ORACLENERD

OBIEE and Source Control?

2010-02-08T23:43:00.004-05:00

One very difficult aspect of using OBIEE (or APEX for that matter) is that it doesn't lend itself very well to source control.

There is one RPD (metadata) file in use at any given time. Changes to this environment will affect anyone using or developing on the presentation server layer (Dashboards/Answers/etc).

For the web catalog (Answers/Dashboards/Prompts/etc) you can make changes, but again, it will affect anyone who is also using the tool. If you want to tweak a report that has prompts or filters, you need to save everything off to your own folder in order to work on it or risk colliding with others or worse, messing up the report beyond repair (also known as FUBAR).

Developers usually need to break things to fix them and giving them an environment where they can do this (also known as tinkering), without repercussions, should be high on the list of must-haves.

Inspired by a meeting I attended last week and Jake's recent welcoming of VirtualBox into the Oracle fold, I decided to think (yikes) my way through a possible solution.

After the meeting last week, I was convinced I could build an environment using subversion as the source control tool. Tie that in with Jira, Fisheye and ultimately Bamboo and you'd have a pretty sweet environment to work in. How to do it though?

1. Set up source control. SVN is free and runs on Linux. Free.
2. Convince a multitude of developers to install and configure OBIEE on their own workstations. Yeah...not so sure about that. I accidentally said in that meeting, "I don't know a single, good developer who doesn't have a local install of Oracle (the database)" May have been just a tad hyperbolic...I like to tinker and appreciate those environments which allow me to do so. Having a local sandbox has been indispensable for me.
3. Not sure where or what 3 is. That's where I got hung up...until reading Jake's post.

How about this then?

1. No subversion (for the time being).
2. Virtualize the development environment.
3. Hand out the VDIs to the developers, and let them run with it. When they make changes, they can promote them through the usual channels. Once those changes are accepted/merged with the development environment, a new snapshot is taken and distributed.

Having the snapshot of dev is the key I think. Those who don't like to tinker, who just like to get their job done, won't have to worry about configuring their environment. They'll just fire up the VM and do their work. For those that do like to tinker, they can fiddle with the VM as much as they want without fear of breaking things for everyone else. If they need a fresh start, just get the original VDI and go crazy again.

This hasn't been completely thought at (if you couldn't tell). I haven't considered passwords or other such sensitive data. It sounds good in my head though. What's the worst that could happen?

Random Things: Volume #13

2010-02-08T15:49:00.004-05:00

A brief respite for me...I get to work remotely this week.

Admittedly I have gotten into the habit, finally, of traveling, so it's a little strange to be home (never thought I would say that). There is no shortage of respect from me for those who travel all the time. It's a hard life.

OBIEE Performance
Our Usage Tracking reports are a tad slow and I've been looking into the logs trying to decipher them. Unlike the database which has a multitude of resources, OBIEE has hardly any. Christian did point me to this Mark Rittman article, which is good, but not great (not because the author is lacking...there just isn't that much to go on). rnm1978 suggested MOS, but I don't have access right now...besides, it seems to be having problems again anyway.

While I'm on the subject of performance and rnm1978, I should link up to this article which highlights 3 recent posts by Cary Millsap. All 3 are excellent reads and require your immediate attention.

Kate
The reason I am home this week is so that I can go to a Doctor's visit with Kate. We finally found a place where they might be able to help diagnose her. Most of her doctors have been more concerned with keeping her alive (healthy) and haven't worried too much about her developmental delays (still not talking...but she can sign "daddy"). Anyway, the place is called The Tridas Center and we're excited/nervous. Excited about finding her better help and nervous about the possibilities (more specifically, what a diagnosis would mean).

PRIMARY KEY and NOT NULL

2010-02-03T19:46:00.003-05:00

I've seen this far too often. A table with a primary key (good) and a check constraint (NOT NULL) on the same column.

Stop doing it. Watch.

CREATE TABLE t
(
  id NUMBER
    CONSTRAINT pk_id PRIMARY KEY
);

SH@I_HAVE_NO_IDEA>INSERT INTO t ( id ) VALUES ( 1 );

1 row created.

Elapsed: 00:00:00.33
SH@I_HAVE_NO_IDEA>INSERT INTO t ( id ) VALUES ( NULL );
INSERT INTO t ( id ) VALUES ( NULL )
                              *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01400: cannot insert NULL into ("SH"."T"."ID")

As HillbillyToad said,

It is better than no constraint, that's for sure. The heart was in the right place...

TNS-12533: TNS:illegal ADDRESS parameters

2010-02-02T09:16:00.000-05:00

I kept receiving this error recently but until today, never bothered to investigate it. To get around it, I would just comment out the bottom half (where the problem was) of the tnsnames file.

Today I had enough.

I removed all but the top most entry, saved the file and did a tnsping <first_entry>.

OK (40 msec)

I added in the second entry, tnsping <second_entry>

OK (210 msec)

I added in the third entry

TNS-12533: TNS:illegal ADDRESS parameters

Removed it.

Success.

WTF?

 TESTING = 
  (DESCRIPTION = 
    (ADDRESS = 
      (PROTOCOL = TCP)
      (HOST = localhost)
      (PORT = 1521)
    )
    (CONNECT_DATA = 
      (SERVICE_NAME = TESTING)
    )
  )

It's probably difficult to see...maybe a picture would do better.

How about now?

Still don't see it?

I almost gave up as well.

This should help.

A freaking space? Really? 8+ years and this is the very first time I am seeing this...seems strange I haven't encountered this before.

Database Table Size

2010-02-01T11:47:00.004-05:00

I've always wondered how big a table is...up until recently I depended on the DBAs to retrieve such information for me.

Thanks to my good, and very helpful, friend, Mr. Thomas Roach, I no longer have to wait or bother the DBAs.

%_SEGMENTS contains a column called BYTES. Use this column to determine the size of your table, with just a little math.

SELECT segment_name, SUM( bytes ) / 1024 / 1024 mb
FROM user_segments
GROUP BY segment_name
ORDER BY 1
/

SEGMENT_NAME                           MB
------------------------------ ----------
BMP_DIVNBR_CUST                    13.375
BMP_DIVNBR_JOINFACT               37.0625
BMP_DIVNBR_PROD                    13.375
BMP_DIVNBR_SALES                  78.6875
CUST                                  940
DIV                                  .125
IDX_CUSTSKDIVNBR_SALES          2676.6875
IDX_PRODSKDIVNBR_SALES          2701.6875
JOIN_FACT                        4298.125
PIM                                   312
PK_DIVSK                             .125
PK_PIMSK                                8
PK_TMSK                               .25
PROD                            2274.4375
SALES                          116122.375
TIME                                 .875
UQ_CUSTSKDIVNBR_CUST               40.125
UQ_PRODSKDIVNBR_PROD                  144

There's a plethora of these scripts out in the wild...but I was originally inspired by helping Mr. Neil Kodner out back in November (which I refer to as the "missing" month). Read his take on it here.

