R12: Unable to change Supplier information

Since I'm on an A/P bug kick, and I've shared with you some knowledge about Supplier changes in R12, I should probably also clue you in on another item to add to your testing suite!  The other day A/P was in the web portal trying to change the inactivation date on a Supplier record when they received an error message indicating "Context Value Doesn't Exist In Value Set $FLEX$.DF_CONTEXTS" and the form wouldn't let them actually save their changes.  MOS note 1458183.1 indicates this happens because setup wasn't migrated over, or because there was a decision made to not migrate data, so you get two solutions: one if you want to fix your DFF and the other if you want to get a bugfix.

If you aren't testing the removal (or change) of information to your migrated data for A/P you should probably start trying to break the system by doing it, and even branch out to test other application data that was migrated because you might be able to introduce patches to your code base early in the process to prevent re-testing.

R12: Problem with Expense Report Export Program

Our A/P group reported an issue when a line on the Expense Report Export Program showed up indicating "Expense Report Line and Distribution Totals do not match" while the table AP_EXPENSE_REPORT_HEADERS_ALL showed "EXPENSE LINE DIST MISMATCH" for the REJECT_CODE.  This was news to me as I had not seen it in R11 nor the past three months we had been running on R12 so off to My Oracle Support I went, and I found document 1582981.1 entitled "Expense Report Export Rejection: Expense Report Line and Distribution Totals do not match".  This has the patch or patches which may have caused this, one of which WAS in our system, matches our exact error messages/text, and has additional SQL statements which allow you to verify if this note applies to the data in your tables.

You have two options to fix this, as you do with most issues found in MOS: patch or get a datafix.  Luckily after submitting the information requested in this note via the SR process, the Oracle analyst indicated it was a rather simple datafix and after applied it DID resolve the issue at hand.  I wanted to highlight this problem because the cause of it as detailed in the MOS note needs to be in your testing suite if you're on or thinking of going to R12 since it could be more frequent for your shop or happen a lot sooner after implementation.

Weekend Learning: Employee Supplier in R12

Have you ever wanted to learn more about the R12 architecture changes with respect to suppliers and how Employee Suppliers exist now?  Well friends, look no further!  I had to do some research on this last week, and stumbled upon MOS note 1377888.1 which has a GREAT breakdown of the changes that have taken place on several "standard" tables as well as being able to introduce the new vendor information so it is very easy to understand.  Even for me.  It probably helps that it has pictures huh?  :}

I know it's not the weekend yet, but my 4 day weekend starts tonight so I'm in that mode here on the blog!

Who is a developer, and who is a DBA?

This is the question that the oraclenerd, Chet Justice, has burning his in mind so he's asked Tom Kyte and Cary Millsap about where they think they fit in the traditional definitions and I think he was trying to get at the difference between the roles (at least in Cary's interview!).  Of course the comments add some meat to the subject as well, and he links to a few older articles where this has come up before!

Being in Support I think I have a high level outsiders view of the values and traits that make these roles (and the people) successful or not.  Along these lines, I think I'll have to make up my own definition of what makes a truly good Support individual and then share it to see what everybody else thinks!

What traits or attitudes do you think helps make a good developer, DBA, or Support person?

Breaking News: EBS R12.2 now available for 64-bit Windows

This post from John Abraham on Steven Chan's ATG blog details all that you need to know about this announcement, but I will say that this release does mark the end of 32-bit Windows Server releases.  Admit it, you want to know more don't you?  Well what are you waiting for?  Go find out the details!

Purge Inactive Sessions and HWM expectations

Recently I ran the Purge Inactive Sessions concurrent program after it had not run for a while, and based on my Workflow purging I wanted to make sure we didn't purge out too much data or else it would be likely the system would hit High Water Mark contention when trying to query the ICX_SESSIONS table.  On the first day I purged out records to leave us above where I thought the HWM contention would occur, but I noticed even after a Gather Table Statistics concurrent program was run there was slight slow down on querying from ICX_SESSIONS but nothing in HWM enqueue yet.  Reporting the issue to the DBAs, they suggested that I continue purging out past what I felt was safe since this was in QA and they were prepared to do a shrink to restore the table(s) affected by this program.

On the next day I ran the Purge Inactive Sessions report again, and as expected, there is now a performance problem with ICX_SESSIONS which I thought was due to purging too many records since a simple SELECT was not returning even after 90 minutes.  Why is that bad performance?  Before purging, the same statement was returning in less than a minute so obviously my statement must have been affected by the HWM enqueue contention right?  Wrong!  Curiouser, and curiouser.  That wasn't what I expected at all.  Since the report was still running, I decided to let it continue deleting before doing anything else and then when it completed I ran my SELECT statement.  Guess what I found?  That statement no longer took 90 minutes, as it was completing in a minute or two, nor did it go into HWM contention even before another Gather Table Statistics was done.

