Weekend Reading: Oracle Purging whitepaper

As an offshoot from talking about purging FND_LOG_MESSAGES, or Workflow tables, if you are curious how Oracle suggests solutions to purging data from your EBS system you should look up My Oracle Support note 752322.1 and read the PDF entitled "Reducing Your Oracle E-Business Suite Data Footprint using Archiving, Purging, and Information Lifecycle Management".  This article has several tips or hints that I would have loved to known several years ago when I was going through my Workflow purging project, plus it leads me to think with a few other items on our radar right now that I might be able to help others in the community learn about this with a real life example of how to approach this and how much you can get back in savings.

R12: Workflow Agent Listener Service logging

Yesterday I posted the what of our problem with FND_LOG_MESSAGES, but I never explained the WHY of it.  I'll rectify that right now!

In the course of our investigation we found MOS note 741087.1 which suggested that our settings for the Workflow Agent Listener Service were set wrong.  Guess what?  They were!  This note is good to review as well to confirm the settings are correct for the FND: Debug Log profile options in your EBS application.

R12: FND_LOG_MESSAGES

Along the lines of my presentation, and published article, I bring you new details of another vector you need to verify to not bloat your database.  Looking into the space consumption of our database post R12 upgrade, the DBAs found that the table FND_LOG_MESSAGES was taking up 13% of our space in PROD so they found My Oracle Support document 735138.1 which details how to purge this information.  Why is this related to R12 you ask?  Based on some of the data analysis scripts in my article, I substituted in FND_LOG_MESSAGES and found that prior to R12 our monthly total in this table was just under 3.5 million rows added back in 2010.  Yet, the largest volume of data added to this table was in October when we went to R12 of over 320 million rows.  Okay, sure the system churn and processing might be excessive when installed so let's look at the next highest month that's been completed; in November we more than 233 million rows added to FND_LOG_MESSAGES, which is an increase over 67 times between our previous high and the following month after R12 was installed!

I have a few more nuggets of information to share with you about this situation, so stay tuned the next few days if you're interested by this!

EDIT: I realized I forgot to add in the links to my other articles last night!

Learn about commit_point_strength parameter

Are you running SQL statements between multiple databases that require commit points?  Have you run into "enq: TX - contention" waits for no good reason at all that is obvious after looking into the issue?  Read Nigel Noble's article about troubleshooting this type of scenario and suggests that commit_point_strength is the magic bullet to fix his issue…even though he gets another answer from Oracle which also might interest you too!

R12: Personalizations

Around two years ago we started attacking our long running SQL statements, and one of those was a blind query possible within the EBS forms on the AP_INVOICES_ALL table.  Our developers placed a personalization on the form so any user interactions with it required query criteria to be present before the query would actually try to run, so the full table scan possibility was completely avoided.  Imagine my surprise today when I went into that same form, tried to have it run the blind query, and then had my EBS application freeze up while it was waiting for the results of the query.  If we had our connection information correct, I might have been able to find my session which I needed to do because it wasn't showing on our long running alert and that is my next mystery after I find out why our personalizations might be missing in R12.  Yet another tip that needs to go on the R12 installation checklist!

Weekend Learning: ADF TV Channel

Are you interested in the development lifecycle of the ADF product?  Would you like to see upwards of 100 episodes of ADF related content on YouTube?  Then this blog post, via ArchBeat, is the one for you!  I really hope this is one of the first ventures Oracle does in this manner, and that it starts to catch on with other products too because stripping away the mystery while informing people is an excellent way to have people learn more.  I wonder if there is anything I can do like this.....

Weekend Learning: RAC Attack!

Have you been on social media lately and seen people talking about the RAC Attack when they go to conventions?  (Yury I'm looking at you here!)  Have you wondered exactly what they are doing, and how you can join in on the fun?  Well look no further than this article where it is broken down step by step so you can install Oracle in a RAC configuration on your own computer!

Catching up on social media

Recently I have been behind on catching up on blogs because of Twitter, but now that I am focusing on keeping my blog fresh and continually updated I'm behind on catching up on Twitter.  That is why when Doug Burns shared this post in September, I was more than a bit relieved that I am not alone in battling the constant stream of information coming at us in many different ways.  The more blogs I follow, the more people I follow on Twitter, or connect to on LinkedIn start to exponentially add to "my conversation" so I am struggling to find a happy medium or ritual to parsing through that data while being able to generate my own content.  What tools do you use to contain the social media flow?  Are there tips or tricks you have to help you deal with the flood?

