Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The 10 days of Blogging past - 2014 Edition: Day 10

As I conclude "The 10 days of Blogging past" feature today with the article "R12 Payables: Invoice Workbench error APP-SQLAP-10108 when committing" that was posted just 9 short months ago but already has rocketed up to the top spot with 545 views!  It goes without saying that this post was the top for the year of 2014 as well too!  What did we cover last year on this day?  It was "Database FLASH exhaustion" that had an amazing (at that time) 170 views and it is very interesting that the past few days we have seen a drop off from the 5:1 ratio to this being just above a 3:1 ratio comparing last year with this year.

What will next year look like during our end of year review?  I do not rightly know, but it is awesome to see that 5:1 ratio discussed over the last few days reflected in the overall stats for the blog as I ended 2013 just under 8,000 views and 2014 sees the pageviews up over 40,000!

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The 10 days of Blogging past - 2014 Edition: Day 9

Getting almost completed with "The 10 days of Blogging past" today we review the post "What happens when your Concurrent Manager goes crazy?" which has been online for only 15 months but has gathered a massive 496 views.  This shows me that even established technology like the Concurrent Manager can experience changes and the amount of details included in the post help to piece together some things that could be classified as mysteries if the post was not around to be searched on.  Contrasting the article that was covered on Day 9 last year, "Concurrent:Active Request Limit (or how I finally learned to know what my system was saying)" that was around about 16 months and had 126 views which only reaches a 4:1 ratio comparing that last 2 years.  Again, if we just think about what would have been in my top 10 for just posts from 2014 we would have "R12: Hiding the DQM Serial Sync Index Program" listed instead with 436 views and I am sure you noticed this was the post spotlighted on Day 7 of "The 10 days of Blogging past"!

Monday, December 29, 2014

The 10 days of Blogging past - 2014 Edition: Day 8

The post "Disconnected Concurrent Manager" with 446 views may look familiar if you have been reading the last few days during "The 10 days of Blogging past" as it was featured on Day 2 from being 8th overall last year.  I would say it is obvious from the popularity of this post that other people and companies have network outages or other issues that wreck havoc with their EBS application from time to time.  Last year we had the post "duration not active: A Tale of Two Articles" with 91 views and while a bit under, it is very close to the magic 5:1 post ratio!  Speaking of flashbacks during "The 10 days of Blogging past", I covered "ASM Alert: RAC ASM disk offline after rebalance" on Day 5 this year since it was 6th overall blog posts but would have been 3rd overall for 2014 blog posts.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

The 10 days of Blogging past - 2014 Edition: Day 7

Continuing "The 10 days of Blogging past" we find article "R12: Hiding the DQM Serial Sync Index Program" on Day 7 with 436 page hits which meets our 5:1 ratio between the article covered last year on this day "Learning more about DBA_ALERT_HISTORY" that had 86 views.  This year's article is yet another instance of an unintended "feature" of R12 which likely has caught a lot of other Support individuals off guard so it is quite exciting to be leading the charge to shine light on these dark corners of the application!

How does this compare to last year?  Well the post "R12: Problem with Expense Report Export Program" would have the 4th highest hits of 2014 with 311 views and if it seems familiar to you that could be it was listed on Day 2 of the "The 10 days of Blogging past" feature just a few days ago!

Saturday, December 27, 2014

The 10 days of Blogging past - 2014 Edition: Day 6

On the other side of halfway for "The 10 days of Blogging past" we visit the post "R12: Application server craziness" which continues the trend we have been seeing with R12 ruling the top 10 lists this year and last.  While it was not the first issue I found with R12, it was the first problem I had with R12 in our PROD environment, and from the 404 views it has received since I am guessing other people have had a problem with this in their implementations as well!  As stated, R12 rules around the blog lately and it continues with "EBS R12.2.4 Release Notes" that would have been in this spot with 269 views if we were focusing on just 2014 posts.  Compared to last year's post the article "Concurrent Manager holding lock on a report" held down the spot on Day 6 with 82 views which is almost dead on the mark for the 5:1 ratio that I have been mentioning all during this feature comparing the last 2 years.

