Monday, June 30, 2014

R12.1.3: Payables Open Interface Import performance issues

With all of the issues that have been rattling out of our R12.1.3 instance, it is good to learn about one in advance of having it happen to us when we can least afford it.  In that light, today's post is about the patches located within the My Oracle Support page "Performance Issue In Payables Open Interface Import" in note ID 1900462.1 where an import of several million lines did not complete in a timely fashion.  Do you want to wait until your Import had this many lines, or do you want to prevent disaster and plan for these patches?

Sunday, June 29, 2014

Weekend Learning: Total Session History utility

I cannot wait to get my hands on Chris Craft's new utility Total Session History which is supposed to combine AWR (Automatic Workload Repository) and ASH (Active Session History).  This utility is targeted at Exadata platforms to give us a complete look at everything that is going on in our systems so I want to dig into this to see what I am missing right now in my mental picture of what our system is doing!  If you have a chance to use this before I do next week, let me know what you think in the comments!

Saturday, June 28, 2014

OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech 2014: Back Presenting!

Just a few days ago I told you that the OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech 2014 was now going to be presented via E-Learning, and that the schedule was full so I would not be able to present.  Well it looks like there have been some changes, as I have heard back from the organizers and I am back on the schedule!  That means that I will get to share my Workflow presentation again on July 21st!

Friday, June 27, 2014

R12.1.3: Invoice Workbench freezes on saving

During our last A/P month end close we were pulled into an issue where the business was seeing the system take 5-10 minutes to save per invoice when they had to change site or payment information, and another 5-10 minutes to validate the invoice as well.  Obviously this made the system pretty much unusable for the individuals that had to perform these tasks as part of their core job functions, so we sat down and saw that the SQL_ID being passed each time was c9zkjtwxxu17t with an explain plan cost of the SQL over 40,000 GB.

Today we sat down with several individuals with the A/P team to try and brainstorm some ways to research and replicate this issue, when we found that the Invoice Workbench was freezing even if they were not trying to save or change supplier site information but one track we need to verify is if this affects only Validated invoices.  Enter my co-worker that did a search on My Oracle Support during the meeting and found the article "Performance problem in Invoice Workbench: It Takes Long Time When Changing The Supplier Site" under document ID 1572029.1 which has the patch required to fix this and details what the true cause of this issue is.

We also learned that this has existed ever since we went to R12.1.3, but over time it slowly began to take more and more time to save or validate.  Why is this?  Well, I am glad you asked!  The root cause is in XLA tables, which was introduced with R12 architecture and these tables keep growing the more business/conversion you do so if you have a bad query hitting a small amount of data it can perform "well enough" so the business does not mind the delay but if you take the same query and greatly increase the amount of data it runs again there goes your system performance.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Using shell scripts to monitor DB files

Since I am sure that you got enough Twitter information from KScope this week, I am going to skip the regular Thursday Twitter to focus on on a tweet from Xavier Picamal about monitoring log files!  Why is this such a good article to read?  Well I am spending some time planning out additional monitoring for our platforms using shell scripts like this, and seeing different examples of what can be done or different ways to do the same thing can only expand our horizons and make our solutions better.

While Xavier is looking through .log files, this makes me think about being able to search through .trc files that get automatically generated.  What does this make you think of?  Have you seen other examples of how to do this, or other things to monitor in this way?

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

AWR taking too much SYSAUX space

While we might take our AWR data for granted, but the My Oracle Support article "How to Address Issues Where AWR Data Uses Significant Space in the SYSAUX Tablespace" from note 287679.1 shows us several ways that we can run out of space in SYSAUX.  These points should be yet another monitoring hook for us, so we keep our system up and running 100% especially if we decide to make modifications to how we capture or retain AWR data!

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech 2014: Now Online!

I let you know last month that I was selected for the OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech conference in Pittsburgh for the second year in a row, but unfortunately the level of registrations were not near last year's level so the conference has been modified so it is now online only.  As a consequence, the list of presenters has been trimmed down to fit an E-Learning model so I will not be presenting at the conference this year.  I have been told that there will be a fee for the conference, but it has not yet been announced what it is, and when I get more information I will be sure to pass it on to you.

If you were hoping to see me in Pittsburgh, I am sorry about this turn of events but I am sure we will have many more opportunities in the future to meet!