EDIT: Minor correction as it looks like I didn't finish my first sentence.

TCP connections and load balancers

If you've ever wanted to work through if you need a load balancer for your long-lived TCP connections this article, found via ArchBeat is for you!  I picked up a few pointers here, so even if it doesn't have a whole lot of technical details, you could brush up or learn something new if load balancers are something new for you.

EDIT:  I wrote this article using my Blogger app, editing the links in on Safari, and this morning when I try to have the start of the article show in the LinkedIn preview it is just grabbing my profile sidebar information.  Curious.

Efficient Oracle table scanning methods

Ever wonder if there are better ways to scan Oracle tables?  James Morle has some answers for you in his published articles covering efficient I/O, being able to take a direct path, and how to hide latency while scaling up.  If you don't have time to read these today, do yourself a favor and bookmark them (or download them locally) so you can potentially learn something new.

ANONYMOUS: To delete, or not to delete?

Have you ever seen the ANONYMOUS user in your EBS application, and wondered if it would be a good idea to remove it?  Well, read My Oracle Support Note ID 1078993.1 and find out!  Then, visit either Oracle's link to the note for securing R12 or visit my previous post on securing your EBS application which has both note references for R12 and 11i security.

Weekend Reading: Database performance and data types

File this one away in the "needed to sit down to review it" type of follow up post, but the article by Pythian's Edwin Sarmiento is no less effective or topical because of that.  As I've peeled back the onion of what makes Oracle databases and applications tick, the lessons suggested here will help you when designing solutions and also are good reminders for how you can either tune something wrong or look for a potential problem just waiting to strike.  Wouldn't we all like to avoid database bloat?  Who is not looking for faster ways to access our data?

Weekend Reading: Concurrent Manager

Maris Elsins posted several great posts many months ago on the internals of the Concurrent Manager processing, some performance settings available, and the dangers of CMCLEAN being run.  Why have I not posted these sooner you ask?  Well, I'm anxiously waiting for the next entries in this series but I found myself reading these again so I decided there was no better time to share them with you!  Very easy to read, but explaining some advanced mechanisms with the Concurrent and some great visual aids as well.

11gR2 database bug due to ASM defaults

Did you know that ORA-04031 errors can crop up on you, if you have ASM configured with the default memory parameters being too low?  Serious!  Look up MOS Note ID 14292825.8 where a patch is suggested AND an alternative to patching by setting your MEMORY_TARGET value correctly.  You may want to proactively verify that your databases on 11.2.0.3 and up (not including 12.1) have the correct ASM values set to avoid unexpected outages!

ORIG_SYSTEM_REFERENCE and TCA APIs

I have found that doing research for one thing, will allow you to peel back layers of the onion on other things that are related to what you're researching for and sometimes others that you find by accident.  Case in point is MOS Note 554356.1 about the how and why ORIG_SYSTEM_REFERENCE can't be updated, then opposite is MOS Note 1462348.1 which explains TCA API causes for the errors and also how to fix them.  What's so great about this last note?  It covers R12 API errors that can be encountered for the TCA product!

Hungry for more?  Look at bug 9352630 for another way to solve the problem brought up in Note 554356.1 since it doesn't look like Oracle will be solving this anytime soon.

Resources for starting out fresh

When you started dealing with Oracle applications, or SQL statements, what were your resources for learning?  I ask because the good folks at Red Gate Software run the All Things Oracle site, and in their monthly newsletter I saw highlighted the start of a series entitled "Oracle for Absolute Beginners".  As we have a person new to both Oracle applications and SQL, I decided to give the article a read and you know what?  I read Part 2 immediately next.  Then I fired off an e-mail to said new person, and suggested they read these posts this weekend.

Now you might be asking yourself, what does this mean for me.  Well, I think it's probably a good idea to reflect on where we've all come from and where we're going.  Just because we've learned all that we've absorbed after 1, 2, 5, 10 years it doesn't mean that we won't be asked to revisit the past and try to start over from the beginning to help another person learn the lessons we did years ago.  These posts, and I expect the next in the series will as well, help me do that.  I'm toying with the idea of making a page on my site collecting articles which can be categorized into Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert levels in order to help others jump in fresh or continue to better their skills by picking up new tips and tricks.

