EBS Plug-in 12.1.0.2 is now available for EM 12c.

The initial release of 12c is certified with 11i and R12, while the terminal release of 11gR2 is certified as well and even more certifications are available for 11gR2.

Multiple versions of EBS client configurations are now certified on Windows 8.

Firefox ESR 24 is certified with multiple EBS clients.

Running EBS on SPARC?  If so, 11i is now certified with 11gR2.

Did you know that Office 2010 64-bit is certified with EBS 12?

R12:

The R12.1 Consolidated Update Patch #2 is available, but is not required if you are already on R12.

Steven reminds us that if you're on R12.1.1 or R12.1.2, you're closer to being able to go to R12.1.3 than you think!

Are you unsure if you should go to R12.1.3 or R12.2?  Steven has an answer for you.

Do you know about the new flexfield value set security feature in R12.2?

Are you using Oracle VM Templates?  New templates are available for R12.2.2.

New Information:

An offer to help Oracle shape the future of the next generation of the EBS interface.  I'll sign up, how about you?

Want to see a great reason to attend Oracle OpenWorld next year?  How about getting support timeline updates direct from the source?

The CPU for October has been released.

Did you know that you are expected to be signing your JAR files?

A new white paper on best practices for gathering EBS statistics, while another paper is available on getting optimal performance from the EBS.

Oracle is sharing the presentations from OpenWorld 2013 for a few months!

Elke suggests a series of upgrade recommendations that are available now.

Can you use 3rd party tools to modify your DB?  Steven has an answer on this one too.

Sunday, December 8, 2013

R12: MO Operating Unit

With changes in R12, it is possible to change your setup from using the profile option "MO: Operating Unit" to start using the profile option "MO: Default Operating Unit".  While that isn't horrible, it does mean that you have to go through your entire system to scour out the old profile option from all responsibility setup and the hard coded details in reports.  This is because if you do not complete this task it is entirely possible to miss something so when you try to run a report it errors out, or if you have some type of audit or alerts run based on MO: Operating Unit when run they will not give you the type of results you're expecting.

This is yet another small piece of advice for a running R12 checklist that I seem to have been building here over the last few months.  :}

Saturday, December 7, 2013

R12: Invalidated workflow

After our upgrade, we kept a close eye on our monitoring alerts and noticed right away when one for workflow errors in the last day showed us this:

ORA-04061: existing state of  has been invalidated

Reaching out to the team responsible for validating the release of the workflow, they weren't quite sure if this was a one off issue or a complete outage type of issue but upon further examination it was determined that the resolution to this was a bounce of the application tier.  I was skeptical, but believed in what I was being told, and it just so happened we had an application tier bounce already lined up for another issue so the stars were aligned and the next day this error went away.  I'm not quite sure what object was invalidated, as you can see that between of and has in the error message, there are 2 spaces as if the object name was not able to be reported up in the error stack.

Friday, December 6, 2013

R12: Materialized Views

You will probably find this best as a "oh yeah" kind of reminder, but I learned a lesson during our R12 upgrade when we went live: treat MVs just like you treat your ETLs and not only test them prior, but validate after as well.

Obviously we did test, but sometimes in a huge project not all changes get propagated as they should so we have MVs without column modifications (especially for RA_CUSTOMERS).  Additionally, we ran into this in our alert log:

ORA-12012: error on auto execute of job 93
ORA-12008: error in materialized view refresh path
ORA-00942: table or view does not exist
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_SNAPSHOT", line 2563
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_SNAPSHOT", line 2776
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_IREFRESH", line 685
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_REFRESH", line 195
Why did we encounter this?  We didn't validate that the MV was in a VALID state before asking the system to run it as per the normal run schedule.  This leads me to think of yet another alert to tell us when we have a MV go INVALID just in case it happens again and we aren't watching the alert log like hawks.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Thursday Twitter - 12/05/13

It's about time that I actually do this post on time huh?

I've obviously missed a few weeks of my Twitter updates, so today you get a massive update following the same format as last time, and we'll see how it goes!

