COLLABORATE16: Day 2 (and lots of Me!)

Database Security - Case Study for Enterprise License Features - @aprilcsims

Oracle External Password Store - something worth looking into so you do not need to put passwords in clear text or pass them around.
Blogs.oracle.com/upgrade
Some features in Advanced Security Option now moved to Enterprise License (and free) because of Cloud encryption needs.
271825.1 - Passwords "Is the password encrypted when I logon"
Wireshark can see scripts in plain text if there is no encryption!
Database auditing - table privileges, system privileges, logon/logoff trigger- AUDIT SESSION WHENEVER NOT SUCCESSFUL is the base you need to start with.
dba_stmt_audit_opts - a new table I did not know about!
1299033.1, 553225.1
LogRotate on Linux - this might be worthwhile for our environment!
Open Source product LogSearch lets you collate log files for analysis later.
12c - DBMS_PRIVILEGE_CAPTURE
Use orapki to create the wallet with -auto_login_local so it can't be transferred to another server!
1114599.1 testing the wallet on another server
Sqlnet.ora parameter WALLET_LOCATION
Dead Connection Detection - zero length packets being dropped by the new Cisco router!
Some Unified Auditing is on with a fresh 12c DB installation so check v$options!

Blogging: The How and Why to Propel Your Career - Craig@orapub.com

You may ask yourself "why are you going to a session on blogging if you already blog?" and that would be a great question but I think there is always room for improvement in all things so I went to several sessions during the conference on this topic to try and pick up new tips or tricks that can make me deliver better content to my readers.

Craig redesigned his website to focus on Oracle performance because he had a site that was not focused at all and it was difficult to decide what to do.
The plan: making the best decision, getting started, what to write about, tuning your blog.
Are you interested in blogging?  You can download this from orapub.com soon!
Blogging takes time, so WHY do it?  Help others, help yourself, career goals - OracleACE, independent consultant, business owner, shift in career path, career development.
A blog is your living resume
"Inbound marketing"
What you can expect: perceived as an authority, develop a following, think a question through to completion, become a better writer and communicator, increased conference participation, develop thicker skin, encouragement (from readers) is a life giving.
Turned comments off - this was interesting to me, and made me think a bit!
Define your objectives: be honest about your market and impress them, do not do it just to be famous.
Measure your objectives: views, clicks and downloads, email volume, conference invites, career objectives, recognition, registrations for on-site training, memberships, consulting work.
Purposefully design your blog: reflection of you, aligns with objectives, easy to read, easy to be found, easy to migrate, easy to change format, easy to build content.
Choosing a platform: hubspot, wordpress, blogger, build your own.
Learn to create basic graphics - a good tip that I took away, and something I have heard in another arena and an obvious weakness in my armor.
How often to post?  Once a week, keep content size and scope very small 3:1 rule, break up larger topics into a series, mix "how it works" to "how to do" - this ws pretty interesting too, because when I fail to post I see it as a failure but Craig seems to be saying to reduce the amount of content so you do not burn out.
What to write about?  Watch and listen to what others are interested about, write what you have already written about, what interests you, what other people are wondering about (Cloud anybody?)
Tuning your blog, pictures, sign up, latest/popular posts, charts, video - all great tips to take away!
SEO: be easy to be found, be the answer to the question, create a title as if solving a problem, use Google to suggest titles, repeat key words in your post, content is king - don't try to fool Google.
Make it enjoyable, spacing easier to read!
Search "inbound Marcus" for an ebook about the topic.

Analyzing Oracle Workflow Data for Increased System Performance - Me!

Right after lunch can be a difficult spot to be in, but I was pleasantly surprised when about 20 people showed up and seemed to be enjoying the session!  They even asked some really good questions which should give me some good ideas for the next version of this presentation.

OAUG Workflow SIG Meeting - Various (and Me!)

Check out the website http://workflowsig.communities.oaug.org/ for the presentation that John Peters put together!
We also had a visit from Oracle and they demoed the Mobile approval solution which was great!  I am thinking about trying to lead a project to get this going at work, that is how great it looks!!
Oh, and I am a Board Member of this SIG as well now!  I do not know what title or role, but I am there!