What do you think about this idea?  Do you have articles or sites which would fit this model?

R12: Data changes in gv$session colums

I've posted several articles using gv$session to do different things (finding RMAN or CM holding a report lock), but imagine our surprise when development needed to retrofit a script for us based on gv$session with MODULE and ACTION no longer displaying the correct information!  Luckily enough for us, they also found MOS Note ID 1359998.1 which addressed the changes in the table to these columns AND that it requires the Profile Option FND_CONNECTION_TAGGING to be set to Enabled as well in the EBS application.

Start planning for Oracle OpenWorld 2014!

From the Oracle OpenWorld Twitter account comes a quick post to let you know that you are now able to sign up to be notified when registration opens for the event which is scheduled for 9/28 through 10/2.  Not only can you sign up for registration notification, but you can also click here to sign up for notification when the Call for Proposals opens up too!!

Oracle in the Apps Store!

I was looking in Apple's Apps Store for something else this weekend, when I decided to do a search for Oracle and I was amazed to find several apps which I thought were worth the download!

Oracle - This is the one stop shop for everything Oracle from news, support, events and even blogs!

Oracle Open World - This is an app I'm looking forward to using next year.  :}

Oracle Events - Even though the other app has events in it, I've loaded this on my phone just in case this gets me more updated information.

Sun ZFS Appliance Monitor - This one blows my mind away that I can monitor our ZFS online through our phones anytime we want.  I'm dying to turn this on!

Want to find more apps?  Visit the page for Oracle apps in the Apps Store!

Weekend Reading: MOS BPEL/SOA articles

This past week I had occasion to search MOS based on several different error messages related to BPEL and during my search I found many articles which have the potential to help you learn quite a lot about BPEL and SOA so I wanted to share them with you:

Troubleshooting ORABPEL-05002 Errors for SOA Suite or BPEL Process Manager (Doc ID 1290419.1)
ORABPEL-05002 Exception While Running large number of Parallel BPM Process. (Doc ID 1597990.1)
Troubleshooting ORABPEL-05002 Error Related to Transactions, Database, XA or JDBC in SOA Suite or BPEL PM (Doc ID 1306718.1)
Diagnosing ORABPEL-05002 Message Handle Error (Doc ID 747334.1)
ORABPEL-05002 When Trying To Recover A Business Fault (Doc ID 1407528.1)
Information Center: Troubleshooting Oracle BPEL Process Manager 10g (Doc ID 1459806.2)
Adapter Messages Polled by Mediator not Handed off to BPEL (Doc ID 1392594.1)
Mediator Hangs when Invoking BPEL Process (Doc ID 1407948.1)
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E14571_01/core.1111/e10113/toc.htm
SOA 11g: FTP Adapter Failing to get Files with Wildcard Search (Doc ID 1485762.1)
"Publish Engineering Change Order Updates" Concurrent Program Finishes In Error (Doc ID 1339841.1)
PO And OTM Integration: Not Able To Use Non Apps User In Fusion Layer (Doc ID 1283684.1)
NullPointerException Occurs While Invoking BAM Adapter From a Composite (Doc ID 1347520.1)

Oracle 11gR2 Support alert document

Another one of the articles I found on MOS when researching my menu issue, was Note 880782.1 entitled "ALERT: Oracle 11g Release 2 (11.2) Support Status and Alerts".  As I get more and more familiar with MOS, I think this document will get added to my favorites list so I can review it periodically to see if new bugs are reported that we might be encountering or need to prepare for (with alerts or such).  This should be a good habit to get into for different types of articles such as OS, database, infrastructure, and application to track against your current versions and those that you are planning on upgrading too.

I've been published by Oracle!!

Several months ago I was lucky enough to present for the OAUG and as a result, there was some interest in the Whitepaper that I generated to go along with it.  I didn't want to post the documents right away anyways, since I felt OAUG members should get first crack at them but after hearing that the Oracle mothership was interested I really thought if they were willing to help out by hosting it that they should be able to monitor the traffic and get the good results!

