Oracloid Blog

Following my presentation at InSycn09 about Oracle E-Business Suite high availability, I gave a few minutes interview to a fellow Oracle tweeter here in Sydney and member of the team behind The Red Room blog — Gareth Llewellyn.

I should say that my dedication to the interview was very strong :) and you will believe me if I tell you that during that time the party in the InSync09 exhibition hall was already in the full swing. Thanks to Gareth, the interview is now on Youtube and if you go there directly, you can watch in HD.
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What: Sydney Oracle Meetup #3 - Focus on E-Business Suite + Oracle/Sun deal
When: April 28, 2009 5:30 PM
Where: As usual - Sydney Mechanics School of Art
How: just register at the SOM website.

We have to limit the number of people to 40 this time so make sure you RSVP timely!

We are gathering at 5:30pm and technical goodies are starting at 6pm so use this time to catch up with other members. We should finish by 8:30pm including a beaks and some post follow up. The presentation schedule is a bit floating this time.

As usual, we should have some pizza and beverages facilitating seamless peer networking. ;-)

In addition to the main topic, we plan to have some overview of Oracle / Sun deal and share what everyone thinks about it + report from the InSync09 conference. We will talk a bit about MySQL as it becomes Oracle technology now.

Even tough this meetup’s technical content is built around Oracle E-Business, it’s not intended to be purely for Oracle Apps DBA’s and should be attractive to anybody interested to learn how this product is built including DBA’s, Architects and Developers.

We have one presenter for the evening - Jurijs Velikanovs. Jurijs is an Oracle Certified Master (one of the first OCM’s in the world) and has been working with Oracle E-Business Suite since 2001. He worked with installations of 1+TB in size and up to 6 nodes Oracle RAC on the back-end. Jurijs has been involved into one of the first EBS/RAC implementations and numerous infrastructure upgrade projects.

Oracle e-Business Suite technical components overview, architecture, DBA challenges and future directions.

Oracle E-Business Suite (OEBS) is the Oracle’s flagman applications set covering almost every business area of a modern enterprise. Over its long history, OEBS has gone through many changes and today leverages many Oracle technlogies such as RDBMS, Application Servers, Forms, Reports, Discoverer and etc.

We are going to divide the session in three parts:

• Currently most popular version (11i) overview and DBA-s’ and Architects’ challenges
• Newest version review (R12) - most important changes and technical improvements
• Future technical development (Project Fusion). What to expect from next releases?

Questions to be answered:

• Technical components the product consist of
• Possible architectures to meet different load and security requirements
• Typical problems Apps DBA face and possible solutions

I enjoyed InSync09 conference and the networking opportunities there — great place to meet bunch of good old friends and make some new ones. The content of the presentations and direction where Oracle is going to provided some interesting food for thoughts on Oracle’s strategy and how it’s going to make money with all those acquisitions they’ve done recently including current Oracle-Sun deal.

My take now is that Oracle’s focus is integration of all those products. It’s absolutely clear that Oracle won’t be able to merge so many different product lines together. It’s difficult and time consuming task and customers often suffer during this transition process. Oracle does not want its customer suffer — it’s the best way to shrink their customer base.
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It’s the second day of the InSync09 conference in Sydney — the first large-scale conference in Australia that combined user of all Oracle applications such as E-Business Suite, Hyperion, Siebel and all others that Oracle has bought in the last years. There is quite a bit of sessions on SOA and Fusion technology.

Official number of attendees is 550 but it definitely feels smaller. Perhaps, because quite a number attending only one of two days.

There are very few sessions going into technical details and I think my presentation yesterday was as technical as it could get at this conference even though it was more “shallow” than my typical presentations. My talk was titled “Making Oracle E-Business Suite Highly Available”. The idea of the session was to advocate for being reasonable when implementing HA solutions.
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InSync09 is the first conference in Australia focused on Oracle applications which in the past few years multiplied immensely in numbers — e-Business Suite, JD Edwards, JD Edwards, Hyperion, Siebel, BEA, PeopleSoft. There is also significant focus on SOA.

I submitted couple abstracts and one of them has been accepted so if you are attending InSync09 next week then I’ll see you there! Make you you find me to say hello — they plan to have quite a crows there with up to 500 people.

Few days ago, I have put together the Quick Install Guide for Oracle 10g Release 2 on Mac OS X Leopard (Intel). I did mention that it would be cool to get APEX working as well but, apparently, APEX isn’t supposed to be running on Oracle 10g Release 2 Database on OS X as few people pointed our on the blogs.

Well, the release notes says that Oracle Application Express is not supported and I would imagine that it’s because Oracle HTTP Server is not supported either. I’m not a frequent user of APEX but I know that APEX 3.2 is not supposed to be configured in Oracle 10g Database using Embedded PL/SQL Gateway. However, looks like few people did manage to run APEX on 10g using Embedded PL/SQL Gateway. For example, Jeff Kemp has some APEX on 10g hints that I perused.

Long story short, I was able to install APEX successfully using the native Mac OS X Oracle 10g Database and here is how…
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I’m on the train coming back from Sydney SQL Server User Group April 2009 meeting — SQL Server 2008 Security Deep Dive by Peter Ward. The event is held at the same venue where I organize Sydney Oracle Meetups (actually, it’s another way around — I learned about this place by attending the previous SSUG meeting) and it’s the top quality venue especially for the money they charge.

The presentation in two parts was exactly what an Oracle DBA like me would need to have a peek into the security territory of SQL Server. I was afraid it would be really “deep dive” and assumed lots of SQL Server knowledge but I was actually fine. I think it would be cool to have a full day real deep dive and looking at what Peter was talking about, I’m convinced that he could keep going further and further into details should we give him more time.

I learned that SQL Server security model is somewhat complex and it’s still not clear for me what is what in all these server logins, database users, schemas and etc. are doing and what are relationships between them but, again, there is just an Oracle DBA inside me. As David Lean, the voice of Microsoft there, explained — it’s historical. Indeed, SQL Server must be old enough now to have some history! ;-)

I was very surprised that Oracle released Oracle Database for Mac OSX, especially, version 10g now that 11g has been out for almost 2 years. Well, I guess Oracle wanted to please Mac users expecting things just work and decided that good proved 10g is the way to go. On the other hand, we’ve been supporting 11g in production for quite a while and I must say it’s much better quality compare to 10g when it came out. I’m pretty sure there was a significant customer that influenced that decision — interesting who might that be?

Anyway, there is no quick install guide for OS X but only a standard Oracle® Database Installation Guide 10g Release 2 (10.2) for Apple Mac OS X (Intel). It’s fine but if you want to install Oracle on your MacBook and not for production use then you might take some shortcuts and follow a quick instructions so I gathered my notes while installing just released Oracle Database 10.2.0.4 on my MacBook and this is what you see now.

Before I get to the announcement of the next Sydney Oracle Meetup, let me share the experience from the the Very First SOM that took place yesterday. I think I can sum it up as one word — awesome!

My schedule was a bit crazy recently and I was afraid I could forget something important under time pressure (it always happens to me). In the end, I did forget few things (like napkins and power adapter for my MacBook) but it was all resolved.

Thanks to Andre Araujo for helping me to carry some of the required “ingredients”. One of the attendees was there a bit early so we’d got additional help preparing the room (thanks Jack). As we just cracked the first beers and pizzas, people started arriving and we had nice 30 minutes of warm up.

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