Thursday, April 6, 2017

COLLABORATE17: Day 4

Oracle E-Business Suite Mobile and Web Services Security - Michael Miller - Integrigy Corporation - @Integrigy

While I only took a few notes, that does not reflect poorly on Michael, actually the opposite!  There was SO much information that I decided early on to go get his presentation and download it instead!  I put my name down to get invited to regular security webinars, and I suggest you go to their site and do the same!!

Great opening note that Oracle attack toolkit exists in the wild, and people download it to work against Oracle installations.
FND_IREP_CLASSES - Integrated SOA Gateway (ISG) cropped up again, so I really need to look into it.
"Yesterday's interfaces are now web services."  Just awesome quote!
Httpd.conf -> url_fw.conf -> url_fw_ws.conf

Personalize and Extend Oracle E-Business Suite for Desktops and Mobile Devices - Maher Muhanna and Vijay Shanmugam from Oracle

Maher
6 levels of OA Framework personalizations
New components can be added at the Site level like buttons.
Ability to undo personalizations from the Manage Levels page - as result of feedback
Copy Personalization, again something new that was designed as part of user feedback.
R12.2.4 a new simplified home page, more tablet like.
Personalized Announcements looks like a widget on the home page that can deliver specific messages you want to your customer base.
User level global header can be selected between icons only or classic links only, and the same for Alta UI options in 12.2.5+ too.
Save search as a view as user personalization, sounds like a great feature.
12.2.3 allows column reordering on webpages, and can hide columns too - Settings menu allows you to do this too
Column Freeze indicator like Excel's grid freeze
Admins have more powers to disable freezing or hiding columns on pages
Plan for a smoother upgrade by making sure your OAF points to synonyms not the tables themselves!!
1531121.1 Online Patch readiness
Oracle Alta UI is the only supported skin in 12.2.5
Simplified Global Header
HTML 5 Standards Uptake
12.2.3 takes on ATG 12.2.4/12.2.5
Working on:
- a WYSIWYG admin personalization workbench
- theme editor form Alta UI
- column freeze for HGrid
- page as favorite part of every favoritable page

Vijay
Mobile list 1641772.1 / search "Oracle EBS America" - same app connects to 12.1 and 12.2
Need to apply patches on 12.1 to start using it.
Can use VPN to connect apps
Smartphone apps can use existing authentication
No SSO between apps because apps are installed in one offs, no shared browser cookies
1642431.1
1641772.1
807319.1
Choice between App Store and enterprise distribution (seems like a killer choice to enable uptake by management) - allows you to not upgrade the app, and have to patch EBS as a result
cacerts file cannot be updated after app is installed from store - I might ask for some clarification about this one, as this could be a deal-breaker as we have other certs in this file that might be on different schedules than the mobile suite is.
Working on:
- adding certificates dynamically after installation
- reassign in Approval (seems like a blocker for us)
- AirWatch and MobileIron 3rd party apps
- push notifications

Oracle WebLogic Server Administration and Management with Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 - Kevin Hudson and Elke Phelps

Kevin
This is a brand new session based on OAUG ATG feedback, which is pretty awesome!
To WLS, EBS is a handful of web applications, deployed to Clusters of Managed Severs, supervised by AdminServer.
oacore_server, forms_server, oafm_server are just different nodes that need to run, forms-4ws_server comes disabled but do not delete it, it will be deleted with a later patch!
Online Patching is used to apply ALL patches in 12.2!!
1583902.1 Online Patching FAQ
Identical FMW_HOMEs in FS1 and FS2
3 Oracle homes in here, FMW Common, Webtier & Utilities, WLS home
Synchronizations to one FS goes to the other FS
Recommendation for ports to be incremented by 10 example: FS1 :0 and FS2 :10
Not supported to have direct connection to PATCH FS
Multiple ports with administration - think about having a VIP pointing to both locations?  Need to ask more about this, but I think it would work.
100-150 concurrent users per JVM
1905593.1
Add WLS managed server gets added in RUN, then prepare PATCH creates it for you
Adding nodes 1383621.1 / 1375769.1
pairfile - important new file, need to understand it
dualfs=yes after ATG.D7