Friday, December 26, 2014

The 10 days of Blogging past - 2014 Edition: Day 5

Tonight we continue "The 10 days of Blogging past" after yesterday's Christmas article with "ASM Alert: RAC ASM disk offline after rebalance" with 363 page views!  This was one of those articles where I was able to find references on My Oracle Support which corresponded to something that had just happened at work so not only did it make more sense to me about that incident, but what I found could help us (and everybody else) avoid future issues!

If we counted just the posts from this year, we would have "R12: FND_LOG_MESSAGES" in our countdown today with only 218 views.  I thought it was pretty interesting that this post did not get more hits, because it seems like EVERY implementation of R12 is going to have this bloat and later on in the year I found more reason that this table needs a lot of attention!  While on the list last year in this spot we had "Supplier issue in Expense Report Import" with 81 views and while you can see there is a drop off from the 5:1 ratio, it is still up there around that range.

Thursday, December 25, 2014

The 10 days of Blogging past - 2014 Edition: Day 4

In today's Christmas edition of "The 10 days of Blogging past", we cover the article "Database FLASH exhaustion" with 359 hits!  This compares to last year when it was the TOP article for the blog last year with 170 views but again if we were just comparing this year it would be the post "Hotsos Symposium 2014 - Day 1" that would take this spot on our list with 205 views!  This is awesome because it is another example of how much presenting at conferences can enhance your "brand value" or just general recognition in the blogging ecosystem and I know that I have been getting more views as a result of each opportunity I get to present!

Last year in this spot we had "Your Oracle DB not playing nice with Hyperion products" from mid 2013 with only 72 views and again we see an almost 5:1 ratio between the entries on this list from last year and this year.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

The 10 days of Blogging past - 2014 Edition: Day 3

As we continue on our feature "The 10 days of Blogging past" day 3 brings us the post "R12: Bouncing Workflow agent process" with 358 since it was posted in 2013.  This was not on the top 10 list last year, but it skyrocketed up the charts because I think this showcased a clear change in Support operations from the previous EBS version to R12 so a lot of other people were probably blindsided by this too.  This also continues a theme I posted about yesterday where changes in R12 are driving a lot of traffic to the blog as the 3rd entry in our list last year was "System Wait Events Part 2" with just 71 views.

If we count just this year, we continue the same trend of R12 ruling all as the entry "R12: Changes in GL_DAILY_RATES table" was a very simple update but it would have been listed today on the top 10 list of 2014 as it has received 201 hits since May!  This is an average of around 30 hits a month which you can see is roughly 1 hit per day since it was posted.  I have already learned that R12 seems to be very popular around here, but this also shows me that even the smallest changes can have a ripple effect out there in the community since there could be a lot of reasons this is impacting people and information is really important to spread out into the ecosystem!

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

The 10 days of Blogging past - 2014 Edition: Day 2

Continuing the 2014 edition of "The 10 days of Blogging past" we have today the blog post "R12: Problem with Expense Report Export Program" having 316 views already this year with it being put online February 2014!  What did I take away from this post, and the success of it?  There are a lot of R12 features (or bugs) which have not been shaken out of our system, and that a lot of other people are interested in!  Why so much interest?  Are people searching for potential problems ahead of implementation, are they encountering the bugs live like we are here, or is there a combination of both?  Just as with some of the new things I find with recent upgrades like NFS, Exadata, or 11.2.0.3, R12 is no different with the larger community pooling our resources and always searching out other solutions or problems that have been identified. 

Last year on the top 10, we had the post "Disconnected Concurrent Manager" with just 61 views so you can see a continued trend of more traffic to the blog this year but if we were measuring just 2014 posts then the article "Purge Inactive Sessions and HWM expectations" would be on our second day with 199 views.  This post was the result of some investigation on my part in QA about what I wanted to do in PROD, related to what my expectations were regarding how I thought purging data out and the HWM (High Water Mark) would be interacting.  It was really interesting because things did not happen the way I expected them to so I had a lot to say in the post as I learned quite a bit and obviously I think others are dealing with high volumes related to inactive sessions too!