Monday, June 23, 2014

Weeklong Learning: KScope

Last week I mentioned on the Thursday Twitter that you could view some of the sessions from the KScope, but if you aren't paying attention to KScope on Twitter this week then you are just plain missing out!  I have learned that many times presenters will link to their presentations or even answer extra questions so you do not have to be at the conference to get the benefit of the information shared there.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Weekend Learning: EAS sign on for multiple Shared Services

I may have mentioned recently that we help administer Hyperion products in addition to our main EBS application, and for those of you out there in similar situations I want to share this post by John Goodwin explaining how he was able to utilize the sign in information for a standalone EAS over to multiple Shared Services instances.  Reading through this it may seem complicated, but taking a step back it is fairly straight-forward and elegant in the solution!  I learned a bit more from this one, that I did not expect to get out of the article, so I am glad that I found the article!

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Happy Birthday to the blog!

It is hard to believe that just a year ago I was marveling about having over a thousand hits, and today I am on the verge of TWENTY thousand hits in just TWO years!  Not bad for a little site I started as a personal outlet for some thoughts/opinions I had on some subjects huh?

I have branched out to new social media outlets (Twitter and Google+), attended multiple conferences (OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech and Hotsos Symposium) and continue to expand my horizons by learning from others!  Over the next month, I will be expanding and changing the site a bit to make it more personalized and easier to find and keep track of some things.

Here's to another year of fun and learning!

Friday, June 20, 2014

Unmounting ASM disk by querying V$ASM_FILE on 11gR2

The title of My Oracle Support note 1145365.1 "Alert: Querying V$ASM_FILE Gives ORA-15196 After ASM Was Upgraded From 10gR2 to 11gR2 with an AU size > 1M" does not quite tell you the full story because it neglects to tell you what the ORA-15196 message means or what it results in!  The error is for "invalid ASM block header" and it results in the disk going offline if it has less than a certain number of files in the disk group.

I think it would be good to know if a disk will go offline all of a sudden if the GV$ASM_FILE or V$ASM_FILE objects are queried from, so take this as an opportunity to be proactive and run the query in this note to investigate your ASM disk groups before you find out the wrong way that this is an issue!

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Thursday Twitter - 6/19/14

Yes, there was something besides World Cup tweets on Twitter this week.  :}

Announcements:

https://twitter.com/Exadata/status/479662416889126912 - Announcing the Exadata X4 platform!

https://twitter.com/ddfdba/status/478990788060135424 - David Fitzjarrell shares that Apress/IOUG press is now online.

https://twitter.com/lakshram/status/478948781639995392 - Laskhmi Sampath lets us know that MS Office 2013 is now certified with EBS R12.1.3!

https://twitter.com/RaghuSripada/status/478903134795087873 - I don't know how, but Raghuram found my tweet from a few days ago and added it to his daily EM paper!

https://twitter.com/BW_Contract/status/478894158883454976 - OAUG creates a new SIG and GEO!

Training/Free Stuff:

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/479632864330674177 - Did you know that the Developer Relations YouTube channel is a year old now?  It even has more than 100 videos up too!

https://twitter.com/OraclePress/status/478957839785132033 - Here are 23 FREE Q&As from the OCP Upgrade to 12c exam guide!

https://twitter.com/OracleDatabase/status/478937644869898240 - A whitepaper on Oracle Partitioning!

General News/Information:

https://twitter.com/OracleSecurity/status/479674988006752256 - Oracle Security posits that organized crime is as powerful as some countries.  Agree or disagree?

https://twitter.com/JLOracle/status/479674719705133057 - Jonathan Lewis on the costs for DELETE operations.

https://twitter.com/DBAKevlar/status/479651586869059584 - Kellyn Pot'Vin shares a post from a WebLogic blog on analyzing a stuck piece of code.

https://twitter.com/dba_hba/status/479623095917899776 - Allan Robertson shares the first part of Service Reliability and Pythian shares part two here https://twitter.com/Pythian/status/479626536023121920.

https://twitter.com/CondeBond/status/479608920101896193 - Xavier Picamal shares a LinkedIn debate about log file sync wait.

https://twitter.com/OracleSecurity/status/478986709028589569 - What are 5 things you can learn from security threats?