Today, I happened to be searching for some details about the new R12 directory structure apps_st when I stumbled upon the main WorkFlow Analyzer document and curiosity got the best of me so I opened the page up to see if my document had been attached yet.  If you search MOS for my name, or go directly to Note 1369938.1, you'll be able to pull up the document and click on the link "Whitepaper on analyzing WF data for increased system performance".  That's MY paper!  This couldn't have happened without a lot of people being involved, and I hope I was able to capture everybody in the credits!

If you have any questions or comments you can reply to this thread or get in touch with me directly via any number of other outlets privately if you would like, as I would love to hear what you think!

R12: Menus and You (or how they got changed and you can change them back)

The other day I had to investigate an issue with an external application, which has an authentication against our EBS system, but when I tried to look at the Form we used to control the access hierarchy it wasn't there any more.  I wasn't really surprised, but what did surprise me was that the Menu we used to attach the Form had been recreated by the FND_USER.USER_ID 121 which I posted about a few days ago shows up as the FND_USER.USER_NAME of ORACLE12.1.0.  I wasn't seeing things, in our archive 11i EBS instance the menu existed many years ago created by AUTOINSTALL but after R12.1.3 it says it was created only a few years ago by ORACLE12.1.0.  I would share the menu in question, but when I did a search to see how many menus were either CREATED_BY or LAST_MODIFIED_BY 121 I received a LOT of hits.  Thousands.  So, add the Form back to the Menu and we're done right?  Not exactly.

The View FND_MENU_ENTRIES_VL ties together FND_MENU_ENTRIES and FND_MENU_ENTRIES_TL but much to my surprise, it ties these tables together based on the ENTRY_SEQUENCE field.  So what you're wondering right?  Well our old Menu was ordered 1, 2, 3 but the R12.1.3 install made the same items 5, 10, 15 and I wanted it changed back before I added my Form back on there.  I had not looked closely at the View, so when I ran this script:

UPDATE FND_MENU_ENTRIES
SET ENTRY_SEQUENCE = 1
WHERE MENU_ID = 67867
AND ENTRY_SEQUENCE = 5

what do you think happened when I requeried the Menu?  The first entry was GONE.  Just plain gone!  I didn't freak out, but this is when I looked at the View and found out how the tables were linked so I had to run the script:

UPDATE FND_MENU_ENTRIES_TL
SET ENTRY_SEQUENCE = 1
WHERE MENU_ID = 67867
AND ENTRY_SEQUENCE = 5

before requerying the Menu and the entries that were 5, 10, 15 were now 1, 10, 15 and ready for me to change the 10 and 15 entries with the same set of scripts above for each entry.  This was my first attempt to undo a Menu change such as this, and it hurts my head to think of how many other Menus have been changed which we haven't stumbled upon yet, but knowing the tables involved it sure seems like we could start building some alerts to let us know the next time a Menu might change right?

Also, iff you still need to upgrade, this should be on your list of "gotchas" that we've been slowly building over the last few months for how R12 is different or changes your system!

EBS ATG webinar: Advanced EBS management with OEM

In less than 24 hours, there will be a webinar by the ATG team on advanced EBS management using the OEM tool with a focus on 12c and R12.2.  Visit the page here to get all the details and sign up for what looks to be a very useful webinar.  Looks like it will be so useful that I decided to post during the day *gasp* in order to give you as much advance notice about this one!  :}

Exadata: ZFS may be unable to rejoin cluster

Today I was researching something on My Oracle Support, and I ran across document ID 1405209.1 detailing a scenario where Exadata ZFS appliances won't be able to rejoin the cluster due to a software update if you have certain network cards installed.  So what you ask?  Well, other than the obvious research you want to do if you are on Exadata, if you don't get to play with a lot of commands for Exadata this has several that might be useful if you encounter this message:

This appliance is part of an appliance cluster.
Please wait while cluster synchronization takes place.

Joining cluster ... /

Thursday Twitter - 1/2/14 (Part 3)

Finally all caught up on Twitter, following yesterday's post, and I must say that as I follow more people and it takes me a bit longer to digest the week that went past, it is becoming crystal clear just how much I learn from all the people in my circle!  I would encourage each and every one of you to start following as many people as you can, starting with those I pass along that you see sharing things along your interests week after week so you can get more out of social media.  For about a year my blog was the only output, and other blogs the only input but the addition of Twitter has really lead to a lot of great interactions both ways!

Announcements:

Sorry folks, no real announcements this week!

