Weekend Learning: FREE Online R12.1 and R12.2 EBS training from Oracle

The other night I said you needed to bookmark a My Oracle Support article, but tonight I REALLY mean it as you NEED to add "Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 and 12.2 Transfer of Information (TOI) Online Training" from note 807319.1 to your bookmarks because there is an incredible list of free training from Oracle on several versions of R12 including the brand new R12.2.5!!

How can you tell if Oracle products are certified or can get patches?

Do you know the differences between the terms Premier Support, Extended Support, Error Correction Support and Sustaining Support?  If you have Oracle products in your environment, you really should know so that you are aware of when you can get new patches from Oracle and Steven Chan tells us exactly how to understand these terms tonight by explaining how to find information on the MOS Certification page and deciphering it with the Lifetime Support Policies!

Oracle: Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance

Were you able to catch up with Larry Ellison's keynote speeches during Oracle OpenWorld?  Did you see the announcement of Oracle’s Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance?  Do you think your backup strategy could use a refresher?  Maybe you want to suggest to your business how their data can be a lot more secure in the event of a disaster?  Check out the infographic, datasheet, and white paper to get up to speed for the future of data backups!

Thoughts: Larry Ellison "steps down"

By now everybody has heard about Larry Ellison stepping down from his role as CEO into dual roles as the Executive Chairman and CTO yet what everybody is focusing on is his move from the CEO role.  I think what is more important to focus on are three things: Larry has put the well being of his company first before the ego he is known for by allowing this change to keep his management team together, the direction and ideas the new CEOs are going to bring to running Oracle, and the interesting fact that Oracle did not have a CTO at this time.

I have seen some posts or tweets the past week where people are acting like Larry has died, or Oracle is going under immediately, but I think people are blowing things out of proportion because it sounds like Larry has been the de facto CTO while he was the CEO so this will allow him to concentrate on what he has been excelling at while the CEOs can do the same in their focus areas too.

What do you think?

Weekend Learning: Oracle Real World Performance team

Are you interested in getting the most performance that you can out of the software and hardware you purchase from Oracle?  Of course you are!  That reason is why you should start following Oracle's Real World Performance team, including visiting their site that has several YouTube videos and which I'm sure will contain a link to the webcast Andrew Holdsworth (@ajholdsworth) held today about this very topic.  There will be other webcasts from Andrew, so look for them in the very near future!

Oracle Support at Collaborate14!

The next OAUG Collaborate conference is coming up quick, and MOS note 1525331.1 tracks the sessions that feature Oracle Support during the conference!  Have you ever wanted to know more about Oracle Support, or even meet some of the people you've worked with previously?  Well then, this is your chance!  Take advantage of it!

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?

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!

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!

The future of Oracle Enhancement Requests

Ever want to be on the cutting edge?  Have you thought about seeing inside Oracle's thought process about improving?  Well are you ever in luck today!

Read MOS note 1584210.1 titled "FAQ for the Enhancement Request Community", then come back here.  Back?  Good!  So what did you think?

I'm excited!  This is the future of how Oracle wants to work with their customer base to get Enhancement Requests in the queue, worked on, and ranked by the very customers they are serving.  How cool is that?!?  Also, this is going to be a template for how ERs will be worked for all the other streams so a. get in now, b. make the process better, and c. get ready to work like this for all of the other EBS modules (and maybe beyond).

OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech - Day 2 + me

The final day of the OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech conference here in Pittsburgh, and my schedule of events for the sessions I attended today include:

9:00 AM - R12 Surprises in User Management - City Center A - Susan Behn and Karen Brownfield with infosemantics.com

While I was going into this presentation expecting just to find out the "surprises" with User Management, I was pleasantly surprised myself to find that Susan and Karen covered a lot of basic core UMX concepts so that we could then understand the "surprises" they were going to present to us.  Great explanation of what the function security and data security layers were and some of the building blocks related to them.  Especially to know that Oracle is adding new roles in UMX so you have to be proactive, instead of reactive.  Some of the notes they shared were 737547.1, 804296.1, 553290.1 and 1162403.1 in this very good presentation.

10:15 AM - Tuning the eBS Middle Tier - City Center B - Arian Stijf

Unfortunately, I was kind of disappointed that Arian decided to condense a day long training into 45m-1h and kept saying "I won't get into that" several times to open his presentation.  My take away was "don't offer a presentation and then tell the audience that you won't be sharing anything they can take back home, with the veiled hint they should talk to you later for consulting".  Even worse, he didn't include any personal or professional details to contact him for the work!  He does seem like a very personable individual and has some good presentation skills keeping the room laughing from time to time but when asked a direct question he avoided answering it and on one occasion said something very strange which isn't what I've heard or experienced.  Doesn't mean it's not true, but again it made me pause.

All that said, I did get a few nuggets of information about notification mailer, advanced queues and different parameters you can change (but not really what you should change it to) for container and component level settings.