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/478831701406535680 - Do you support Oracle Fusion Middleware?  Then maybe this pretty new Oracle blog on practical experience with the application might be your cup of tea.

https://twitter.com/kylehhailey/status/478821132628262912 - Kyle Hailey shares more insights from Andrew Holdsworth: if you are updating 1 row per ms, do you know how long it takes for 1 trillion rows?

https://twitter.com/DBAKevlar/status/478810546649968640 - Do you need to present data?  Here are 50 ways to do it!

https://twitter.com/PrasannaPeshkar/status/478777801684688896 - Prasanna Peshkar found this post from Tanel Poder to be pretty awesome.

https://twitter.com/oraclemagazine/status/478766616420040704 - Oracle shares trends in data center consolidation.

https://twitter.com/OraTweets/status/478614088105201664 - Iggy Fernandez has part 2 of a series about the EXPLAIN PLAN.

https://twitter.com/leight0nn/status/478338159596421120 - Leighton Nelson tells us how MTTR setting changes the DBWR work profile.

https://twitter.com/fuadar/status/478129331060101120 - Fuad Arshad shares a take on the Oracle 12c In-Memory Option.

Conference News:

https://twitter.com/debralilley/status/479615019702046720 - Why does Debra Lilley present at user groups?

https://twitter.com/JLOracle/status/478990049632325633 - Don't miss an opportunity to learn from Jonathan Lewis!

https://twitter.com/odtug/status/478962428865425409 - Not going to KScope?  You can view it remotely!

https://twitter.com/pythianpartners/status/478952837154877441 - Pythian was at the ECRUG conference this year and so was Subhajit https://twitter.com/DCSubhajit/status/478909515287764992!

https://twitter.com/debralilley/status/478934279217745921 - Debra was at the BGOUG conference!  It's nice to be an ACE Director!

https://twitter.com/kylehhailey/status/478880636888154112 - In a few days, I'll tell you why this tweet from Andrew Holdsworth at the AOUG Vienna is SO funny!

https://twitter.com/martinberx/status/478840663489146880 - Martin Berger got to see Christian Antognini at the AOUG conference speak about adaptive query optimization!

https://twitter.com/martinberx/status/478810733481041920 - Martin also shares this slide from Andrew Holdsworth about performance that people get.

Social Media/DevOps:

https://twitter.com/thatjeffsmith/status/478878378821304320 - THAT Jeff Smith shares a post about why you should start presenting.  Sure it's not about Social Media or DevOps, but it is about getting out of your comfort zone and interacting with people; both of which are tenants of these two headings!

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

OTN Virtual Technology Summit

The last few years, OTN presents Virtual Days which include hands-on labs and this year they are changing up the script a bit!  It looks like instead of more "hard-core" and lab intensive work OTN is opting for sharing a lot of information about Middleware, System Administration, Databases, and Java with a lot of different experts during a Virtual Technology Summit on July 9th for the audiences in the Americas (10th and 16th for regions outside the Americas).  Did I mention that this is free?

This looks like a really great event, and I signed up minutes after I read it in my Architect Community Newsletter which you should also sign up for here.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Firewalls, Damn Firewalls, and Projects

Okay, maybe it is not grammatically what the original phrase was about but I thought it was a good title.  :}

We recently had a project where we were replacing a set of servers, and one of the things that caught us out during the PROD cutover was the firewalls!  Firewalls between databases, firewalls between middle tier applications; some we had caught in QA, others we did not, but it all added up to extra time in our deployment that could have been avoided.

Take our mistake, and learn from it to make your next project that much more successful.  I know the next time we have something like this going in, I am going to grill everybody available about the firewalls!

Monday, June 16, 2014

R12: Incomplete Payables conversion from 11i

Were you aware that the data that existed in 11i within the AP_ENCUMBRANCE_LINES_ALL table was not upgraded into the new XLA tables?  I didn't know that either!  The MOS note "Enhancement Request: R12 Doe Not Show Upgraded Encumbrance Accounting Lines From Payables" from note ID 1673271.1 does reference R12.2 but since all versions of R12 do go through the XLA conversions I believe it would apply to all versions!  Food for thought if you are going through the upgrade process, or something to keep in mind if you have already upgraded just in case the business did not catch this in testing originally and suddenly realizes it after implementation.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Weekend Learning: Compression

Have you ever wanted to learn more about Oracle compression, and some of the associated techniques with reducing your data footprint?  If so, today is your lucky day!  Check out these My Oracle Support articles, and the free documentation PDFs to see if there is anything you might be able to pick up and use!