E-Business Suite R12: Application Lessons Learned for Support and Implementers - Me!

Even though there were about 100 people that had showed interest in this in the application, I was REALLY surprised when I had around 40 people show up for this session!  I did get time to add some new information to the presentation, even something I have not blogged about yet, and was able to cover all of the content in 46 minutes (obviously shooting for 45 so I was happy) with a lot of people writing MOS notes down or making notes about some of the project lessons that came from our experience (and did not have MOS notes)!

Deep Dive into the Internals of a SELECT Statement - Michaelwcunningham.com

I was really interested to get a lot more on this topic after the session I had the day before that was all talking about finding out when a parse is hard, soft, soft hard, or harder soft, if you are having issues running a SQL statement and while I did not get as much out of it as I thought, I really was inspired to start digging deeper into the internals!

Cursorttrace level 580, address <hash_value from v$sql>
Oradebug setmypid
Oradebug set library_cache 4
obj$, tab$, ind$, seg$, objauth$ - Data Dictionary information
10053 trace shows a lot of this data
ALTER SESSION SET EVENTS 'IMMEDIATE TRACE NAME TREEDUMP LEVEL 20679
ALTER SYSTEM DUMP DATAFILE 4 BLOCK 8531
x$bh is the buffer header structure

COLLABORATE16: Pre-Day + Day 1

After weather delays leaving Phoenix, due to thunderstorms over Las Vegas, I missed a few sessions I wanted to attend on Sunday but I luckily was able to attend fellow Upgrade SIG Art Dowd and then make the Meeting of the Members!  On Day 1 there was a lot to take in, so that has a much fuller download to share with you, but I am going to have to skim and give you the high level takeaways or MOS notes you should look up later - if you are an OAUG member look these presentations up later!  Not a member but interested in some of the things I posted?  Change that and sign up!

Upgrading to R12.2 - Lessons Learned and Tips That You Need to Know to be Successful - Art Dowd - o2works.com

Great point that there are 2 types of projects, technical and full "business-aligned", and there is an 8 piece plan to build a repeatable process for both of them.
269.1
461705.1
aaplcust.txt 889733.1
At least 3 iterations of upgrade before go live.
Add 50% time to previous 11i project for R12.
416699.1
12.2.2 is the Holy Grail of patching with 2 file systems - 1 run, 1 patch.
SYSTEM and SEED tablespaces double!
Going to the cloud?  Need to adopt SaaS and PaaS, and a full reimplementation.

General Session - Trends & Technologies Shaping Your Future

The big takeaway here was only about 20% of companies are going to the Cloud, and most of the rest are not due to security and cost reasons.

Linux/UNIX Tools for the Oracle DBA - Tim Gorman - @timothyjgorman

Why CLI?  GUI not supported, vendor support, automation and scripting.
Unixtools.com is a good resource.
Sar is really underneath what you see in OEM/TOAD!
Mpstat gives you information per CPU, can show a busy system for instance XTTS is single threaded no matter how parallel you make it - interesting!
Uptime and w give you uptime and user stats.
jstat shows JVM memory usage displays.
Dtrace.org is a free tool.

Architecting for the Cloud: Best Practices - Zeeshan Baig - @IamZeeshanBaig

What is Cloud computing?  gMail has been SaaS for a while we just didn't realize it at the time!
Hybrid, private, public, community - different cloud deployment models!
Core concepts for Cloud, elasticity - allows you to scale up and out!
Business benefits of cloud - low up front costs, in time infrastructure, efficient resource utilization, usage based cost, reduce time to market.
Technical benefits of Cloud - automation, auto-scaling, proactive scaling, efficient development lifecycle, DR and business continuity.
Design for failure - remove single of failure, design for automatic recovery, graceful failures, consistent backup and recovery strategy, don't fix - start a new instance, avoid stateful sessions.
Decouple components!
Elasticity + parallelization = WIN

Productivity Enhancing SQL*Plus Scripting Techniques - Bert Scalzo - @bertscalzo

set linesize 512 produces a larger file than set linesize 256!
set trimout on is different when going to the screen.
Do not forget about the BREAK or the COMPUTE commands.
Dynamic scripting is the most important technique where you can have SQL producing other SQL to run!!