Training/Free Stuff:

https://twitter.com/UweHesse/status/416911420278984704 - Uwe Hesse shares a bunch of OLL tutorials on DBAs for beginners.

https://twitter.com/oraclebase/status/417648281263427584 - Tim Hall has an incredible series of articles on public speaking that are well worth your time to read!!

https://twitter.com/MHBusiness/status/417717543709978624 - Want to get a free eReader preloaded with 25 McGraw-Hill books?

https://twitter.com/oraclepress/status/418062881981485056 - Want another free book chapter, this time on Fusion?

General News/Information:

https://twitter.com/kylehhailey/status/416829087953723392 - Kyle shares Goldratt's 1980s theories and how they have changed.

https://twitter.com/DBAKevlar/status/416857335920082945 - Kellyn provides a list of 5 deadly Linux commands that you should NOT run.

https://twitter.com/DBAKevlar/status/416900379692269568 - Interested in a plan for optimizing performance?  Follow these steps!

https://twitter.com/UweHesse/status/417041540276817920 - Do you know why you shouldn't set OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE?

https://twitter.com/climagic/status/417065756832985088 - An interesting way to monitor more than 1 log file with the tail command!

https://twitter.com/mnorgaard/status/417240381651439616 - Mogens has a great point here, and I've seen it way too many times!

https://twitter.com/UweHesse/status/417273817799860224 - Uwe shares a YouTube video of Maria Colgan talking about the Optimizer changes with Oracle 12c.

https://twitter.com/dbasolved/status/417492587235127296 - Bobby Curtis has an article about restarting 12c.

https://twitter.com/OracleCloudZone/status/417611045830938624 - A short video about how California State University, Northridge is using Oracle technology to help their students!

https://twitter.com/dbasolved/status/417719988556800000 - An article by Bobby on OEM 12c and GoldenGate pending.

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/417768994800955393 - A retirement from Oracle!

https://twitter.com/mariselsins/status/417792581888520192 - Maris Elsins shares a Linux script that he's designed to download patches from MOS!

https://twitter.com/fritshoogland/status/417956325591482368 - Do you know what is behind the ORA-19821 error message?

https://twitter.com/dbakevlar/status/417987526050459649 - Ten tips to become a master programmer.

https://twitter.com/jloracle/status/417993330476060673 - Ever have it happen where a problem stops when you trace it?  So has Jonathan Lewis!

https://twitter.com/uwehesse/status/417998600128716800 - What URL should you memorize if you are a DBA?

https://twitter.com/brost/status/418024386075975680 - Bjoern Rost has some acronyms from Oracle to share with us.

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/418040813088948224 - Some tips on Concurrent Processing!

https://twitter.com/uwehesse/status/418070327332450305 - Uwe and Oracle Data Guard posts.  Lots, and lots of posts!!

https://twitter.com/leight0nn/status/418118714500730881 - Nice to see that others are thinking about support and historical activities for OEM12c…even if Oracle isn't!

https://twitter.com/otn_garage/status/418151131492413440 - A catchup on OTN Garage articles from the year.

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/418371955713392640 - What is the Payables #1 document?

Conference News:

https://twitter.com/yvelik/status/416905360151420928 - Yury would like to get some help proofreading his presentation for Collaborate!

https://twitter.com/dbakevlar/status/417734692075356160 - Don't forget to register for RMOUG in February!

Social Media/DevOps:

https://twitter.com/ClickTips/status/417316587822014464 - An idea on how to add excitement to your blog posts!

https://twitter.com/UweHesse/status/417636201953517568 - A listing of Oracle User Group events worldwide.

https://twitter.com/clicktips/status/418388574417846272 - What is a Twitter landing page, and why should you use it? 

Thursday Twitter - 1/2/14 (Part 2)

The first follow up to Thursday's post to catch up on all of the awesome information coming out of Twitter over the past few weeks!

Announcements:

https://twitter.com/otnarchbeat/status/415471074756022272 - There is a new ACE Director out there!  Congrats to Danilo Schmiedel!

https://twitter.com/acolvin/status/416347832564469760 - Andy Colvin tells us that a new version of Exadata Storage Server has been released and also it has new cell-to-cell communications too https://twitter.com/acolvin/status/416370394535178240.

https://twitter.com/rmoug_org/status/416390992908926976 - If you didn't know, Oracle made a 1.5B move towards the cloud.  Adobe, Salesforce: your move.