Elke
Downtime for changing WLS admin password, since you have to stop application tier services
New things in changing APPS password, and does require downtime too - AFPASSWD recommended
EBS Technology Code level Checker (ETCC) 17537119.1
Process to patch the 3 homes is essentially the same - key step is adop phase=fs_clone 1355068.1
1905593.1
ss -l -p -n | grep <AdminServer PID> - Need to try this in our environment to see what port the server is running on!!
1940996.1 DS connection pool diagnostics
1428056.1 Oracle Fusion Middleware diag
2230225.1 WLS utility - MOS
1984710.1 Summary of EBS login

I had a really great time at COLLABORATE yet again, and I am already looking forward to next year!  Hope you join me!!

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

COLLABORATE17: Day 3 + Me!

As you will see, today was pretty much all about me!  :}

E-Business Suite Workflow SIG Meeting

I tried to sneak into the room and be a normal attendee, but current SIG Coordinator John Peters spotted me and made me sit at the table up front!  This meant that I couldn't take too many notes, but you should visit the http://workflowsig.communities.oaug.org/ website in a day or too for the conference slides.

Other than that, the major announcement that started off the session was my promotion to SIG Coordinator taking John's place due to his time commitments at the moment.  I promise to try my best here!

E-Business Suite Upgrade SIG Meeting

EBS R12.3 is expected 2019 at the earliest which is coming from Cliff Godwin, as they expect R12.2.7 this year and are planning a "year off" of releases in 2018, but that could change depending on other technologies that are in the works so R12.2.8 COULD come out at some point.
There was some very lively discussion about upgrading from 11.5.9 instance on Windows or if reimplementation is a better idea, which had the entire panel agreeing on something for the first time, that reimplementation is the preferred option.

Next up was lunch, and then instead of going to a session I took the hour off to practice for...

R12: Reducing the Data Footprint of Oracle E-Business Suite - Me!

Obviously I could copy and paste all of my slides here, but that just is not a lot of fun!  I thought it went well with 20-25 people attending, and they seemed engaged and interested in the subject, so that was really great.

How Arby's Restructured Their GL Chart of Account Without Re-Implementing EBS: You Can Too - Matt Powell

This one should have said the answer was they contracted services from EiS Consulting and used a tool from eprentise to get this done since, other than that there was not a lot of meat to the presentation.
I did think it was interesting that they were trying to collapse 18 companies into a single unit but were having problems.
Reimplementation was going to be 500-750k, upgrade only 100k, which was a great motivator for not doing reimplementation.
Used eprentise to have FlexField software.
Created a one-time responsibility just to allow people to help with COA conversion, and I found this a good idea.
Leveraged SharePoint w/WebADI templates.
Summary Template deletion delayed by 18 hrs due to DB performance and then on top of that the Internet went out at their office!

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

COLLABORATE17: Day 2

E-Business Suite on Oracle Cloud: An Architect's Perspective - Roy Hunter

Business priorities - innovation, agility, lower cost and risk (grow and transition the business)
IT priorities - on-demand self-service, rapid elasticity, measured service (enable business growth and transformation)
Five QA systems to support a PROD system, TEST, UAT, SIT, performance test, and stress test!
Migration tools allows automated cloning.
Reimplement onto SaaS
Re-platform onto IaaS - why?  Current environment tailored (customized) to support unique business processes and requirements, while SaaS requires business process re-engineering and SaaS modules lack features/functionality, or don't exist.  Doing IaaS allows you to eventually move to SaaS when ready while getting benefit of IaaS immediately!
Constraints on moving - Data Sovereignty, Control, Latency
Oracle Cloud Machine moves into your Data Center to solve some of those constraints.
Co-existence between Cloud and on-prem is possible, and actually even expected!
Can't get a trial account for Exadata, but if you talk to your tech rep they may be able to help set up a POC
https://blogs.oracle.com/EBSandOracleCloud/
This is for EBS 12.1.3 and up.
There is also a new disconnected OCM which to me sounds like an Exadata box, where it gets installed in your DC and then does not connect to Oracle.