Oracle Database Networking Basics - Eric Siglin - @ESiglin

What is a DB?  That is where we start, and if you do not know the answer go look it up.  :}
Access challenges - must be connected, logging into the host is impractical, security challenges with DB.
What is a client?  Anything that connects to a DB, even another DB!
Two ways to register performance stats: response time and throughput.
Shutting the listener down does nothing to current connections, only new connections - important to know!
Creating and destroying database session is one of the biggest things to ask the DB to do!
docs.oracle.com - Database Net Services Administrator's Guide (Part I: Understanding Oracle Net), Database High Availability Overview

OAUG E-Business Suite SysAdmin SIG Meeting - Various

Drew Chiaiese and David Heisler from Oracle joined us!
We went over and adopted the bylaws for the group and then I was put forward for Secretary of the SIG!
432.1
1939637.1
1584210.1
1581299.1 - 12.2 Information Center
1633974.2
793436.2 - Hot Topics
1580100.1 - MOS Accreditation

Arizona/New Mexico OAUG - Kickoff Meeting - Various (including Me!)

This was a really positive meeting!!  There were individuals in attendance which had run groups in both states before, so I think we will have a lot of good information about what works and does not so going forward we will be more successful!

The Bad One In Your Crop - SQL Tuning Analysis For DBAs - Martin Klier - @MartinKlierDBA

If you can do it, submit abstracts for the DOAG conference in Germany, but even if you do not do that make sure to follow the hashtag #DOAUG2016 later this year!
SQL -> Syntax -> Semantic -> Library Cache check -> Optimizer -> Execution is a hard parse!
Soft parse avoids the Optimizer because it has been found in the Library Cache.
Great story about bad weather affecting DB performance, and something I have seen happen in person (not with bad weather, we never have that in Arizona).
Bind peeking is a harder soft parse.
Before you tune, analysis is mandatory!
Starts with "What's the problem?"
His style is to simplify your toolset by using AWR/ statspack, SQL*Plus, SQLci, SQL Developer, dbms_xplan.display_cursor; being suspicious; looking thoroughly; having situational awareness; using intuition (over time you will get the right approach 80%); going down to the second, one hour has 3600 seconds which is a static and common measurement.
Finding the culprit (unfortunately this is where I had to step out and take a phone call, but I cannot to download the presentation and finish it!)

COLLABORATE16: How to follow along with the home game!

I've been quite busy the past few nights so no posts about what I've attended just yet, BUT if you want to play along at home you can always follow the #C16LV Twitter hashtag at home and get great content and commentary from the community while they are attending!  Hopefully I'll have time tomorrow night to transcribe my notes a bit for you to give you a few days of interesting factoids I picked up here and there!

My COLLABORATE16 schedule!

Are you going to OAUG's COLLABORATE16?  Awesome, me too!!  Here is my schedule of events, and I'm sure you'll be able to find me at many other times and places too.  :}

Sunday

Meeting of the OAUG Members - 4:45 PM - South Seas F - Obviously this is something for all the OAUG members and I'll be there, so it might be a good chance to catch me today!

Monday

Arizona/New Mexico OAUG Kickoff Meeting - 3:15 PM - Mariners AB - I'm the Chairman of this brand new Geo, and tomorrow is our first real meeting (outside of the several phone planning meetings we've had over the past few months)!

Tuesday

Analyzing Oracle Workflow Data for Increased System Performance - 1:00 PM - South Seas A - This is the standard bearer, but the first time I'm bringing it to COLLABORATE!

E-Business Suite R12: Application Lessons Learned for Support and Implementers - 3:30 PM - Breakers B - A "Best of COLLABORATE" from last year makes a return, maybe with a few new surprises in store!

Wednesday

OAUG Upgrade SIG Meeting - 9:15 AM - Reef F - I'm a Board Member of this SIG and will be helping to moderate the panel discussion!