Make Money Blogging

2010-01-30T19:14:00.003-05:00

Yeah, it's pretty much a futile effort, but hey, I've been paid by Google.

Only 430 posts. I think that puts me at less than $0.40 a post. 28 months would come out to less than $4 a month.

OBIEE: ORA-12154 could not resolve connect identifier

2010-01-27T00:36:00.003-05:00

I'm playing around with OBIEE using the SH schema (sample schema). I've imported the tables successfully, created the logical and presentation layer when I decided to change the driver from ODBC 3.5 to the OCI driver. When I went to run a simple report to test the Times dimension, I received this:

OK, no worries.

I tried to update the row count through the Administration tool and got this:

Barnacles.

So I begin to troubleshoot. First though, here's the setup.

OS: Windows Vista Ultimate
Database: 10gR2 (local)
OBIEE: 10.1.3.4 (local)

There is no other Oracle software running on the machine.

First I went to Google. Nothing really exciting there, but it did remind me of the OBIEE forums (which I posted to for the first time yesterday). So I did a search there.

Reading through a couple of posts confirmed what I had done.
1. tnsping my local database. Check.
2. Connect to the local database via SQL*Plus. Check.
3. Check environment variables. TNS_ADMIN is setup to point to my one and only tnsnames.ora file on the machine.

Hold up...what about the PATH variable? I've seen before, in my millions of local installations in Windows, where the order of paths will affect how certain things work. Here's what mine looked like (hard returns added for readability):

C:\oracle\bin;
C:\OracleBI\server\Bin;
C:\OracleBI\web\bin;
C:\OracleBI\web\catalogmanager;
C:\OracleBI\SQLAnywhere;
C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_17\bin;
%SystemRoot%\system32;
%SystemRoot%;
%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem

Hmmm...I wonder if having the database path first is causing this? Why would it though? OBIEE doesn't have it's own tnsnames.ora...so it shouldn't, right? I moved c:\oracle\bin behind the final OBIEE path. Guess what? I was able to connect.

I'm not sure exactly why this happened, I wasn't able (or was just too lazy) to find the exact reason in the forums (I'm sure Christian or Robin will leave me a note), but it worked. Yeah for me.

OBIEE: Tooltips in Answers

2010-01-25T22:36:00.003-05:00

The title was OBIEE: Hack The Gibson...I didn't hack the Gibson nor I am I 733t.

But I did manage this little trick.

I have involved myself in a situation where we don't change the column names in either the logical or presentation layer. Instead, we use a database (Oracle) table and pull in the values using a row-wise repository variable.

I won't get into all that, but I will demonstrate the basics.

First off, in the Administration tool, open up the properties of a column, I'm using PROD_NAME from the SH schema PRODUCTS table.

Check the "Custom display name" and just leave the default value. Then enter in some text into the Description box...doesn't matter what it is.

You can see that the text I put into the Description box matches that in the tooltip from Answers.

Now comes the fun part, where the real hacking begins.

There are 2 parts to get this accomplished:
1. You need to add the reference to the javascript file
2. You need to change the javascript function used by OBIEE to accomodate the call

Neither one of those is easy...especially so for the uninitiated.

I'll start with #2. Looking at the page source for that frame, I found a bunch of javascript references. Of particular note was treeutility.js. Once I found the file which is located in <BI_HOME>/oc4j_bin/j2ee/home/applications/analytics/analytics/res/b_mozilla

At approximately line 1359 you'll see this:

strBuf.append(this.getSelectHtml() + " title='" + saw.encodeHTMLAttrValue(this.getToolTip()) + "'>"

I know enough to be dangerous naturally.

The BoxOver javascript call is pretty simple, you just need to add "parameters" to the title attribute.

Something along the lines of:

header=[Description] body=[some text goes here]

So just add those to the javascript function above and let OBIEE, with it's call to saw.encodeHTMLAttrValue(this.getToolTip()), do its work.

Now the fun part, how do you get that reference to the javascript file to show up? This is how you normally reference a javascript file in HTML

<script language="JavaScript" src="res/b_mozilla/browserdom.js"></script>

How to add that to the template is the hard part (for me anyway).

I "grepped" the source code in the <BI_HOME> for treeutility.js. I got 3 hits back:
<BI_HOME>\web\msgdb\messages\deliverstemplate.xml
<BI_HOME>\web\msgdb\messages\commonuitemplates.xml
<BI_HOME>\web\msgdb\messages\criteriatemplates.xml

Despite the stern warnings not to edit those files, I monkeyed with them anyway. Wherever I found the reference to treeutility.js, I added another line referencing boxover.js. Stopped the BI Server and BI Presentation Server, cleared the browser cache and restarted.

Nothing.

After searching the OBIEE forums, I found a link to these (HTML) documents which talked about changing the styles and skin for the Presentation layer. In particular, this one.

To make a really, really, really long story short, I added a file to the customMessages folder (which I had to create) underneath my language (l_en), called custommessages.xml.

The contents of that folder are as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<WebMessageTables>
  <!--WebMessageTable lang="en-us" system="CriteriaTemplates" table="Messages">
    <WebMessage name="kuiFunctionSelectorHead">
      <HTML><script language="javascript" src="/analytics/res/b_mozilla/boxover.js"/></HTML>
    </WebMessage>
  </WebMessageTable>
  <WebMessageTable name="deliversTemplates" translate="no">
    <WebMessage name="kuiDeliversIBotEditorHead">
      <HTML><script language="javascript" src="/analytics/res/b_mozilla/boxover.js"/></HTML>
    </WebMessage>
  </WebMessageTable>
  <WebMessageTable lang="en-us" system="CommonUITemplates" table="Messages">
    <WebMessage name="kuiBrowserDialogHead">
      <HTML><script language="javascript" src="/analytics/res/b_mozilla/boxover.js"/></HTML>
    </WebMessage>   
  </WebMessageTable-->
  <WebMessageTable lang="en-us" system="TreeViewSys" table="Messages">
    <WebMessage name="kmsgTreeImageMap">
      <HTML><script language="JavaScript" src="res/b_mozilla/boxover.js"/></HTML>
    </WebMessage>   
  </WebMessageTable>
</WebMessageTables>

Note that the first 3 attempts are commented out, so I only really need that last WebMessageTable entry.

One thing I still need to resolve though, is that my bullet points disappeared (first screenshot above). But...I got what I needed and I can tinker a bit more to get the desired results.

Before doing this on your production system, please ensure that you are allowed to modify the supplied javascript files. The custommessages.xml file follows the guidelines set forth, so I think that's safe, just not sure about the javascript.

The Long Drive Home

2010-01-23T23:35:00.003-05:00

So I am starting to understand why people who travel don't have a lot of time.

For the past 3 weeks I have driven back and forth to Greenville, SC, a round trip of 1200 miles. That's 600 miles on Sunday and 600 miles on Thursday. My record so far is 7 hours and 45 minutes, approximately 75 MPH.

Tomorrow I will be flying and will be there in 1.5 hours. Much better.