DBMS_REDEFINITION ONLINE REORGANIZATION OF TABLES - 149564.1
How to Reorganize a Table - 151588.1
How to Re-Organize a Table Online - 177407.1
Master Note for OLTP Compression - 1223705.1

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e17157/planned.htm#HAOVW155
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11857_01/em.111/e11982.pdf

Saturday, June 14, 2014

Weekend Learning: Using ASH Analytics in EM12c

Have you used Enterprise Manager 12c yet to drill into ASH analytic data?  If you have not had the chance, I would visit the page Kellyn Pot'vin shared via Twitter tonight where she uses EM12c to identify a negative trend and then dive into the ASH data to figure out what is going on!  This was a great article where she gives us the entire "train of thought" plus screenshots for every event so we can duplicate her efforts when we have our own problems!

Friday, June 13, 2014

OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech: Early Bird Pricing Ends 6/18

In July I will be in Pittsburgh to present at the OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech conference, and if you have not already signed up you should do so by 6/18 as you will save an extra $100 with Early Bird Pricing!  If you are not sure that it is worth the investment, view the preview webinars to get a good taste of what you will find at the conference; I can say that without being tongue in cheek having watched one of them this morning and snapped several screenshots of the presentation so I can digest the information later!

I hope to see you next month, and if you have any questions about the conference please add to the comments!  I might direct you to somebody with the OAUG, but I would rather you ask even if I cannot give you an answer myself!

Thursday, June 12, 2014

OOW14: Rejected!

I already shared something from Twitter this week, so what has hit me today and is on my mind a bit was the rejection for Oracle OpenWorld 2014 of all three of my proposals.  This is not a new feeling, as I was rejected last year too, but I think with the past year behind me I felt like I was ready to make another big jump like I have this year going from my first conference presentation for OAUG to my second presentation at the Hotsos Symposium.  Sure this means that I can focus on my next big project at work that I want to use for more material eventually, and that I don't have to rush any of my material together for the new proposals that are almost from scratch, yet I feel like I am going to miss such a great opportunity to learn and meet more people that have the same interests I do.  I am not giving up, next year I will be submitting again and between then and now are more conference opportunities like Hotsos and Collaborate where I might find the right stage again!

If you have had your proposal accepted for OpenWorld, this year or any other, what are some tips that you can give the rest of us that are trying to get our material chosen?

If you have had your proposal declined for OpenWorld, this year or another, what do you think are some reasons that you might not have been picked?

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

12c In-Memory Launch

If you were on Twitter today, you would have seen the hashtag #DB12c being used a lot as Larry Ellison lead a launch event for the 12c In-Memory option which was announced already at Oracle Open World last year and several high profile gurus like Tom Kyte and Maria Colgan were already going to conferences spreading the word about the option.

What did today bring us?

World records as the 12c In-Memory enabled database ran on a trillion rows of data.
Application reports going from 4+ hours to 12 SECONDS.
Testers were bored because it was so easy.
Several Enkitec employees were involved in the presentation!

Do not just take my word for it, follow the hashtag link above to find the official press release and YouTube link of the replay.

Monday, June 9, 2014

OS Command Learning: curl

We had an issue the other day where we did not know if a new server would be able to reach out to the WSDL that our old server was able to hit.  While we were fairly confident that we had a problem, I was introduced to a new OS command: curl.  Used by itself with no switches, and just the WSDL link after the command as the first argument, retrieved the WSDL definition on our old server without a problem.  On the new server the command was not successful because it was not able to reach the destination!

Reading up on the Wikipedia page linked above it appears that this command will download the source of any webpage offered in the argument, including saving the source code off locally with the right switches!  This may be a rare tool that we have in our toolbox, but the one time you need it is the one time you will be glad you have it!

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Weekend Learning: Oracle DB Support

Did you know that even if you are not signed up for Premier Support, you can still get some of the benefits from it?  True story!  You can even learn A LOT from the My Oracle Support note "Oracle Premier Support - Oracle Database Support News - Issue April, 2014 Volume 39" ID 1671614.1 including information about 12.1 new features, DBFS, and RAC recommendations.  After you soak up all this knowledge, stay in touch with the Oracle DB Support group so you can get notified about this information when it comes out!