Monday, December 22, 2014

The 10 days of Blogging past - 2014 Edition: Day 1

This year I am going to dust off my top 10 posts review feature "The 10 days of Blogging past", and 289 views gets the article "Concurrent:Active Request Limit (or how I finally learned to know what my system was saying)" as the first post, which is LAST place, on the top 10 list for 2014!  How does this compare to last year?  Well last year the top post of the year had only 170 views with this post being number 7 on the top 10 with just 126 views!  This post was a good learning lesson to start writing down even "simple" things I was running into on a daily basis, which also led me to stop taking things for granted and start researching these types of items.

What was the last post on the top 10 list last year?  I am glad you asked!  It was "Purging concurrent and Fixed Assets" and had only 60 views, so you can see how far the blog has come if there is an almost 5 time increase in page hits for #10 on the list last year compared to this year.

Speaking of this year, what was #10 on the list if I just had counted posts done this year?  The article "Selecting from too many tables hits Oracle DB bug on 11.2.0.3" would have taken the cake with 176 hits this year!  What is my take away from this article being on the pseudo top 10?  The famous ORA-600 error message either attracted a lot of attention, a lot of other people had the same idea I had to select from too many tables, or maybe people are upgrading to 11.2.03 and looking for future bugs.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Weekend Learning: Oracle Purchasing - Information Center

Take this opportunity to visit My Oracle Support to bookmark "Information Center: Purchasing" located via document ID 1391694.2 so you can get webcasts, search helper assistants, FAQ, feature reviews, business processes and all the news and announcements which you need to stay on top of all the Oracle EBS issues for the Purchasing module!

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Weekend Learning: Oracle General Ledger - Information Center

Do you want to learn more about Oracle GL?  Of course you do!  That means you want to bookmark the MOS document "Information Center: Oracle General Ledger" via article ID 1489229.2 to keep up to date on all issues related to GL with tabs on this Information Center even about performance tuning!

Friday, December 19, 2014

11.2.0.3: Gather stats job hangs due to parallel processing

While I did not actually post describing our issue (this post actually mentions the problem though) when we upgraded our DB to 11.2.0.3 on Exadata we ran into some serious issues as soon as we fired up all of our Gather Schema Statistics reports because of the parallelism that was enabled for the process.  Enter MOS note "Dbms_Stats.Gather_Table_Stats For a Table is Hanging With the Wait Event "PX Deq: Execute Reply"" via document ID 1946632.1 which sounds exactly the type of situation we had with our nodes conflicting with each other due to the parallel processing that was enabled!  Did we patch to fix the issue?  Nope, what we did was actually use the report parameter that gave us control over how many parallel processes would get spawned and then ran everything in a single Gather Schema Statistics report since we were on Exadata and had processing power to spare!

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Restarting Windows services and v$transaction

I am sure you are thinking "come on, what do I care about restarting a Windows service" or "I thought this was an Oracle blog" right?  Just hang with me for a minute and it will all make sense!  While we are Oracle technologists foremost, sometimes we need to get additional skills to enhance our primary skills and this is a great example of that.  Today I found myself referencing documentation from Microsoft's Technet because we have a Windows service that keeps a connection open to our database so the software can call our database when needed, and this is keeping a transaction open.  Why is that a problem?  We need to make sure that nothing in v$transaction is older than x days due to our restoration plans, but every x days our monitoring tells us about the old transaction from the Windows service and we have to manually restart the service.  Well, HAD to after using the "net stop" and "net start" commands in a batch file so we can create a scheduled task that bounces this service every night.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

R12: Reversal date has to be entered in WebADI journal that is not a reversal

Obviously the situation described in the title does not seem right, and the only reason it happens is because of a bug!  Document ID 1929245.1 on My Oracle Support directs you to the article "Your Reversal Date Must Be The Same As Or After Your Accounting Date Error" with all of the details on which patch you need for the BNE product depending on which R12 codeline you have installed.  Here is another testing scenario to add to our testing suite!