Announcements:

https://twitter.com/Oracle_EBS/status/406109000393318400 - The Quarterly EBS upgrade recommendations!

https://twitter.com/OTNArchBeat/status/407644367881764864 - Bob is looking for you to guest produce the OTN ArchBeat.  That's an awesome deal!

https://twitter.com/oracleace/status/408030885834137600 & https://twitter.com/grantunez/status/408012239958851584 - New Oracle ACEs!!

https://twitter.com/OracleCert/status/408333092764413952 - Last chance to take Linux 5 & 6 SysAdmin Beta tests for $50!

Training/Free Stuff:

https://twitter.com/Oracle_EBS/status/406088866345783296 - Webinar on the R12 Financials Accounting Hub.

https://twitter.com/OracleDBsupport/status/406181984478961664 - Use Linux on System Z?  Here's a webinar for you!

https://twitter.com/TanelPoder/status/406775536456069120 - Tanel shares a presentation from Connor McDonald about Oracle analytic functions.

https://twitter.com/OraclePress/status/406866616232984576 - Get Chapter 44 free for Java Stored Procedures from Oracle DB 12c: The Complete Reference.

https://twitter.com/oraclehardware/status/407539693556076545 - A webinar on OEM 12c storage tips and tricks for performance!

https://twitter.com/Enkitec/status/407546270937407488 - If you didn't attend Karen Morton's presentation on "Everyday Oracle Pro" do yourself a favor and visit the recording here.

https://twitter.com/OracleExalogic/status/407554786364776448 - Exalogic bootcamps are coming, register now!

https://twitter.com/Enkitec/status/407560217631547392 - Tanel is giving another troubleshooting and optimization course.

https://twitter.com/OraclePress/status/407631087763193856 - Free chapter of Oracle 12c New Features.

https://twitter.com/ahl/status/407872672941355008 - Presentation from UKOUG on ZFS for databases.

https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu/status/407900605399592961 - Test your GoldenGate 11g knowledge with a question!

https://twitter.com/OraclePress/status/407963944322883585 - Another free chapter from Oracle Press, this time on ASM Health Check Monitors.

General News/Information:

https://twitter.com/Oracle_EBS/status/406068741290864640 - A MOS note for understanding FA mass additions, create, and troubleshooting.

https://twitter.com/Oracle_EBS/status/406088866345783296 - Learn how encumbrance accounting flows from PO to GL with another MOS note.

https://twitter.com/fritshoogland/status/406176781637394432 - Frits Hoogland with a more than average insight.

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/406231580282454016 - Great idea to get updates to this Exadata MOS note automatically!

https://twitter.com/TanelPoder/status/406413846514262016 - Tanel Poder shares with us a MOS note about testing Exadata and RAC.

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/406413928160567296 - Starting up 252 PDBs with Oracle Multitenant!

https://twitter.com/dba_hba/status/406429076769869827 - Allan Robertson shares a great post about triage and troubleshooting, with some very good take aways.

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/406926405138923521 - Trunc Aggregation and HA.

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/407122160495628288 - Detecting application entry points.

https://twitter.com/ChiefRobot/status/407472571035451392 - Amusing image about the take over of the Amazon drones!

https://twitter.com/Oracle_EBS/status/407523316397006848 - Automatic Receipts in R12 blog entry from the Oracle EBS team.

https://twitter.com/Oracle_EBS/status/407538422132142081 - What are the top FIVE ATG notes being viewed by customers?

https://twitter.com/mnorgaard/status/407791480833843200 - The start of the OakTable Network.

https://twitter.com/Oracle_EBS/status/407889491601682432 - The period close advisor and how to make it a concurrent program: https://twitter.com/Oracle_EBS/status/408234260949385217.

https://twitter.com/grantunez/status/408055170707095552 - A good reminder about Windows XP!

https://twitter.com/OracleAlchemist/status/408252030801547264 - Steve has a great point.  Great point.