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Weekend Learning: Partitioned Table Indexes

Have you ever wanted to learn more about partitioned tables and how they are indexed?  Look no further than the MOS article "Common Questions on Indexes on Partitioned Table" from document ID 1481609.1 that Deiby Gómez shared on Twitter.  If I had to guess, Tom Kyte or somebody just as knowledgable at Oracle wrote this because it is VERY detailed and informative!

Friday, June 6, 2014

Troubleshooting disk performance issues

While orientated towards the Solaris OS, the MOS article "Troubleshooting Disk Performance" found in note 1010680.1 has a good general rundown of what layers exist between the OS and Oracle's DB software.  It is an interesting dive into what is typically a "black box" that we do not really know anything about since it just sits there working all the time!

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Thursday Twitter - 6/5/14

I might not have been on Twitter a whole lot this week, but I was on it enough to get you some very good articles/information to read!

Announcements:

https://twitter.com/SharmanPete/status/474261937555914752 - Application Management Pack for EBS 12.1.0.2 has been certified with EM 12c R4!

Training/Free Stuff:

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/474212161494188032 - Get accredited on EBS with My Oracle Support!

General News/Information:

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/474287840336302080 - Interested in Oracle Multitenant?  Visit these useful links!

https://twitter.com/oraclebase/status/474286245665722368 - Tim Hall is in the 12c manual!

https://twitter.com/OracleDBsupport/status/474283211850518529 - Tips from the Database Networking Community on MOS.

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/474258312192864257 - Have you signed up for the Oracle Database Insider?  No?  Here is the June edition and a good opportunity to sign up for it!

https://twitter.com/OracleBlogs/status/474242229754949632 - Top 10 Architect Community articles of May!

https://twitter.com/markrittman/status/474232576090316800 - Speaking of the Top 10, here is the author of the #1 link for May!

https://twitter.com/TheGrahamHussey/status/474184731945607169 - Take a break from the day, and Oracle related content, with this 10 minute recipe.

https://twitter.com/UKOUG/status/474113661871865856 - Several reviews of the latest edition of the Oracle E-Business Suite Financials Handbook.

Conference News:

https://twitter.com/Enkitec/status/474227468283289603 - E4 was a big hit this year!

https://twitter.com/EPM_Queen/status/474218675869065217 - Join Sarah and submit for ECOUG!

https://twitter.com/jczuprynski/status/474191977819287553 - Jim Czuprynski's post on the MENA tour!

https://twitter.com/brainsurface/status/473554062458486784 - OTN MENA tour was so great, it's going to be an annual event!

Social Media/DevOps:

Nothing interesting this week, better luck next time.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Zero dollar expense reports get stuck

Did you know that personal $0 bothpay expense reports in 11.5.10.2 get stuck due to an overwrite of the EXPENSE_STATUS_CODE?  It is totally true!  Check out the My Oracle Support note "Zero Dollar Personal Bothpay Expense Reports Are Stuck In 'Ready For Payment' Status" ID 1627500.1 for the bugs (and patch) that will resolve this issue.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Hotsos Symposium 2015: Open!

Sure I went on and on about the Hotsos Symposium 2014 conference which you can see here but I learned something today I think you should know.  The call for presentations is now open and so is registration!

Personally the 2012 event changed my view of the world and got me really going professionally, the 2014 event inspired me even more and was such a great time to network and learn from others that I am hoping to have an entirely new abstract to submit for next year!

Monday, June 2, 2014

Adding OEM notifications for file generation

Catching up some on older posts out there, and one from Pythian caught my eye on OEM notifications about generated trace files!  It introduced me to GV$DIAG tables which I had not known about before, and I wonder about the further application beyond counting the files and being able to do some space measurements on the files.

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Weeklong Learning: E42014

No, that is not a misprint.  I said weekLONG learning.  Why?  Because you should be following Enkitec's E4 conference on Twitter via the hashtag #E42014 if you can't make it in person or be a virtual attendant.  With such good prices, I think this conference is going to be in my personal budget for next year just in case I find myself free around this time next year because that is a GREAT value for all of what you can learn about Exadata here.