Why did my query take so long to return on the second day?  My best guess is that the system was trying to calculate the number of results in the table, but was unable to do so while I was busy having the report deleting from the table so it was stuck until after the report was completed.  When I do this in another environment prior to going to PROD, I'll be able to look at this closer and hopefully I'll gain more insight as to what was going on!

Ten Thousand

Once again it is time for me to digest another milestone for the blog, as this weekend I have passed the big 10,000 views mark!  As I get closer to presenting again, creating more abstracts for presentations, and just generally dive deeper in the Oracle pool, I'm amazed at how my audience has grown and stayed with me throughout this journey.  Here's to another 10k views, and a lot more articles to go with it!

Thank you SO much for sharing your interest in the blog.  I hope you'll continue to enjoy it, as I continue to enjoy sharing it with you!

Weekend Reading: Oracle Whitepaper on MOAC for custom code in R12

Researching this week, I found the Oracle Whitepaper entitled "Oracle Applications Multiple Organizations Access Control for Custom Code" in MOS note ID 420787.1.  This article contains primarily R12 content, since MOAC was introduced in R12, and while it is not required that you enable it when you install R12 it may be important information for you during your planning if having multiple organizations is a possibility.

Weekend Learning: Redgate on caching

In the monthly Redgate newsletter, I found the initial article on result caching which was followed up with the second article in the series but that doesn't end our learning on caching!  In the first article, there are TWO other links to caching articles as well so that means you have FOUR chances to learn something about caching this weekend from Redgate.

The dangers of hard coding

We have all been there.  Something gets hard coded when it does not need to be, or when it does not make a whole lot of sense, and it makes your life a lot more difficult than it should be.  Today was one of those times for us!

We had a responsibility created to serve business needs, but they later wanted to segregate duties and when they did we found out that the upload report designed had the responsibility_id hard coded into the report which made it impossible to run out of another responsibility.  Great idea, bad execution because we were not given a way to make it dynamic with profile options or some such plan.

So the business decided to go forward with the new segregation of duties responsibility anyways, but let an administrative account have both responsibilities which was tightly controlled.  No problem right?  Until a new manager came along, did an audit of the responsibilities, and removed the responsibility that was needed to run the upload report from the segregated duties responsibility.  Oops.

The lesson here is that if you need to hard code something, do it in such a way that it is soft coded.  Make updates possible so down the road when a parameter, e-mail address, or responsibility_id in our case have to change the people that follow you can do it without having to take your name in vain while they re-code your work.  Even better?  Allow a framework so changes can be centralized and manipulated easily without messy table level updates!

R12: Compiling Forms and ORA-04023

A few days ago I shared a new MOS article that caught my eye, and here is another!  Why do you receive ORA-04023 errors when upgrading to R12.1.1 or R12.1.3?  Read note 1503874.1 to find out what the parameter _disable_fast_validate needs to be set at, and why it isn't set the way it is.

Hotsos Symposium 14: Early Bird Pricing Ends!

This week ends the early bird pricing for the only conference cool enough to have me present for them this year!  I've already setup my travel plans, signed up for my badge, and am finalizing my presentation to submit this week and then the countdown begins!  If you can't sign up this week, don't worry you can sign up anytime before the Symposium starts on March 2nd.

Hope to see you there!

Missing: OPMNCTL after R12.2 upgrade

Occasionally I will read the title line of new articles in My Oracle Support and it will grab my attention enough that I open the article up to spend a few minutes reading it.  Note 1619645.1 was one such today because while I do not get to do a whole lot of server administration, I have had a chance to use the OPMNCTL command to start and stop services so having it go missing after an EBS R12.2 upgrade really sounds like a bad thing.  Little did I know how bad it was, because while it suggests why this happened (and is completely controllable) it also has a suggested plan for resolving the problem.  In this case, I am sure those that encounter this really wish they found it sooner.

Magical Mystery Event Tour

I have posted before about R12 having some event changes that you need to prepare for, but a good three months in I am still seeing events that are completely new to me.  We had a session that appeared to be stalled and our investigation found the thread was in the "gcs drm freeze in enter server mode" wait event locking against LMON when it was just sitting there in the event "rdbms ipc message".  Oddly enough, the situation just resolved itself but not before I captured another event in the wild that I had never seen before: "latch: object queue header operation".  I am not quite sure what happened here, so this gets tagged as a mystery....until the next time and I can solve it

Food for Thought: When IT grows up

I've posted in the past about some articles on expected growth future of roles, and if an architect role is something you're after, but I've never thought what role I wanted to fulfill in relation to IT changes.  I think change is obviously something that can't be stopped, and for the most part it can't be prophesied either, so stepping back and looking long term for your industry can maybe help you find that niche you want to fill.  I've been lucky enough the last 7+ years to be working on an Oracle EBS system, and during that time I've seen the growth in technology associated with Oracle hardware, yet haven't "stopped to smell the roses" to think about where it might go next or how to take advantage of coming changes.  This juncture in my career is a wonderful time to change that so I can leap forward later to where IT will be heading.