My reasoning for driving is multi-fold:
1. I'm not in the habit of flying thus maintain a tad bit of fear at the prospect. I know it's not rational...
2. 4 trips in a month comes out to about $3,000, I can't float that kind of money now. Driving saves me about $400 a week in air travel and about $250 a week in car rental. Driving costs about $120 round trip in gas.
3. Driving pays. Current federal rate is 0.55/mile. 1200 miles = $660. Subtract that from $120 and I am ahead $540. Multiply that by 4 weeks and I'm at about $2,000.

One thing I did not take into account is the exhaustion factor. When I get home, I don't want to do a thing and just dread Sunday creeping up. Despite having a driving buddy coming home this past Thursday, I slept pretty much all day Friday. Today I was a slug too. I'm not much use to my kids in that state.

So I'm going to fly. I nice early morning flight won't bother me much as I will still be too tired to think too much about being scared. Perfect. Sucks that I have to leave so early in the morning, but what can you do?

I still can't float the money to do this every week, so I'm going to try and rotate the schedule, fly, drive and beg for a week of remote work to ease the burden.

Any tips or tricks for traveling out there? I'm using TripIt, which is nice to keep everything in one place. What else?

OBIEE: Connect to Remote RPD

2010-01-18T19:41:00.002-05:00

There is occasion were you will not have physical access to the machine which hosts your RPD.

How to connect?

First create a new ODBC Data Source, you can find that in Control Panel --> Administrative Tools

Choose the System DSN tab

Click on Add

Then select the BI Server driver

You'll be prompted with this:

For name enter "remote_rpd", for server, select the location of your other server, in my case, it's XP

Enter the username and password to the remote RPD (if you haven't changed anything, it's Administrator/Administrator)

Go ahead and accept the defaults

You should now see "remote_rpd" in your list of data sources

Finally, open up your BI Administration tool and you should see "remote_rpd" in your list

Enter the password and voila! You are in.

Random Things: Volume #12

2010-01-15T09:33:00.003-05:00

Driving
The last 2 weeks I have been driving back and forth to Greenville, SC. Round trip at 1200 miles. I leave Sunday at noon and return on Thursday night at 10. Yesterday I couldn't keep my eyes open, despite 2 5 hour energy drinks and a bottle of Mountain Dew. Had to pull over for a nap.

Consulting
I have to say being a consultant is fun for a number of reasons.
1. I get to meet a lot of different people.
2. I get to experience different IT shops and how they work.
3. I don't necessarily have to prove myself every single time.
4. I get to eat out more often

It's also bad for a number of reasons.
1. Time away from family.
2. I get to eat out more often
3. I get to eat out more often

I definitely need to find a routine. Next week should allow me to begin that search as I will be the only one (from my company) there...temptation(s) (read: eating out) is reduced by 100%.

The hotel I originally stayed at had a stationary bike. The second one did not. I'm trying to get back into the first, but they're booked. My charm wasn't enough to convince them to open up a room...but they did say I could use their gym.

Work
I'm currently working with OBIEE metadata (rpd) and reporting (presentation services). Soon to be extending that to OBIA, the pre-built DW/BI solutions for EBS, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards.

It's difficult for me to stay out of the database though. I constantly want to push as much as I can into it.

The good thing is that I am getting serious exposure to the complete lifecycle of data. OLTP --> ETL --> DW --> Reporting

(Completely) Random
I continue to be amazed at the amount of help available out there...you just need to find it. My old friend Tom was helping me out earlier this week. Kellyn has offered to help me out with something else. Christian has promised to send me his NexusOne (ok, I have to send it to him after I receive it...maybe)

I love the 'tubes.

Ubuntu and Cisco VPN

2010-01-13T00:04:00.003-05:00

As a consultant I often have to VPN into a client's network and do some work. Up until today, I wasn't aware of a Cisco client for Ubuntu (9.10), so I would fire up my Windows Vista Ultimate VM, install Cisco and log in.

Only Windows Vista Ultimate doesn't play very nicely with the older versions of the Cisco VPN client (pre 5.0). Naturally (stop laughing), I found my old version of Windows XP, booted it up, installed Cisco and connected. Fun huh? It's amazing how resourceful we can be sometimes...

I had to deal with this because I "lost" my Windows image today. By lost I mean I couldn't recover it. I'm still not sure what happened, but it was some kind of invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character error. The image just disappeared. I tried changing my LANG variable to en_US, but that didn't seem to do any good. I'm not really sure what happened.

Anyway, I found vpnc and began to try and connect. That's no easy task for the likes of me (as you well know).

Just running vpnc, I was prompted for the following:

chet@cdj-laptop:~$ vpnc
Enter IPSec gateway address: vpn.oraclenerd.com
Enter IPSec ID for vpn.oraclenerd.com: something
Enter IPSec secret for something@vpn.oraclenerd.com: 
Enter username for vpn.oraclenerd.com: chet
Enter password for chet@vpn.oraclenerd.com: 
vpnc: unknown host `vpn.oraclenerd.com'

I guessed at the first 2, username and password are no brainers...even for me.

So I looked at the help file.

OK.

gateway? that's vpn.oraclenerd.com
id? defined as your group name. I opened up the connection properties of the Cisco client and found the group name, NERDVPN

and then in the help file there are 2 options for the group password, one in clear text and one obfuscated...but it said "config file only"

  (configfile only option) 
      your group password (cleartext)
  conf-variable: IPSec secret 

  (configfile only option) 
      your group password (obfuscated)
  conf-variable: IPSec obfuscated secret

So I created a file .vpnconfig and put it in the root directory (I was just testing). Here are the contents:

IPSec gateway vpn.oraclenerd.com
IPSec ID NERDVPN
IPSec obfuscated secret ASDFLKJUW3ROUOIUALKJQAEWROIR3379273AFJI;LKQJ3E
Xauth username chet

Then I ran

root@cdj-laptop:/home/chet# vpnc /.vpnconfig
Enter password for chet@vpn.oraclenerd.com: 
VPNC started in background (pid: 3702)...

Voila! I'm connected. Time to do some work.

Note that I did this as root. I'm still figuring out the security aspects of Linux so I'll leave that part up to you. I'd rather not advise you to

chmod ugo+rwx / -R

many of you would be very angry with me for suggesting such a thing...

Dynamic Single Row Query

2010-01-10T21:36:00.003-05:00

Once in awhile doing analysis, I'd like to see the count from each table, just to get an idea of how much data I am working with. Of course this doesn't measure width, but it is a metric.

Of course I could go through and write a SELECT COUNT(*) from every table, that works if there are like 4 tables. Anything more and...well it sucks.

Yes, I could gather stats on the schema and then reference NUM_ROWS, but this is an occasion where I don't have the necessary privileges.