E-Business Suite 11i/12.1/12.2 to 12.2.6 Upgrades: Quick, Fast, and Easy - @OATCInc

Relational calculus is what Oracle is built on, did you know?
Review of the support timelines, which is always good.
742060.1 DB support note
If you are going to do a fresh install, do R12.2 now, there is no reason to do R12.1 anymore.
1439822.1 EBS customers get updates for JRE
Forms won't launch in Chrome without an addon that is unsupported anyways!
Microsoft Edge doesn't support Java, so won't support EBS!
Oracle Forms are not going away due to how powerful they are, and cannot replicate what they do in Java...yet at least!
There are 22 mobile apps right now - 1641772.1
2114173.1 R12.2 Knowledge Center
1984710.1 architecture
UI login in 12.2.6 and favorites have a tablet look and feel which is completely different!
E48834-13 11i to R12.2 upgrade document
R12.2 patches are C patches, R12.0 are A, and R12.1 are B, so know which are which and do not apply the wrong thing!
How long it takes depends on: Time, scope, budget (famous triangle)
1 month per module!

Navigating My Oracle Support with the Customer Support Council - Doug Hahn - @doughahn

oaug.org/resources/csc
Enhancement Requests
Extended Premier Support for 12.1
ORAchk, Oracle Analyzers, Support Identifier Groups (virtual CSIs)
Hot Topic notifications
Bundle Analyzers - concurrent reports DO update
1939637.1
Focusing on being proactive

Architect Data for Excellence - Ian Abramson - @iabramson

Bi-model BI, this is new to me, so need to research it a bit.
Wal-Mart is like a cult…Sam Walton was focused on innovation
Hans Peter Luhn, Bill Inmon, Ralph Kimball - major influencers on Business Intelligence/Big Data
Ian deals with a 40 Petabyte data lake!
Variety, volume, velocity, veracity
Data Lake - highly agile, data scientists vs. Data Warehouse - less agile, business users
Need to celebrate failures as much as successes - this is a major takeaway because the thought process behind it is that you learn from failing just as much (if not more) than succeeding!
Key question is: What do we expect from Big Data?
DW is highly governed data, low latency, 1000s of users vs. Big Data raw and unstructured data, unrestricted and ungovernable data
Out of a million products, probably 200k are right, so how does that throw off the company?  Millions of dollars out the door!
What do we need to do today?  Need to provide access to all data, be able to bridge data between business units and data sources, keep data secure, bi-modal BI is the new analytic approach.
Hadoop is not a database.  Hadoop is not an IDW.
Data warehouses are not going away, they are going to instead evolve!
Big Data is not a solution, but a tool
New analytic needs - new data integration, business need for lower data latency, support for dynamic structures, report personalization.
How to evolve?  Understand the architecture.
Analytic Sandbox -> Raw Data Hub -> Enterprise Data Lake
Three components of data architecture: landing & assembly, general DW, specialized data warehouse

Low-Hanging Fruit: Tuning & Securing WebLogic Server - Sid Patel & Smarajit Pramanick - @ASTCorporation