Conference News:

https://twitter.com/devops/status/406544421392760832 - The MountainWest DevOps 2014 conference call for papers is now open!

UKOUG:  Again, we have a conference getting a section all to itself because of the volume coming out from it!

https://twitter.com/orcldoug/status/407161048287162369 - Slide from James Morle about throughput.

https://twitter.com/orastory/status/407180270283292672 - A fan of learning IO internals around direct path, IO submit, and IO slots from James Morle and Frits Hoogland.

https://twitter.com/mfild/status/407185511716257792 - Marc Fielding talks about Frits' multiblock reads magnum opus that took two years to complete.

https://twitter.com/brost/status/407443879710179328 - Learning about scalar subqueries.

https://twitter.com/UweHesse/status/407456371505119232 - Uwe tells us that Point In Time recovery for PDB requires a container at a remote site.

https://twitter.com/ahl/status/407456397199409152 - Speaking of PDBs, there is the opinion that they won't be used for a few years.

https://twitter.com/MarisElsins/status/407470248104067073 - Frits in action, and a comment that his presentation was so good that people couldn't tweet anything out during it.  That's pretty good!

https://twitter.com/brost/status/407479360011374592 - IO latency heatmaps in action!  Download link is here: https://twitter.com/tpresslie/status/407489834878767104.

https://twitter.com/oraclebase/status/407483277331537920 - How do you jump around PDBs like you do editions?

https://twitter.com/acolvin/status/407498202401607682 - Ever have an issue you block from your mind, and it comes back when talking about something else?  Yeah, me too.

https://twitter.com/MarisElsins/status/407514163347746817 - Maris freaks out a bit about the size of his room, and that's likely what I'll get in March.  :}

https://twitter.com/oraclebase/status/407526387919388672 - I don't know about witchcraft, or the witches that practice it, but I don't think we need to be going this far do we?  :}

https://twitter.com/brost/status/407536008323137536 & https://twitter.com/OyvindIsene/status/407537346205458432 - The community seems to be really open to new people participating, which is great news for me!

https://twitter.com/LucaCanaliDB/status/407539849286385664 - A great snapshot and caption about DBAs!

https://twitter.com/MarisElsins/status/407565844450123776 - A lot like what I said from a few presentations at Hotsos 2012!

https://twitter.com/SQLMaria/status/407573549549768704 - Maria (and others) won awards at the conference!

https://twitter.com/MarisElsins/status/407682517865463808 - Downloading MOS patches with a script.

https://twitter.com/JLOracle/status/408162051819708416 - Jonathan shares his Basic CBO PDF.

https://twitter.com/UweHesse/status/408206268034473984 - Is your script using Exadata cells?  Query v$cell and find out!

https://twitter.com/yvelik/status/408207015040020480 - Yury shares Maris' presentation on 10 ways to improve RMAN scripts.

https://twitter.com/mcox_IT/status/408263401329414144 - Great endorsement, and sounds like what I think about OAUGs Collaborate.

https://twitter.com/rluttikhuizen/status/408370107438493696 - WebLogic hackathon.

Social Media/DevOps:

https://twitter.com/ClickTips/status/405854969255174144 - Reducing "bounce rate" for your blogs.

https://twitter.com/devops/status/406272117425311744 - What is the problem with DevOps?

https://twitter.com/JLOracle/status/406346774119342080 - Not often that I get to see what other bloggers habits are, but Jonathan Lewis gives us some insight here on some of his "routine".

https://twitter.com/DBAKevlar/status/406529955648917504 - I'm filing this under Social Media because while I'm branching out, maybe I should be getting an about.me page too like Kellyn.

https://twitter.com/kylehhailey/status/407182726010515456 - Kyle Hailey shares a post about PLNs (personal learning network) and I have to say, the past few months have made me a believer.

https://twitter.com/devops/status/407631846802214913 - What is DevOps?

https://twitter.com/ClickTips/status/407862656100352001 - Getting more traffic with a "word cloud".

https://twitter.com/devops/status/407949327110516736 - I've heard of PMBOK, but SABOK?