I've been trying to do this for years, with no luck, until yesterday. Typically I would do something like this:

DECLARE
  l_count INTEGER;
  l_sql VARCHAR2(200);
BEGIN
  FOR i IN ( SELECT table_name
             FROM dba_tables
             WHERE owner = 'SYSTEM' ) 
  LOOP
    l_sql := 'SELECT COUNT(*) INTO :1 FROM SYSTEM.' || i.table_name;
    EXECUTE IMMEDIATE l_sql USING l_count, i.table_name;
    dbms_output.put_line( i.table_name || '-' || l_count );         
  END LOOP;
END;
/

Which would of course would give me this:

DECLARE
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01745: invalid host/bind variable name
ORA-06512: at line 10

Only now did I realize a fatal flaw with that...I was trying to bind the variable into the string, which would obviously never work.

For whatever reason, this time I decided to research it. I came across Flavio Cassetta's site and this post, SQL Error: ORA-01745: invalid host/bind variable namI'll skip a few iterations and get to the final product (because I went through this exercise on Friday night and quite honestly, don't remember all the permutations).

SET SERVEROUTPUT ON

DECLARE
  l_count INTEGER;
  l_table VARCHAR2(61);
BEGIN
  FOR i IN ( SELECT table_name
             FROM dba_tables
             WHERE owner = 'SYSTEM' ) 
  LOOP
    l_table := 'SYSTEM.' || i.table_name;
    EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ' || l_table INTO l_count;
    dbms_output.put_line( l_table || '-' || l_count );         
  END LOOP;
END;
/

...snip
SYSTEM.LOGMNR_USER$-0
SYSTEM.LOGMNR_OBJ$-0
SYSTEM.LOGMNR_DICTIONARY$-0
SYSTEM.LOGMNR_DICTSTATE$-0
SYSTEM.OL$NODES-0
SYSTEM.OL$HINTS-0
SYSTEM.OL$-0

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Done.

EBS Oracle VM Templates

2010-01-07T23:25:00.003-05:00

OK, now I am angry.

The other day I emailed the Steven Chan, he's the Senior Director at Oracle in Applications Technology Integration, Oracle E-Business Suite Development, about The EBS Challenge. Just a courtesy thing, I wasn't sure if he had seen it or not.

Well, today he wrote me back...

And what did he tell me?

He told me about two recent, and by recent I mean December...you know...about the time I started this whole saga of installing EBS, posts of his.

Actually, I'm not sure who I am more made at, him or John. I suppose I could excuse Steven since we have never interacted before...but John? Are you telling me John didn't know about this? John knew the pain I was going through just to create the stupid 300 GB VDI. John knew!

I can come to no other conclusion than John purposely tortured me. I hate you now John.

Alright...that might be a little harsh. Wait...no, it's not harsh at all. Yes it is.

If you don't feel like going through this exercise yourself, here is the easy way out:

--E-Business Suite 12.1.1 Templates for Oracle VM Now Available
--Using Oracle VM with Oracle E-Business Suite Virtualization Kit

Thanks John...we're not friends anymore. :)

EBS Install Guide - Part 4

2010-01-04T14:00:00.000-05:00

By John Piwowar [ blog | twitter ]

This is the fourth and final post in the "Installing E-Business Suite" series, where we'll take a quick look at the GUI. As with the command line interface, going into deep detail would take more time and space than is practical, but I'll try to present some of the high points. I'll close with a final list of useful references for EBS administrators, and then return you to you regularly scheduled oraclenerd programming. Thanks again, Chet!

Part 1 --> Part 2 --> Part 3 --> Part 4

The Navigator
After logging in to Oracle Applications (you remember that from the end of Part 2, right?), you'll be presented with the Navigator. Depending on the responsibilities granted to your user, the length of the list in the left column of the Navigator will vary. When connected as SYSADMIN, you'll most often be interested in the "System Administrator" and "System Administration" responsibilities. Clicking a responsibility will populate the center column of the Navigator with the functions assigned to that responsibility, and clicking one of those functions will take you to that function, either in the HTML interface or the Forms interface. As shown in the screenshot below, the small icons next to the links indicate whether a link will launch Oracle Forms or just take you to another HTML page. To the right of the two Navigator columns is the list of Favorites, which can be especially handy if you've been granted a lot of responsibilities and can't be bothered to remember which responsibility provides your most frequently-used functions.

The SYSADMIN user offers access to a wide variety of responsibilities and functions, particularly in the Vision instance. As you might expect, SYSADMIN also has "superpowers:" some responsibilities offer expanded functionality only to the SYSADMIN user. If you're interested in seeing what a more common, but still fairly powerful, user looks like, you can log in as one of the following users: MFG, OPERATIONS, SERVICES, MRC, or HRMS. These users are seeded in the Vision instance with the password 'welcome'.

The forms interface
EBS has been evolving to use a more HTML- and Javascript-based UI, but a large proportion of the end-user functionality (and some crucial administrative functions) are presented via Oracle Forms. When you click on a link for a function that is handled by forms, Java will launch the Forms interface for you. It really, really helps in this case to be running on a supported Java+Browser+Operating System combination (Linux users take note: Oracle does not currently plan to certify Linux desktop OS versions to run EBS clients). In addition, make sure that you've either disabled your browser's popup blockers, or added your EBS server to your popup blocker's whitelist, otherwise Forms may fail to launch and you might mistakenly conclude that they're broken. Here's a quick demo of the start of the Forms interface, so you know what to expect. I chose the "System Profile Options" form for convenience, not because it's super-important...though it's certainly a normal amount of important:

Click appropriate link in the Navigator (or, as in this case, the Favorites list...yay, laziness!). A new browser window or tab will open, displaying a Forms servlet launcher. Depending on your browser's security settings, you may be asked a few questions about whether you want your EBS server to be allowed to communicate with your browser. I've found Safari to be particularly persnickety about this.

One of the browser windows (or tabs) that will open during the launch of Forms contains a "Do not close this window" warning. Hint: they're not kidding. Make sure it stays open for the duration of your Forms session.

After a bit of waiting and spawning those extra browser windows, you should get a view of the Forms interface. It'll probably try to take over all of your screen real estate (at least it does on my laptop), so it'll be impossible to miss:

A few things to note:

The Forms function you selected may be specific enough to require a series of sub-forms, in which case you'll see parent forms open underneath.
As with the web interface, there's a Navigator form, with all of the functions available to the current responsibility. If you select the Navigator form, the little "top hat" icon will become active, and you can switch to a new responsibility.
You can bask in the warm, comfortable nostalgia of desktop-app-like "File, Edit, Tools, etc" menu system.
If you use the Navigator to select a function that is HTML-based, you'll be popped back out into your browser. It might come as a surprise the first few times, but you'll get used to it. ;-)
If you close the Navigator window, you'll be asked to confirm that you want to exit Oracle Applications

Diagnostics
Oracle makes it easy to collect a lot of diagnostic information about the various EBS applications modules and tech stack components. A lot of the diagnostic test output can be packaged up and shipped to Oracle Support to support SR resolution. I've also been able to resolve issues on my own using Diagnostics that I might otherwise have had to open an SR to resolve, which makes the Diagnostics a clear timesaver. Access Diagnostics from either the "Application Diagnostics" responsibility or the "Diagnostics" link at the top of the Oracle Applications home page. Using the responsibility is a bit more straightforward.