Intro of WLS - example of a sandwich to show how what is in the middle might really matter…great example!
Common issues - system errors (stuck thread, thread waits, timeout, memory issues - StuckThreadMaxTime default is 600 seconds), bad throughput (server not responding to new requests), loss of messages (intractability of messages, network/socket issues), poor performance (request taking longer time than expected, SLAs violated)
Common performance issues - memory leak, thread deadlock, WLS session replication, high number of open file descriptors or sockets, long running DB queries, JVMs spending took much time in GC, too chatty system, improper hardware sizing, network bandwidth, payload size, load balancer issues, bad application design
Performance tuning - how is WLS performance measured?  Response time, latency, throughput, resource utilization - how is WLS performance tested?  Functional, stress, load, and soak testing
Benchmark
Identify possible bottlenecks
OS tools - netstat, iostat, top, vmstat
WLS tools - server logs, WLS diagnostic framework, WLS console & EM, WLST
JDK tools - JPS, thread dumps, heap dumps, Java flight recorder, jvisual vm, jconsole, jstat (some of these I do not know so I need to look them up)
Log and debug options - logging service, log subsystem events (startup/shutdown, application deployment, subsystem failures), communicate status, domain message log (overall status (server logs and out, domain logs)), change log location, message catalog (Java logging API), use Java logging (Log4j), subsystem logs (http, transaction, data source, diagnostic images)
Log severity levels
Log rotation policy
WLDF (WebLogic Diagnostic Framework) free out of the box
OS parameters need to be tuned, especially for Linux
file descriptor since everything is a file - "Too many open files"
ps -eaf | grep Java -> pfiles processID | grep rlimit
ulimit -H -n
ulimit -S -n
TCP tuning, default wait time netstat -a | grep TIME_WAIT | wc -l

Monday, April 3, 2017

COLLABORATE17: Day 1

Keynote Session - Jenn Lim - deliveringhappiness.com

There was SO much good stuff here that it was hard to capture, so I recommend that you check it out for yourself BUT there were six keys that I thought were important to capture: commitment, revisit your core values, commit to transparency, purpose, build meaningful relationships, build the right team!

Get More from Data by Giving It to Your Customers - Bryan Brewer

This was interesting as Womble is a pipe coating company that doesn't own their inventory!
Internal challenge to find a dashboard with the following features: real time, integrated, secure, Internet enabled, summary and detail reporting, easy to install design/develop, and train/support.
External challenge to provide the customers the same thing!
What they did is come up with a combined checklist!
Looked at BI Publisher, OBIEE, OBIFS, Hubble (Insightsoftware.com) and finally used Hubble in their efforts.
Went from a report with over 900 lines to a dashboard with 4-5 visual reports that can be drilled down into!

JSON is not another YAML ("Yet Another Markup Language") - Coleman Leviter - @cleviter

Lightweight compared to XML.
Basic types - number, string, Boolean, null, whitespace
JSON data types are few and predefined, it has a simple structure-defining and document-combining constructs, order of the objects is insignificant, is very data centric
JSON doesn't have its own data type like XML does
JSON operators - json_exists, json_query, json_table, json_value, RETURNING
json.org

What you need to know about Oracle's password file - Michael Nelson

Password file is stored at the OS level so you can log into a down DB!
If you are on the server, be part of the ora_dba or dba group, but if you are not on the server, use the password file stored on the server!
Run select * from v$pwfile_users to see who is in the password file.
Password file is encrypted on the OS for security!
The file is usually located at $ORACLE_HOME/DBAs/orapw$ORACLE_SID
orapwd command - can be used on ASM only in 12c, only if ASM is set to 12c also
ORA-1996 indicates that the password file is full!

Oracle E-Business Suite SysAdmin SIG - @kansasdba and @michaelbrownorg

EBS 12.2.6 released on 9/2016, while 12.1 was released on 5/2009, and 12.3 is coming at some point.
EBS 12.1 supported until 2021!
My Oracle Support note ID 742060.1
https://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/entry/db121_extfee
https://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/entry/db112_extfee
Housekeeping
-Bylaws
-I'm now the Vice Chair!
Santiago Bastidas with Oracle gave us a presentation on EBS on Oracle Cloud.
This strategy uses both PaaS and IaaS.
Shift to the cloud is going to be assisted by automation!
DataBase Cloud Services (DBCS) is different from the offering for Exadata Cloud.
My Oracle Support note ID 1383621.1
My Oracle Support note ID 2066260.1
Lift and Shift - process of moving an existing EBS system from on prem to the Oracle Cloud.
Enhanced EBS management with EBS Cloud Admin Tool, adds SOA CS, OAM/OID instance, Mailer instance.
Roadmap - lots of things, but major takeaway is REST/SOAP enablement is being worked on in the Cloud!