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/416591893469077504 - Premier Support ended for several products with the new year!

Training/Free Stuff:

https://twitter.com/oraclepress/status/415526159552884736 - Want a free chapter of the Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook?

https://twitter.com/oracle_ebs/status/415527311623352320 - Learn about SLA and Procurement in this webinar.

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/416106991166431232 - A good article bringing together a lot of OpenWorld presentations for SOA/BPM!

https://twitter.com/enkitec/status/416317137188188160 - Learn Exadata Offloading efficiency in Optimization courses from Enkitec!

https://twitter.com/kylehhailey/status/416610593408172032 - Kyle Hailey shares a post about Harvard data visualization course lectures and slides being online!

General News/Information:

https://twitter.com/tmmdv/status/415381725938585600 - Timur Akhmadeev shares his Pythian blog post on how to calculate if you have enough redo space.

https://twitter.com/alanc/status/415385339394412544 - Want to read a really great detective story about trying to find out why power supplies were dying on the same day in a data center?  You do, it's got an awesome ending too!

https://twitter.com/oracle_ebs/status/415512212791640064 - Having some problems in R12 with incorrect depreciation on member assets?

https://twitter.com/dbakevlar/status/415512465766883328 - Kellyn Pot'Vin shares 10 productivity sites/apps for working remote.

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/415563869617389568 - Clean up your SOA QA environment!

https://twitter.com/agonen/status/415866934266052608 - Learn from the Oracle documentation about the UTL_CALL_STACK procedure!

https://twitter.com/gokhanatil/status/416094191455055872 - Here is a script for looking at your ASM information.

https://twitter.com/oratweets/status/416114989754097664 - Iggy Fernandez starts a really good series of articles on NoSQL.

https://twitter.com/gokhanatil/status/416137525376602112 - Do you know the history of Exadata?  Are you sure you know the whole story?

https://twitter.com/yvelik/status/416181102064435201 - Yury Velikanov gets EBS 11i forms to run on Windows 8 64-bit due to his secret weapon!

https://twitter.com/oracle_ebs/status/416267256809947137 - Have you used the PO Approvals Analyzer tool?

https://twitter.com/leight0nn/status/416294888473251840 - Leighton L. Nelson identifies a bug with R3 of EM12c which wasn't there in R2.

https://twitter.com/flashdba/status/416335285547708418 - Did you know Oracle has changed Smart Flash Cache Compression to be part of the ACO license?

https://twitter.com/moh/status/416438130099494912 - What do you think about programming late into your life?  Great response here for young versus old!

https://twitter.com/bertranddrouvot/status/416501692453367808 - Bertand Drouvot believes that this is a must for any DBA toolkit!

https://twitter.com/osamaoracle/status/416547091562119168 - Really love this comment from Osama Mustafa!!  I think this could fill an entire volume for a book on support!

https://twitter.com/uwehesse/status/416559874508464128 - Uwe Hesse recommends a post from Jonathan Lewis on random slowdowns, and it is a very good article!!

https://twitter.com/oracle_ebs/status/416591831733133312 - Have you looked at the BI Publisher Consolidated Reference document on MOS?

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/416591893238386688 - Do you know why there hasn't been a new R12.1.3 RUP for Procurement?

https://twitter.com/kylehhailey/status/416613245236281344 - Kyle has a post about ZFS fundamentals for throttling!

https://twitter.com/oracle_edu/status/416640773065416704 - What were the top 13 classes for Oracle University in 2013?

https://twitter.com/chrisantognini/status/416650737779605504 - Did you know that the parameter _px_xtgranule_size controls the size of block range granules when accessing external tables?

https://twitter.com/leight0nn/status/416669705051443200 - Configuring F5 equipment for use with OEM 12.1.0.3?  There looks to be a surprise waiting for you, but Leighton had your back with details!

https://twitter.com/RaySmithAce/status/416687245504950273 - Ray Smith shares a post about a new option in OEM12c R3 direct from Oracle!

https://twitter.com/kylehhailey/status/416778286744608769 - Kyle has an awesome point here, that we need to automate or die.

Conference News:

https://twitter.com/markrittman/status/416666891185557504 - Get an advance look at Mark Rittman's presentation for BIWA14!