I'll spare you a long, screenshot-laden walkthrough of Diagnostics, but you'll find that there are over 280 applications to choose from, each with its own set of tests. The applications AD (Applications DBA), FND (Application Object Library), and SYSTEM_TEST (HTML platform) are probably the most immediately interesting to you at this point. For fun, run the EBusinessSecurity test group under FND and see what holes are left open in a default system. :-)

OAM: Oracle Applications Manager (OAM)
I'm sure I'll lose a lot of "street cred," assuming I've ever had any, for extolling the virtues of a GUI-and-dashboard-based administration interface, but Oracle Applications Manager is pretty nifty. Come to think of it, maybe I'll lose cred just for using a word like "nifty." Oh well. OAM is available to users granted the System Administrator or System Administration responsibility. Access individual OAM functions from those responsibilities, or start at the Dashboard to begin exploring its functionality.

OAM can quickly display the overall health of your system, lets you change some Apps configuration options, provides facilities to report on applied EBS patches and analyze new ones, manage the various moving parts that comprise the Workflow system, and much more. Click around for a bit; they've packed a lot in there:

I should note that OAM and the Diagnostics utilities discussed above are part of the base Oracle Applications system, included as part of standard EBS licensing. OAM should not be confused with the Oracle Applications Management Pack for Grid Control, which is a separately-licensed product.

Standing on the shoulders of giants
Okay, that's a wrap! Thanks for sticking through to the end; I'll leave you with one last list of reference material. If you want to dig further into learning about EBS, here are some useful resources and blogs. I'm bound to miss a lot here, but you won't go very wrong starting with this list:

First and foremost, if you aren't following Steven Chan's blog, you are doing yourself a huge disservice. Steven and his blogging team are are all heavily involved in the Applications Technology and Applications Technology Integration groups at Oracle. They will keep you up to date on the evolution of the Oracle Applications tech stack "as it happens," with certification announcements, discussions of advanced features and configurations, and pointers to interesting EBS whitepapers. If you've ever tried to navigate the labyrinth of Oracle's certification matrix, you'll recognize that Steven's list of certifications for the EBS tech stack components alone is worth a visit to his blog. Steven also maintains a list of Apps-related blogs, both within Oracle and in the broader community.
The OTN EBS forums are an invaluable resource for getting answers to your EBS questions. Most of the time, it seems like Oracle Ace Hussein Sawwan is holding the entire show together with his encyclopedic knowledge and crazy My Oracle Support skills. There are a lot of very helpful regulars there to pick up the slack when Hussein steps out for dinner, too (I'm not convinced that he sleeps). The EBS on Linux, EBS R12 Install/Upgrade, and EBS Technology General Discussion forums are a good place to start.
Atul Kumar's Online Apps DBA blog covers a wide variety of topics related to the technical side of Oracle Applications, including the integration of a wide variety of Oracle products with EBS, and more "real-world" deployment scenarios than this installation guide provides. It seems like there isn't an Oracle product this dude hasn't installed; it's pretty impressive.
Eddie Awad's famous OraNA service has an "Applications and Apps Technology" subcategory, and you'll see some interesting tidbits come through there.
Ben Prusinski, Oracle Ace and RAC expert, has recently ventured into the realm of Apps DBA work, and many of his recent blog posts have covered R12-related topics.

The Costs and Benefits of Enterprise Technology

2010-01-03T15:57:00.003-05:00

My technology chops lag a bit behind the writers and readers of this blog. While I am taking the Piwowar EBS challenge along with Chet, Floyd and others, my day to day activities are more focused on trying to blow hot air onto the frozen middle of enterprise technology management. Chet recently retweeted a good question that got me thinking, reading and (now) writing. The question was:

That post linked to a super article called Upper Mismanagement from The New Republic. It discusses how many executives, having risen up from finance instead of operational backgrounds, are probably incapable of leading American manufacturing today.

We see many of those same problems in IT. Those leaders who come from a finance background tend to be focused on showing the money (or the savings), while the technical leadership are just as focused on innovative technology. That often leaves the more operational business folks hanging in between, trying to keep the business going - doing more with less.

One problem seems to be that the wrong people are making the decisions - for the wrong reasons. This is an organizational problem: the right people are not in the right place. Technical, financial, and business folks all need to work together to create the solutions that will best advance the organizational mission. Too great a focus on any of those areas will potentially endanger the goals of the others. Jake spoke to part of this divide in his OOW 08 presentation (slide 9):

What about solutions?

In a recent seminar on financial management for IT, we worked with Intel's Business Value Index model. When you have a few minutes, read this white paper: IT@Intel White Paper Using an IT Business Value Program to Measure Benefits to the Enterprise. I'll provide the first line as a teaser:

Intel's IT business value (ITBV) program has shifted our IT investment decision making process to a customer-focused, data-driven model that demonstrates the impact of IT on Intel’s bottom line.

Yes! Right on! Isn't that what we all do?! I'd argue that if we all did this even half as well as Intel we wouldn't have as many questions about "finance killing IT" or "IT costing too much" or "IT not serving business needs."

I encourage all of us to read this paper. It explains how Intel's model "works by evaluating IT investments along three factors: IT business value, impact on IT efficiency, and the financial attractiveness of an investment." I love how they are ranked.

The key to the success of the Intel model seems to be accurate measurement of all three factors. Cost is frequently measured, but not always accurately. How often have you seen a solution implemented without provisions for its total cost? IT efficiency is measured less often. Business value is typically implied in requirement gathering, but I often see operational metrics missing once a solution goes into production. One example comes from a business intelligence project I am working on. In all of our work to help our business owners develop KPIs, we came up short on defining those metrics that would indicate how well IT was performing. See a good post from CIO magazine on developing metrics for IT.

So, if it is easy and obvious to do the right thing around measuring the benefits of IT to the enterprise, why is it not done consistently? I used to think it was just me, or just my organization, or just my industry (Higher Education and Research). Since I have been in school and doing a bit of consulting, though, I find my peers in all industries are singing the same tune. Perhaps one answer is implied in the New Republic article referenced earlier in this post. Perhaps we are not preparing ourselves and those around us to take the lead in this area.

Here is a good recent publication from my industry highlighting the shifting roles in IT leadership. I would argue it is not that different in other industries. Nor would I argue that any of this is new. Here is a similarly good recent publication from the CIO Executive Council called the State of the CIO 2010. I also recently read some great old school management principles from IBM's heyday. They are enjoyable and still applicable. Check out especially the "IBM management principles and practices" and the "Quintessential quotes."

Please find the comments if you love or hate any of the resources I've included. Please also drop a comment if you have an answer to the question of "will 'show me the money' kill IT?"

Thank you @oraclenerd and @brhubart for getting me thinking, reading, and writing. Now I can shed the slacker tag for a spell and get back to my work on the Piwowar EBS challenge (I am still on hardware and OS, ugh).