R12.1.3 Workflow: Notification preferences are being set to DISABLED

The My Oracle Support article ID 1588209.1 for "Notification Preference Gets Set To DISABLED" appears to be from 2012 or 2013, but appears to still be relevant as there are several patches which need to be applied AND you can find a pattern in the Notification Mailer log files which can be monitored for!

R12.1.3 Assets: YTD depreciation is calculated wrong at year end while posting impairment

On EBS R12.1.3 when you get to year-end you might have to find out that Assets cannot be completed due to "YTD Depreciation Is Calculated Wrongly When Posting Impairment in the End of the Year" from MOS note ID 2119515.1 so why not apply the patch or test now just to make sure you do not find yourself in this situation right at year-end?

Oracle Linux: Windows AD or LDAP server cannot authenticate due to TLS error

While the My Oracle Support article "OL 6 & 7 - Unable to Authenticate to Windows AD or LDAP Server "Could not start TLS encryption. unknown error"" from ID 2109478.1 may not be relevant if you are not changing your configuration, you may have to know this when you decide to do an upgrade so check this out!

Weekend Learning: Enabling data encryption for Oracle Payments module in R12

If you have upgraded to R12, or have a plan to do so, make sure you read MOS document "How To Enable Oracle Payments Data Encryption Functionality" from document ID 1301337.1 to learn how to get on the middle tier, create an Oracle Wallet .p12 file, and what concurrent requests you need to be running as well depending on what profile options you choose for the encryption method.

Weekend Learning: Background information on using 4k redo logs on Flash and SSD-based storage devices

Check out MOS document "Using 4k Redo Logs on Flash and SSD-based Storage" from note 1681266.1 to get details about using 4k storage media like Flash and SSD to see how they can be logically setup or used in hybrid situations to avoid misaligned I/O issues!

11gR2: Connections fail with ORA-12560 while SSL_VERSION is set to TLS 1.1 or 1.2

If you are getting ready to upgrade to 11.2.0.4 or if you are on that database version and need to change TLS settings, you really need to read My Oracle Support document "11.2.0.4 Connections Fail With ORA-12560 When Using TLS 1.1 or 1.2 (By Setting SSL_VERSION In Sqlnet.ora)" as a bundle patch needs to be applied to get the connections working!

Exadata: Flash Cache Compression on X3 and X4 Storage Servers causing disk drive failures

Check what version of software you have on your Storage Servers immediately due to the bug listed in "(EX28) High risk of data loss on X3 or X4 Exadata storage when flash compression is enabled and running late 2015 or early 2016 software release" MOS article ID 2115005.1 which currently has NO solution!  There is a workaround listed, but that is turning off the Flash Cache Compression which will likely negatively affect the performance of your Exadata application and Oracle gives some great advice about proceeding with caution if you are planning upgrading!

R12.2.4 Payables: Payments form has performance issue

I have talked about XLA slowness in Payables before, but the My Oracle Support note "R12: AP: Performance Issue With Payments Form (APXPAWKB)" from article 2117534.1 has no hooks into XLA but still has a performance issue due to indexes that appear to be missing or incomplete on AP_INVOICES_ALL!

R12.2.4 Receivables: Create Accounting errors due to imbalanced CM application distributions

Although MOS document "Create Accounting Completed With Error (319) Unbalanced Distributions of CM Application" from article ID 2116697.1 does not give you an exact issue or resolution, it may help you to build some proactive alerting around an imbalance in credit and debit entries in AR_DISTRIBUTIONS_ALL.

Backups can completely age out of the Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance

With a name like Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, one would think every scenario had been thought of which Oracle would prevent against right?  Well not so fast!  Read the article on MOS "(RA10) Bug 22378407 : BACKUPS WILL AGE OUT COMPLETELY IF ONE STOPS CREATING THEM" from note ID 2112880.1 which seems to be half process issue, and half bug since it doesn't prevent this from happening!

Weekend Learning: Required/recommended bundle patches and patch sets for OBIEE 11g

If you are running an Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition platform do yourself a favor and add the article "OBIEE 11g: Required and Recommended Bundle Patches and Patch Sets" to your favorites list in MOS via document ID 1488475.1 to keep on top of changes!!