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Configuring notifications in OEM Grid Control

Hot on the heels of my article the other day, about opatch not applying to a RAC instance correctly, is another DBA focused document but there is a reason for that!  How do we get better at Support?  Learning about the system, and what tools are available to help us be more proactive are some great ways to advance your skills!  The document "How To Configure Notification Rules in Enterprise Manager Grid Control" located in My Oracle Support via note ID 429422.1 fits in both of those buckets!  Not only do we learn about OEM, but we learn what is important from Oracle's perspective to monitor about our systems!

Monday, December 15, 2014

Weblogic timeout settings and ORA-24761 rolled back transactions

Today MOS note "Java.sql.SQLException: ORA-24761: Transaction Rolled Back" from document ID 1572916.1 teaches us about the timeout settings for Weblogic and how they can prompt "ORA-24761: transaction rolled back" errors surrounding development when SQL statements are developed to be long running statements.  When you are helping to support new things going into WebLogic, make sure you ask about this!

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Weekend Learning: RAC patching skipping database defined as ORACLE_HOME

In a continued effort to expand what I might know in a Support role, or what the term even means, I have been keeping my eyes open for nuggets of information that I can add to leverage in the future.  Tonight the My Oracle Support article "Why "opatch auto" not patching RAC database ORACLE_HOME?" via note ID 1479651.1 is one such type of nugget as I typically do not get to look at patching (opatch), ORACLE_HOME, or even GI (Grid Infrastructure) so this is another sneak under the covers of what is happening "at the database level".

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Weekend Learning: R12 GL: Setup and usage of budgets and controls

Are you going to R12, or would you just like to know more about GL budgets and their associated controls?  If you answered yes to either of those, head on over to MOS to read document "Budgets and Budgetary Control - Setup and Usage" found via note ID 1928941.1 for all the details!  I think this is a great whitepaper that has been put together that not only uses visuals by the way of screenshots, but has an actual business scenario included that helps walk us through the whole thing!

Friday, December 12, 2014

Weekend Learning: InfiniBand interfaces

Are you running InfiniBand devices with your Oracle infrastructure?  Do you want to know a bit more about it, and problems that can arise?  Of course you do!  Look no further than My Oracle Support note "InfiniBand IPoIB Interfaces Down and IBSTAT Reports HCA Ports in INITIALIZING State" via document ID 1950483.1 which sounds a LOT like an issue we had with InfiniBand interfaces a few months ago, so I wonder if this is based off of our case!  Have you ever used the ibstat command?  Do you monitor /var/log/messages for potential issues?

Thursday, December 11, 2014

R12.2: Invalid PA objects after upgrade

From the title of MOS article "Invalid Objects after Upgrading to 12.2" in document ID 1953062.1 I thought that I would find a large list of objects or even important objects that were preventing an upgrade, but instead there are 2 tables prefaced with PA which are at issue here that do not seem to be holding up your upgrade at all.  Sure, if you want to use your system post upgrade you will have problems because of them being invalid, but it should be found in a TEST instance way before you hit PROD so it does not seem that horrible of a thing.  Read the article and follow the instructions to get the required patch from the Oracle Payroll team as it appears they have it locked down at the moment.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

11gR2: Issue with ORACLE.EXE on Windows BP 9 & 10

In fresh off the presses information, it does not come fresher than this!  Visit My Oracle Support document "ORACLE.EXE MEMORY LEAK ON 11204 WHEN PATCH BUNDLE 9 OR PATCH BUNDLE 10 HAS BEEN APPLIED" which was released today via article ID 1952786.1 and is very similar to an older article where Windows BP 28 was actually rescinded for 11.2.0.3!  If you are running Oracle 11.2.0.4 on Windows, you need to bookmark this note and check back often for updates/solutions because the cause is not known yet!