Ted [ linkedin | twitter ] is Vice President for Communications at the Higher Education User Group, MBA and MSIS student at the Johns Hopkins University, Director of Administrative Systems at MICA, and slacker at badgerworks.

My EBS Install Saga - Part II

2010-01-03T12:27:00.002-05:00

Finally!

After just a little over a month, I've finally gotten this stupid thing installed. Read a bit of my prior trials and tribulations here.

Cost
In total, I believe this cost me about $250.

$80 - 320 GB Hard Drive which I didn't use for this install (but meant to)
$100 - 1 TB hard drive which I did use for this exercise.
$70 - Amazon EC2 usage. Most of the $70 is because I used a 26 ECU machine (8 dual core CPUs, 64 GB RAM)

The EC2 expenses are high mostly because I spent more time connecting and such than actually doing any work. When you have a powerful machine, work is easy (and justifiable). I could download a 1.5 GB file in 3 seconds...well, it seemed like 3 seconds. Plus, I was learning how it all worked.

As far as disk space goes, I didn't have any. Maybe a total of 300 GB to start spread on 3 different disks.

Now I need one of those big ass workstations so I can actually work with this software. Sadly, as I have priced them out, I can't get under $4K. Anyone from HP or Dell (or Apple) reading? Wanna give me one of your workstations? I'll blog about it...a lot.

Instructions
I followed John's instructions to the letter. I received the same error screen as he did

Checked the logs as instructed, found the problem

error while loading shared libraries: 
libdb.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The only errata I've found is that mine was a 32 bit system and not a 64 bit system...but who cares? It works.

I followed his instructions to create the symbolic link...I would never in a million years been able to figure that out.

I'm fortunate to have used the 9i and 10g Oracle Application Server and OC4J extensively in the past, I just need to figure out where everything is located.

Resources
My goal is 2 fold

Create a test environment with EBS, OBIEE and OBIA
Prove (or disprove) a theory about integration with APEX I have

That means I need to have room (memory) to run another VM. Not for APEX, but for the OBIEE/DW space.

Very first thing I did was go into the database init file. I changed the sga_target from 1G to 512M and I changed the pga_aggregate_target from 1G to 512M.

Next up, I'll be trimming some of the memory allocation for the OC4J instances...but not yet. I'm just going to bask in the glow of finally getting this thing done.

I'll also read up Part 3 of John's Install Guide and Part 4 will be coming out this week, probably tomorrow afternoon.

John, you are the man! Thanks!

2009 - In Review

2010-01-03T00:23:00.004-05:00

Crazy year...but that seems to be the norm. Is crazy my normal? I wouldn't be suprised.

Numbers

289 - Number of posts this year.
- 37 - September had the highest number of posts.
- 18 - February - lowest
- 24 - Average posts per month
- 76 - Number of days not covered by a post. In reality though, there were numerous occasions where I posted 2 or more times.
439 - Number of posts it took to get to the magical $100 mark with Google AdSense. I don't even want to do the math on that. BTW, I reached the $100 mark on December 28, 2009. Here's to perseverance.
94,998 - Pageviews according to Google Analytics
66,313 - Visits according to Google Analytics
465,963 - Page Requests according to my web server (GoDaddy)
1,015,934 - Server Requests according to my web server

I'm not sure what the disparity is between the web server stats and Google Analytics. I tend to put more faith into Google Analytics though. (Of course seeing that 1 million is cool, even if it is only server requests).

Pretty Pictures
Here's a screenshot from my Google Analytics page...in July, I hit 5,000 Visits for the first time

I'm still not real clear what happened here

That was a 2,000 visit jump. I originally thought it had to do with my shameless pining to go to OOW 09...but that was late August, early September.

And to give you an idea of the progression since I started

The 2,000 hit jump is much more dramatic in that picture.

Guest Authors

Back in July (well, technically in May), I opened up the blog to guest authors. Mainly I wanted to give people of all experiences an opportunity to try out their writing skills...to see if they would like it. I didn't exclude established bloggers though. Of the 5 who participated, 4 already had blogs and 1 had been considering it.

Ted Simpson - Ted was first, and now owns a ORACLENERD T-Shirt! His angle is more high-level; the decisions concerning IT implentations and how to do more with less (using Oracle of course). He's written 2 articles so far
- Large-Scale Solutions for Small Enterprises: a Brief How (and Why) To
- Intelligent Business Intelligence: 4 Keys to a Successful BI Approach
Gary Myers - I owe Gary a T-Shirt...if he didn't live in Australia it wouldn't be so difficult, but it's like a million dollars to send it there (plus, I haven't had a steady paycheck in some time). He'll get one though...as soon as we get back on our feet.
- How To Kill a Code Review
- How Do You Normalize a Tweet
Kellyn Pederson Kellyn was either contemplating or had just started her own blog, DBA Kevlar (she has the domain name too, just hasn't migrated over yet). She had a great response on the oracle-l mailing list and I asked if she'd like to write something up. I'm glad she did. She gave us UNDO Brain Damage. Yes, I owe her a shirt as well. Thankfully she's in the States and it won't cost 1 million dollars to send it.
John Piwowar John has a T-Shirt already, but I suppose I could send him a black one. Though now that he resides in BFE, it probably costs 1 million dollars to send it there too. Not to disparage the other guest authors, but John has been killing me. Three posts in December...really 4, but I delayed that one until after the holidays. Let's not forget the 3 (4) companion pieces that he's written on his site. I consider this my own personal guide to installing the E-Business Suite, even if I haven't gotten it installed quite yet.
He's also the proud father of The EBS Challenge (though he didn't know about the birth)

Tiffany Morgan came with a writing piece, Top Ten Grammatical Errors That Make People Look Stup-Silly...., which shows up at number 22 for the year in terms of visits.

I know Ted's got one (almost) ready for posting and I'm trying to talk Jeff Haynes and Brad Tumy into doing guest spots as well.

Thanks to all of you who participated...I can't say that enough.

So I hope you enjoyed 2009 as much as I did. I'm not sure how long I can keep this up...it's a lot of work. I think it's worth it though.

My EBS Install Saga

2009-12-31T23:30:00.002-05:00

(Yes, it is sad that I am writing this on New Year's Eve...I'm on a mission at this point and nothing will stop me).

So I've been trying to follow along with John's EBS Install series...and by trying to follow along I mean I'm still on step 0 (zero).

First, it was a lack of space. 300 GB to be exact. So I went out and bought a 320 Seagate expansion drive. I can't remember that far back, but I think other things came up and I had to requisition that space for other projects.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a 1 TB external drive (USB 2.0) for $100. Couldn't pass it up. Sweet...now I'm all set to do this thing.

Somewhere, somehow, I removed all the carefully managed installation files. Couldn't find them. So I started over. A quick reminder, it's 46.25 GB of download, which takes a total of about 8 hours...even with 25 Mbps down. I am really thankful that Kris Rice doesn't do EBS...he'd be in for a world of hurt.