11:30 AM - Oracle - Minimizing Oracle EBS Downtimes - Grand Ballroom - Elke Phelps

From a big picture perspective, this was a really interesting presentation.  She gave us several ideas on how to create a maintenance strategy, make sure our system stays healthy and is up-to-date, reduce downtime tips, table AD_TASK_TIMING.  Another big idea shared is that you should define SLAs with your business group to agree on planned/unplanned outages, what Prod and non-Prod outage windows are, and daily/weekly/monthly/yearly regular planned maintenance windows are.  Also, when I get back to work I need to look into Application Testing Suite Accelerators to automate testing!  The My Oracle Supports that were shared in this session were: 1400757.1, 1078973.1, 228779.1, 1077709.1, 387859.1, 236469.1.

1:45 PM - Deployment and System Administration of EBS 12.2 - City Center A - Elke Phelps

First, I need to say it was pretty awesome how Elke had the room setup with a microphone so her voice wouldn't die on her and she didn't drop a beat while the mic was getting set up all around her.  If that was me, and it was the hour following, I would've freaked out and started blubbering like an idiot.  Not that I can't do that on my own, but anyways...I think this session may have been mislabeled because I was looking for changes in how the system would be administrated but it really wasn't a bad session overall because we got a LOT of technical details about 12.2 that isn't even released yet!  The big thing for me is the replacement of the OC4Js in favor of Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) and WebLogic Server (WLS) for 12.2, since I'm not a DBA and I don't use RapidWiz(ard) to really care too much about out of the box RAC install being available.  On the other hand, hearing that we're going to be required to have a dual file system (and a potential 3rd) for the Online Editioning really scares me.  I mean, I'm really glad that the system is getting more complex to allow patching to be entirely "online" (maybe in-line is a better term since concurrent is already taken?) and that Oracle is working with real world customers to get sizing requirements for the multiple filesystems down before release but complexity means problems I usually find.

3:00 PM - Analyzing Oracle Workflow Data for increased System Performance - by Erwin Schmidt (Me!) with Apollo Group, Inc.

Of course I did good! Are you crazy?!? Okay all modesty aside, I was happy to have met people during the conference that were planning on attending my presentation because they had a problem with this or were interested enough to spend time in my session when there were several other good options available. Very humbling experience and I hope it stays that way because after getting done and hitting every note I wanted to, Karen Brownfield (from yesterday's session that I did NOT get to go to) was among several people that came up to let me know that they enjoyed the presentation!  Just blown away and really invigorating on top of everything I've been doing with the blog....I'm floored and humbled and excited and.....yeah you get the idea.

OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech - Day 1

Continuing my coverage from the OAUG Connection Point - AppsTech conference in Pittsburgh, here is the schedule of events I went to including my reviews of the sessions:

8:30 AM - General Session, Steven Chan - Oracle EBS Technology Latest Features & Roadmap - Grand Ballroom

Here I had the chance to talk with Steven one-on-one for a moment before he gave the opening session, which was a very pleasant experience because he seems like a very genuine and relatable individual. He even remembered my name from a brief e-mail encounter (I had completely embarrassed myself by sending him a comment meant for my team because it was too early in the morning to be online for an Oracle webinar) which happened almost six months ago, and tells me that he takes his blogging and role at Oracle very seriously!

On to the session itself, there was SO much that he went over that my head felt like bursting but then I reminded myself that I'd read a lot of his work already and that this was a refresher course almost.  Except for actually finding out: what Endeca really was, that 12.2 will likely (since it hasn't been officially announced) be replacing the OC4Js with WebLogic, the code name for 12.2 is Skyros (if I spelled it right), a move towards more SOAP & REST services, there are new whitepapers coming out for each module with relation to Exadata and Exalogic, Oracle saved 231 TB of space with Advanced Compression on their own systems, then a few notes 1484997.1 and 1195034.1 that were referenced.  Whew!  And I cut that list in probably 1/4th too!

9:45 AM - Workflow Performance Tuning in R12 - Salon 6 - Karen Brownfield - Scratch that, Working Effectively with Oracle's Public APIs - Salon 5 - Rob Lepanto with API Wizard

Why? I was thinking that the name of Karen Brownfield. sounded familiar but I didn't know why until I started doing a run through of my presentation last night and it dawned on me that she was the author of the Solution Beacon PDF that I referenced in my presentation! I don't remember reading her whole presentation, so I had made a mental note to review it anyways so now that she has updated her presentation for R12 (and is no longer with Solution Beacon) I'll read the new one when it becomes available but since I'd already seen some of it I went with the APIs to learn something new.

This was a fairly basic introduction to APIs with a distinction between those that are Public (for customers to use) and Private (not not supported to use) and while there are 1500 APIs in R11 there are 2500 in R12.  We were provided with a pretty good query for DBA_OBJECTS to find what are potential APIs in our system, as well as a nice listing for what could be considered Oracle API standards.  We also had types of API failure, tips for improving API performance, wrappers (no not Dr. Dre) and information about a seeded responsibility called Integrated OA Framework responsibility with R12.  Good session!