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

EM12c: Reports not running due to special character in password

I have told you about my adventures with passwords before, but today is a new type of issue!  Instead of the EBS application, the MOS document "EM 12c: Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control BIP Reports do not Execute if the User Login Password has a Special Character (like $)" found via note ID 1951651.1 is about encountering error messages when trying to view BI Publisher reports if the account has a special character in the password for the account.  Is that because special characters are not allowed?  Nope, they are perfectly valid characters but do not interact well with BI Publisher report output files!!

Monday, December 8, 2014

POODLE and Oracle Linux

Now you might be saying "hey you already showed us this document" but not only has it been updated in the last week, it has some new tools for our toolbox!  Revisit MOS article "ALERT - Mitigating the SSLv3 “POODLE” Vulnerability in Oracle Linux (CVE-2014-3566)" via note ID 1940202.1 and find out how to use command line checks to verify what SSL versions are being used!  Why is this useful?  Well what if you wanted to make one file that dials out to all your servers just to gather data about them?  It would be nice to know if they were potentially vulnerable to something like this, right?  Now you can if you run these commands!

Of course this also has detailed steps, patches, and setups required to turn off SSL for many different types of software!

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Weekend Learning: Block corruption in pre-12c DB versions

Out of a lot of error messages out there, I would think that the "ORA-01578: ORACLE data block corrupted" error is likely the most feared out there for DBAs (of course behind ORA-00600).  Do you want to find out more?  Read the long article "Handling Oracle Block Corruptions in Oracle7/8/8i/9i/10g/11g" on My Oracle Support via note ID 28814.1 to get all the details which also includes a lot of datafile related tables and errors that go into the alert log which are all potential candidates for proactive alerts going forward!

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Weekend Learning: R12 A/R Patching - Information Center

Do you want to stay up to date for A/R patching related information on EBS R12?  Then look no further than the MOS note "Information Center: R12 Critical, Rollup and Recommended Patches for Oracle Receivables (AR)" found through document ID 1433375.2 for all of the details you need!

Friday, December 5, 2014

Weekend Learning: PeopleTools and PeopleSoft lifetime support

Have you ever wondered what the official Oracle support timeline is for PeopleTools and what versions are supported on the various PeopleSoft line of applications?  If so, look no further than the My Oracle Support article "Lifetime Support Summary for PeopleSoft Releases" found at note ID 1348959.1 for the complete details!  Based on the title, I thought this article would tell me the support timeline for PeopleSoft applications as well, but it did not seem to have those details, so if you find it from this document please let me know how you found it!

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Personalizing the R12 login page

Were you aware that there is a profile option value you can change in order to personalize the login page for R12?  Read MOS document "How To Remove Links From R12.X Login Page?" from note ID 1939787.1 for the details on what profile option value it is, what it needs to be, and what the page looks like when it gets updated.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

R12.1.3 GL: GLTTRN performance issue

The document "R12 Translation Performance Issue - GLTTRN" in note ID 1623156.1 is a great example of what needs to be checked when you migrate EBS from 11i to the R12 platforms.  Indexes that existed in one version might not be applicable in the other due to the data and associated structure changes and here we can see that the GL_BALANCES_N2 index needs to be modified for optimal R12 usage.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

R12 Payables: Voiding payment cannot be done when void date is payment date

File the bug described in MOS note "R12: Unable To Void Payment Where Void Date Equals Payment Date" via article ID 1189693.1 under "found during good testing"!  It appears that a date value is being compared with a timestamp value, and because of this the internal validation fails so the payment cannot be voided.

Monday, December 1, 2014

Hyperion FDM Run-Time/error 91 resolutions

Why is My Oracle Support note "Financial Data Quality Management (FDM) Error "Run-Time error '91': Object Variable or With Block Variable Not Set"" found via document ID 1436909.1 so important to read?  Besides having more than 10 ways to address this type of error depending on your version and scenario?  Well apart from local user permissions causing the issues, you can also encounter this when service account passwords get changed.  Looking to rotate your passwords according to your policy?  Then you might want to learn about this issue beforehand!