OK, I'm downloading the files and unzipping them simultaneously...to save a little bit of time. Get everything downloaded and unzipped...this might be where the fun really begins.

If this is your first time, I'm using VirtualBox. The rest of the setup is like this:
-- Dell XPS M1530
-- Intel Duo Core T1555 1.83 Ghz
-- 3 GB RAM
-- 1 TB Seagate External Drive (USB 2.0)
-- Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)

Not the most powerful machine in the world...but decent enough for 99% of everything. Of course by everything I mean everything but EBS.

The first time I created a 300 GB Dynamic HDD. That's the one I downloaded and unzipped all the files too. Upon completion, it had grown to 68.5 GB. OK, let's run it. Kick off the rapidwiz script, run through the first couple of screens and then it does a system check. Oops...there's not enough space. John did say that 350 GB would be preferable...I obviously didn't listen.

OK, so I could either expand that HD or shrink it and add another. Expansion is not possible (yet) in VirtualBox. I tried cloning (not sure why) and still ended up with a 300 GB disk of which 68.5 GB was used.

I then tried to use zerofree so that I could compact it (again, I have no idea why I was trying to do this). Those attempts were very unsuccessful because I couldn't figure out how to make the HD read-only. I did figure out a way later...just add a bad line in /etc/fstab and then you can run zerofree. What was the poing of compacting it though? No idea.

In one of the more recent versions of VirtualBox (I think 3.0), you could add a second HD. At least that's when I noticed that ability. So I created a new Dynamically-expanding 300 GB HD and attached it through the VirtualBox GUI.

Now I was stuck trying to figure out how to mount the stupid thing. Mr. Brad Tumy to the rescue.

Kick off the rapidwiz script, get through all the setup screens and it's installing...I left it over night...and one more night...78 GB had been written to disk.

I killed it.

How about just creating a 300 GB Fixed HD? Tried it...ran for 24 hours...about 60 GB had been created.

I killed it.

Maybe I could use Shared Folders. I consulting The Twitter and was reminded of my recent fun with Shared Folders.

Hmmm....How am I going to do this?

Then an IM with a colleague where he asked about The Cloud. It would be nice to have a test environment, as we are all remote, that we could share. I gave him 2 suggestions, I could buy a beefy machine and host it here at home or I (we) could try to do something in The Cloud.

That got me thinking...The Cloud? Hmmm...let's see if I can install OBIEE there.

I was immediately sold when I downloaded the OBIEE software (1.5 GB) in like 3 seconds (14 or 15 Mbps). I got OBIEE installed and running on Windows...but when I was creating the Instance, I noticed some pretty beefy boxes.

Maybe I could create the 300 GB VDI in The Cloud?

Yes, absolutely!

So I fired up a 20 ECU Windows Server Datacenter (2008?), with 8 dual core CPUs and 7.5 GB of memory. It took 2 hours to create the VDI.

Sweet!

Now...how in the hell am I going to get that 300 GB down to my machine? Since my local drive was attached, perhaps I could just drag and drop it there. Nope...didn't like that.

I'll zip it up!

Using 7zip, I was able to compress it to a very modest 360.9 MB. That's got to be close to a million percent compression right?

Downloaded that via IIS (had to set that up as well) and began to unzip it. First 5 GB took about 5 minutes, so I'm thinking 5 hours. Then it started to crawl. I was at 75 GB after 10 hours which was going to put me at 40 total hours. But it looked like it was exponential...that 40 hours probably would have ended up around 1 million hours. I don't have that kind of time.

I killed it.

Consulted The Twitter again.

@TedC and @jtdavies offered up some suggestions. @TedC told me to use Amazon S3. @jtdavies told me to split it up and use rsync.

Being incredibly impatient and quite possibly very stupid, I "split" the difference. Using my 400 GB attached Volume, I decided to use The File Splitter to split the files. 10 MB chunks. 3000 some odd files. No worries, I'll just zip up every 100 or so, download and unzip.

Until I ran out of room.

*%##@$!!~!@#$%#$#$**&%(*##@@!!!!!!!

Shoot me...now!

I created a second (well, third) volume, 315 GB, which would be the target for the split files. Attached it and began the split...again. This time, 10 GB chunks. I wasn't worried about the size as they compress very nicely. Two of those equals about 24 MB of download.

So I'm almost done with that...about 95% complete. I just have to download 2 more zipped files.

The funner part will be getting those put back together...if it's even possible. I've read up on cat, I just hope it comes through.

If you have any suggestions...or you want to come over to my house or remote into my computer and help me...that would be awesome! :)

The EBS Challenge

2009-12-31T11:22:00.008-05:00

I'm going to go ahead and say it, I believe John Piwowar's EBS series has been a success. I'm not talking in hits or those types of metrics because I haven't really analyzed the impact his articles have had. I'm talking about inspiring others to do the same. I believe that's where the real value has come from.

So far John has written 6 articles, 3 here and 3 companion pieces on his sites. He sent me the 4th last weekend (about an hour after the 3rd) which I will post next week (holiday lull here). He claims that's a record for him, 8 articles in a single month.

Anyway, here's the list of people who have decided to take the EBS Challenge:

me - ever so unsuccessfully so far. This seems more to do with computing power than anything. You will see a future post on all the fun I have had.
- My EBS Install Saga (probably part I of many)
- My EBS Install Saga - Part II
Ted Simpson [blog|twitter|guest author]
Marcin Przepiorowski [blog|twitter]
Floyd Teter [blog|twitter]
- Getting My Geek On
TedC [web|twitter]
McG - yet to be officially recognized but is participating

Jake Kuramoto added to the fray by posting an article on John's series, Install the E-Business Suite with Your Pals. Jake worked with EBS back in the 80's I think. :)

I'm pretty sure I left people off this list. So if you know of anyone or are someone using John's install guides, let me know through the various methods of communication (twitter, comments, email, IM, etc). I'll add your name to the list with links and all...would be fun to see how many names we can get on here. If you did use the guide and would like to write up your experiences (I will be writing one myself) and post them here as a guest author, or you want to write it on your own blog, let me know. I'll add links next to your name pointing to your article. Also, there is no time limit either. If you follow the guide next December and would like to be added, I can do that too.

Windows in the Cloud

2009-12-29T21:50:00.000-05:00

Last January I read a post by Mr. Dan Norris (not the UK guy), I bought my own server for $1.02 (USD!). The title is fairly self-explanatory, he fired up an instance at (in?) Amazon's EC2, did what he needed to do then shut down (terminated) the instance. Cost? $1.02. It was the first real world application I had seen of the cloud.

Shortly after that, Mr. Lewis Cunningham [ blog | twitter ] went looking for volunteers to provide feedback on a cloud book he was writing. He wanted those with experience and those without (me). I jumped on the opportunity and Mr. Cunningham accepted. Thankfully, the book went by the wayside, instead becoming a series of articles (which I can't seem to find) on his blog, because I had fallen behind...way behind.