11:00 AM - Getting ready for 12.2: Edition-Based Redefinition - City Center B - Michael Brown from BlueStar Inc.

When this one started, I was really chomping at the bit to get a sneak peek at this, and the OAUG Member of the Year for 2013 did not disappoint!  Again, Michael was under a NDA so he could not speak about his direct experiences but the public information out there tells us a great deal about this feature which is basically a type of change control within the database for only certain objects.  There are of course new types of objects to enable the editioning to happen and while I'm not going to dive into the specifics here (because then you won't visit any of his future sessions) there are a few new tables that I will share that are deployed with 12.2: dba_editions and dba_editioning_views.  There, you got a few nuggets of information after all.  :}  Really great session for the "download" and then mind boggling live demo of editioning.

1:15 PM - Oracle EBS 12.1 Upgrade Best Practices - City Center B - Elke Phelps

I thought this was going to be one of the best sessions in the conference, and I wasn't disappointed at all as I got a lot of content out of the session!  Explanation of Rapid Install and the comparison between the file sizes for 12.1.1 and 12.1.3, many reports, customer stories, and the meat and potatoes of the best practices that are recommended.  I found a lot of these were covered more in-depth during Mike's presentation the day before, but it wasn't Elke's fault I went to the pre-conference session now was it?  That said, with the wealth of knowledge that was transferred to us it was hard for our eyes not to glaze over (since it was after lunch) yet she kept us engaged and the topic was lively so we all stayed focused.

Here are all the notes she went over: 761570.1, 1290886.1, 1327399.1, 1446430.1, 1448102.1, 16791553, 384248.1, 734025.1, 399362.1, 8557019, 244040.1!

2:30 PM - Advanced Management of Oracle EBS with Oracle Enterprise Manager - Grand Ballroom - Vasu Rao

For an "advanced" type of session, this wasn't that advanced as it was more a prep for starting to use OEM which was okay with me since I don't use it today and now I want to badger my DBAs to let me use it a bit!  The way Vasu started the presentation by highlighting the top 10 CIO business and technical priorities had a great lead in to getting value out of implementing OEM, so I really started feeling like I was in a sales presentation a bit even though I was learning just about every minute about more modules or features available with the Application Management Suite which is a separately licensed product from Oracle, of which the application management pack is a part of.  I thought we got some real value when he was modeling how RUEI (Real User Experience Insight) worked to help replay a user's entire session which was a WOW moment for me!  Note 1434392.1 was mentioned, as well as I'm sure quite a few more but I have a LOT of documentation to catch up on for OEM and now excuse me I need to go bug somebody about getting me access to OEM.

4:00 PM - Ask Oracle ATG Panel Discussion with Steven, Elke, and Vasu - Grand Ballroom

Oddly, I don't have any questions on my mind to ask Oracle at this venue but maybe it isn't so odd because I'm a speaker and didn't come here with all of the "baggage" from work expecting solutions. I hate to put it that way, maybe a better way to say it is that having a complimentary registration from being a speaker has put things into perspective and I respect the other people that have had their company pay (or even out of their own pocket!) to come here to get something in return.

Talk about single sign-on and how complicated it is, but Elke and Steven indicated they have simplified the documentation from 50 pages down to 20 pages and are working on roadmap items such as changing the architecture to use WebLogic which should reduce the complexity.

Every group in Oracle has been told to integrate with OEM.  Great news to me!

Are there any thoughts to a shared oracle_home?  No.  Different risks, certs, and they still have plans on getting EBS certified on 12c.

"Sales" is pushing Fusion applications so how do we get ready?  Fusion is not the successor to EBS, as they really do different things, yet you can have some Fusion and EBS running at the same times doing their different things.  A big hint was being dropped at 12.2 (or some future release, but one that isn't TOO future) supporting touch devices.

Is your database and application supported on VM?  VMware runs their installation of EBS on VMware, and Oracle will give support until they decide it is a problem with VMware. 

DBAs are asking to upgrade the database that is currently 11.1.0.7 while the app is on 12.1.3, is that supported or suggested?  The database and applications have been decoupled, so they CAN upgrade the DB to 11.2.0.3 but may have to apply some interoperability patches for it to work.  Also, R12.2 has to be on 11.2.0.3 at least so you might as well go now.

Is Oracle going to provide archiving for EBS?  Current applications on the market are only going to really come from Oracle developers or from former Oracle developers, and now that the former Oracle employees don't have access to R12 Steven suggests rather strongly that those tools may not have all the hidden secrets figured out just yet.  An idea on using 12c heat maps to help subset data in the EBS in some way.

More is better: Oracle and Microsoft together

Along the "in case you haven't already heard this" vein, Oracle software can now run on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Server Hyper-V installations.  If you're curious, My Oracle Support notes 1563794.1 and 417770.1 are your reference documents for these installations.