McDonalds's journey to re-platform Java applications from IBM WebSphere to Oracle WebLogic Server - Chandan Bedi & Sundeep Khurana

I felt sorry for these gentlemen, as I was the only person in attendance and it was a pretty good presentation!  Since I was the only person, it was kind of hard to take notes while they were talking directly to me, but it was a good overview of their project, pitfalls they encountered, and how they got the applications from one system to the other.

What's New in PL/SQL and EBR in Oracle Database 12c Release 2 - @BrynLite

Bryn started with a ten minute pep talk about using coding correctly, which seemed a bit odd, but what the hey, right?
Edition-based Redefinition (EBR) has been around since Oracle OpenWorld 2009 in 11gR2!
Brand new code coverage tool - start coverage, run the tests, stop coverage (there didn't seem to be a lot of detail about this, so I am going to have to go searching for this).
alter session set Plsql_Warnings = 'Error:All' - This was a new one for me, since I'm not a developer, but I'm squirreling this away for later if I ever need it!
It took about ten seconds to refresh his 12.2 PDB locally, so try to be destructive and curious if you can recover from it with little to no effort!!
Pl/Scope (what is this program?)
HPROF (hierarchical performance profiler) enhancements - identifies SQL "subprograms" with the SQL_ID (again, what is this?)
Accessible by is a feature that is pretty new, but not a lot of people in the room were using it.
New pragma allows an element of any kind to be marked as depreciated.

Sunday, April 2, 2017

COLLABORATE17: Pre-Day

Testing Oracle E-Business Suite Best Practices - Mazen Arar - 12:30 PM

"Change is constant" was on his first slide, and this is SO true these days for many of us!
Testing readiness means challenging facts.
A great insight that Mazen had was that QA needs to be proactive, as early as possible, even to listen.
Have the hardware on hand, including different versions of it.
Where/how do we start?  Plan, Execute, Automate
Planning - what is the task on hand, what documentation is at hand?  RCD (Release Content Document), FIAD (Functional Impact Assessment Document)
Scope - key business flows, impacted flows, usage patterns
Mark test flows with priority - basic, sanity check, detailed
Follow a testing methodology based on task - theme based, exploratory, role based, end to end flow based
Make sure to have well defined entry and exit criteria
Cloud testing - Shorter Release Cycle (automation), Rapid Addition of features, security, integration, multi tenancy
IoT testing - Complex Architecture, Complex data, security, validation, performance and scalability
Good practice - be creative/innovative, review results, learn from them, plan next cycle with a new flavor, improve scoping
Automation!  Who can do it?  Anyone.  What do you automate?  Critical and repeatable flaws.  When should we?  Now!  Allows more innovation out of employees
There are several different applications for this in Oracle Application Testing Suite (OATS), Oracle Load Testing Suite, and Oracle Test Manager.
Oracle QA reduced their automation time by 60%!
Flow Builder application allows you to generate test scripts.
API and WebServices support in Advance Pack
Due to their own use of these applications, EBS patching won't break OATS.
If you are around at the conference, stop by Demo Booth 14 to see this in action!

Real- time Data Integration in Oracle E-Business Suite using Integrated Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Gateway by Faraz Khalik with @DeloitteOracle - 1:45 PM

This was supposed to be a case study about transitioning to SOA, which was technically what was provided, but really what Faraz talked about was the solution/process that was put in place, not much technical information.  This was kind of frustrating, but I'll check out the addendum in the whitepaper/presentation to see if there is any kind of technical information included.

Geo Land setup! - 3:00 PM

The coordinators of the Geo's had a blast getting everything set up for the OAUG members!

OAUG Geo Land! - 4:00 PM

This was even more fun than the setup hour was!  The Arizona/New Mexico Geo had a cactus themed ring toss game, and a LOT of the OAUG members had a blast!!

OAUG Meeting of the Members - 5:30 PM

There were some awesome awards given out, and even had a sneak peek of an Oracle and OAUG survey which is going to be made public in a few days!