Weekend Learning: Proactive Oracle Support Event Calendar

Make sure you take a look at My Oracle Support's "Get Proactive Dynamic Event Calendar" from note ID 125716.1 because there are some very good sessions on the upcoming calendar about Accreditation, Administration, Working Effectively, and Service Requests!

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!

Weekend Learning: Oracle Database Support News via Oracle Premier Support

I am not too sure if document 230.1 on My Oracle Support is always for their Premier Support group, or just for the latest Oracle Database Support News, but I am going to bookmark article "Oracle Premier Support - Oracle Database Support News - Issue June 2015, Volume 52" on the off chance it gets updated each month and then I will be bookmarking "Oracle Premier Support - Oracle Database Support News Archive" from note ID 1284265.1 as well so I can stay up to date on news from Oracle Support groups!

Weekend Learning: GoldenGate availability and patch notes

If you need to support the Oracle GoldenGate product, you may want to favorite these My Oracle Support articles and visit them this weekend to brush up on your general knowledge about the product!

Oracle GoldenGate Core Product - Release Availability and Support Status - Note ID 1920237.1
Master Note for Oracle GoldenGate Core Product Patch Sets - Note ID 1645495.1

Weekend Learning: Improve hardware support from Oracle

Did you know there are ways you can get better hardware support from Oracle via MOS and the Proactive Hardware Services portal?  Visit the page "Improve Your Hardware Support Experience - Part 2" to find out more about this, visit Part 1, ad get the latest blog site for MOS too by visiting the most recent post on this blog site!

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!

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!

Weekend Learning: Ways to instrument code

Have you ever had a situation where you wished code was instrumented?  Maybe a situation where you had no idea what the error was for a report when it crashed or what table/data was behind the error?  How about needing to get progress information into gv$session_longops?  Well Tim Hall of oracle-base.com fame wants you to instrument your code!  His article even has a few suggestions on how you can accomplish this feat, and I'll tell you that being in Support it is really critical that we plan to have as much information at hand at all times since when we have that .01% chance of encountering an issue we have the same amount of information as the 99.9% when it works right.

Weekend Learning: How software quality can degrade

The best thing about knowledge, is that it never gets old.  Take Cary Millsap's article from a few years about how software quality can be degraded due to the organizational model your company has!  On the surface it is obviously a great article, but the sharing of his ideas stimulated a really great discussion in the comments section as well.  Can we always try to find ways to enhance our processes so we maximize quality and support?  Of course!  Read Cary's article to see if there are some ways you can change processes in order to give your customers a best in-class type of experience.

Do you know the policy Oracle Support has on performance tuning and scalability for reports and forms?

Rarely does my title say it all, but today is the exception as I found out in note 1352875.1 "Oracle Support Policy on Oracle Forms/Reports Performance Tuning and Scalability Issues" on MOS that such a policy DOES exist and it is fairly straightforward and clear for such a broad subject.  It might be worth your time to brush up on it just to refresh yourself prior to opening a new SR for a problem in this area!

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?

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.

Weekend Reading: Exadata & DB Storage

The weekend has just begun, but that doesn't mean you can escape without getting homework assigned!  I think these go together well, and soon I'll be devouring them when I get a chance to sit down for a few hours and catch up on my reading.  First, is Database Storage for Dummies; no seriously I can't make this up!  Then next up is the first entry in the Exadata Workbook series that covers planning, installing, operating and maintaining an Exadata platform so I want to go through this looking for opportunities to enhance the support of the platform.

As an extra bonus this weekend, you should also read the article at My Oracle Support 1274322.1 on Exadata High Availability best practices too!