Social Media/DevOps:

https://twitter.com/clicktips/status/415504739741093888 - Did you know Google has some free tools for seeing where your visitors are?

https://twitter.com/alyssaebs/status/415590381913243648 - A good presentation on modeling DevOps!

R12: The future of Oracle EBS lies within FND_USER

This sounds like an odd statement, but have you looked in the FND_USER table after upgrading to any version of R12?  I recently had reason to look into this table as a result of our upgrade, and expanding my search a bit I was surprised to see in R12.1.3 that the FND_USER.USER_NAME of "ORACLE12.1.0" for FND_USER.USER_ID of 121 was not alone in the table!  Look at the values of USER_ID between 120 and 129 and you'll find a surprise in that the USER_NAME goes all the way up to "ORACLE12.9.0" but there is nothing defined for ORACLE13 in any way.  We know that Oracle doesn't speak about upcoming releases or anything of that nature due to their revenue recognition rules, but we can see the future they are planning for even if it doesn't come to fruition.

Thursday Twitter - 1/2/14 (Part 1)

Since I have almost a full TWO weeks to catch up posting from Twitter, I've decided to break the posts up this week so you can get some weekend reading materials on the actual weekend.

Announcements:

https://twitter.com/oracleace/status/415243703301980161 - The oraclenerd has become an OracleACE Director!!

Training/Free Stuff:

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/415080969201537026 - Fusion General Ledger Beta test available!

https://twitter.com/oraclepress/status/415161431613800448 - A free chapter about NoSQL and BigData!

https://twitter.com/enkitec/status/415166133461725184 - Learn how to troubleshoot Exadata from Enkitec!

https://twitter.com/oakies_blog/status/415346338369650688 - Want to learn something from Christo Kutrovsky's Oracle, Linux and memory presentation from OakTable World?

General News/Information:

https://twitter.com/hdeiby/status/414148843811258368 - Ever wonder how much Exadata infrastructure really costs?

https://twitter.com/oracleblogs/status/414355870676697088 - have you used iperf to measure network performance before?

https://twitter.com/deirdres/status/414642845182476289 - Speaking of measurements, here's a good article on benchmarking.

https://twitter.com/fritshoogland/status/414862141363982337 - Want to see some deep dive information about Oracle?  Look no further than Frits Hoogland's tweet and following conversation!

https://twitter.com/dba_hba/status/415113430731726848 - Sizing and capacity planning when you don't know the system.

https://twitter.com/oracle_ebs/status/415158260808048640 - Reminder about Concurrent and Workflow analyzers, and I can vouch for the benefits of both of them!!

https://twitter.com/csierra_usa/status/415170853668933632 - Carlos Sierra shows how to do some tracing on legacy PL/SQL.

https://twitter.com/dbakevlar/status/415180543001505792 - Kellyn tells about a problem she's having with 12c EM queries and then tells us what the cause was too!

https://twitter.com/orafaq/status/415232079589175297 - What is the LREG process, and why should you learn about it?

https://twitter.com/oraclemagazine/status/415281661954514944 - Part 3 of Tom Kyte's series on 12c!

https://twitter.com/timothyjgorman/status/415330700628205570 - Is the DBA dead?

Conference News:

https://twitter.com/collab_oaug/status/415132671782563840 - Did you know that a MythBuster is going to give the keynote address at Collaborate 14?!?

Social Media/DevOps:

https://twitter.com/clicktips/status/414398457105760256 - I have a friend that swears by using MailChimp, so I know if a newsletter is what I want to be doing this is probably what I'll be using!

https://twitter.com/clicktips/status/414779066118463488 - New to Twitter?  Here are some tips!

https://twitter.com/potus98/status/415025214745874432 - Can't disagree with this picture explaining DevOps!

https://twitter.com/dba_hba/status/415116171424198657 - What is a DevOps Toolchain?

https://twitter.com/clicktips/status/415177227995582464 - A great reminder that sometimes the title is just as important as the article!

Happy New Year!!!

Instead of posting a new article today, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of my readers.  The past year has been amazing with last year at this time I was celebrating getting just over 100 views, while over this past year I've racked up 7846 views to end the year just THREE views short of an even 8000 views!  I've gone from about 9 views per article overall to almost 33 views per article, and even set an all time record for monthly views with 1455 this month.

All of this is as a result of your support.  I humbly thank you for the continued support, readership, and inspiration as I look to do and share more over the coming year.