Since then I haven't done a thing in the cloud (should I capitalize that?). Until today when a colleague asked about creating a test bed for OBIEE, Essbase and other software. I prefer having a big beefy machine at home that I can muck around with, but seeing as how I haven't had a job in a while and money is tight, I thought the cloud would be the best bet.

So I began to tinker.

To back up a little, one thing I always had problems with was connecting to the instance via Ubuntu (not sure if this was a me/Ubuntu issue or a cloud/Linux issue)...by problems I mean I was never able to connect.

Since we are talking about OBIEE and it can be a Windows only install (both server and client tools), I tried to see what I could do. First I looked to see if there were any OBIEE images (AMIs) out there. There was, but I needed some sort of subscription to that. So I fired up my own Windows Server 2003 (64bit) instance, downloaded java (JDK) and the OBIEE software.

Small side note, download speeds from there are AWESOME!

I have 25 down and 15 up and home and I thought that was fast...we should really feel sorry for Kris.

How to Create an Instance using Amazon's EC2
First you'll need to create an account if you don't already have one. Then go to http://aws.amazon.com/. Find the AWS Management Console and click on that. Should look something like this:

On the lefthand side, you'll see a menu of actions.

On the right side is your dashboard

Back to the left side, choose AMIs

That should take you to this page

Let's find some images.

First, pull down this drop down and select Amazon Images

Then select your platform, Windows

Select the amazon/Windows-Server2003R2-i386-Base-v108

Launch it

This will bring up the Request Instances Wizard, just go ahead and select the default and click on Continue

Instance Details, I don't really know yet what this page is about, perhaps someone out there can enlighten me, but just go ahead and accept the defaults

Now we're on the Create Key Pair page. I have a couple of keys created but I'll walk you through creating a new one as well.

Select Create a new Key Pair

Name your new key "test_key" then select "Create & Download your Key Pair." Download the key to your Desktop.

Next up, Security Group. This is probably what screwed me up previously, trying to connect to Linux instance. I was never sure where the key should reside. I followed all the instructions...I just couldn't get it to work.

With Windows, you need to add a Security Group so that you can RDP into the machine. The port is 3389, but the wizard will take care of that.

Name it whatever you want and down at the bottom, select RDP as the rule you want to add.

When you are done it should look something like this

Select continue and you get this nice little summary page

Click Launch.

Connecting to your Instance
It takes a few minutes for your server to start up. You may have to hit refresh in your management console to see it.

Once the instance has started up, you need to get the password. If you haven't waited long enough, you'll see this:

Be patient.

To retrieve your password go to Instance Actions

You'll be greeted with this

Enter the text from the key you downloaded to your desktop (note the screenshot says obiee_key, that's because I took this screenshot earlier today).

And here's your password

Now open up Remote Desktop Connection (Windows) or your Terminal Server Client (Ubuntu), enter in the address, Administrator for the username and password you just generated.

Hit connect and you should be done!

VirtualBox: Add Second HDD

2009-12-26T15:23:00.004-05:00

Two weeks ago I found a 1 TB external drive for $100, couldn't pass it up. Space was the biggest obstacle in following along in John's EBS series (part IV coming soon).

I had purchased a "small" 320 GB HDD about a month ago, but that effort proved futile because I started to save everything off to that after I upgraded to Karmic Koala and received this lovely message:

Finally, I could install EBS without worrying about space...I created a Dynamically Expanding HDD of 300 GB. I then installed Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 5, Update 4 and loaded as many of the known libraries that I could. Then I began downloaded and unzipping all of the required files. I was doing this in parallel, download the file, unzip, remove the zip file. After about 8 total hours, it was done. The VDI had grown to 68.5 GB.

I then ran the rapidwiz.sh script, navigated through the screens until I got through to the system check. It complained I didn't have enough disk space to install. Of course not...there was only 231.5 GB of space left.

Stupidity followed.

What were my options?

OK, I could extend that VDI to 350 GB...VirtualBox doesn't allow that yet.

But for some reason I couldn't just keep that dynamically expanding VDI, I had to shrink it. How?

zerofree

That would allow me to first zero out the unused space and then use VBoxManage compacthd to shrink it.

That required greater skills than I had though. First of all, you had to mount the root file system in read-only mode. I tried a bunch of different ways and could never get it to work. Looking back, it might be easy(er)...

I then decided to clone the VDI with VBoxManage clonehd thinking (and therein lies the problem) that would do the trick. 12 hours later, I had the cloned VDI. Added it to the Virtual Media Manager but it is just an exact copy of the other one (68.5 used, 300 GB total). Doh.

Enough of this. I'll just add a 350 HD as a Dynamically Expanding primary slave. So I did, booted up OEL and...where is it? Why can't I find it? I guess I have to mount it right?

Instead of researching first, I just start to muck around with the system. Really long story short, I thought it wise to edit /etc/fstab. Upon reboot, it broke. (Shocker)

Amusingly, the root file system was mounted as read-only so I could finally run zerofree.

OK, so I mucked up /etc/fstab, I can fix that right? Just replace my edits with the original...wait, it's a read-only file system.

Twitter to the rescue for the umpteenth time.

Some back and forth with @brad_tumy before finally going to IM.

He pointed me to this link and this command

mount -w -o remount /

Worked! I could now edit the file and get my system back up and running.

"Um, Brad, while I have you..."
Do you know how to add a second HDD using VirtualBox? (Yes, I'm really sneaky).

He then pointed me to this link written by the esteemed Mr. Topper. It was kind of hard for me to believe at first, I am not sure I have read a "live" post by Mr. Topper in quite some time. Ah yes, the last post was June 5, 2008.

Brad: "Check out step 12, that's where you should start."

OK, step 12, Create the Partition. This is a VMWare guide, but the concepts are the same. I'm really not sure, but I opened up the Logical Volume Manager (LVM)

Which opened up this. What's this "Uninitialized Entities" section? I haven't seen that before.

I think I'll click on it.

That looks like my second HDD. Initialize Entity? Sure, why not?

Are you sure you want to initialize this entity? Everything on there will be lost!

Do you want to create a single partition? Are you sure about that?

OK, that's done. Now it appears iin the Unallocated Volumes section. Let's create a new Volume Group.

I named it VolumeEBS, I suppose you can name it whatever you want.

Done.

Almost.

How in the hell do I mount this thing?

(Brad is long gone now...we chatted for over an hour into the wee hours of the morning...I can't blame him. He was probably trying to escape after that second question).

Back to Matt's post. Honestly, I have no idea (yet) if this is the same command I performed via the GUI, but I did it anyway after a couple of unsuccessful attempts at mounting the drive.

[root@ebs chet]# /sbin/mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdb1
mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
39321600 inodes, 78643199 blocks
3932159 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
2400 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
16384 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 
        4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616

Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 39 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first.  Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

Something good happened...I think.

[root@ebs chet]# mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /install
[root@ebs chet]# ls /install
lost+found

Win! Or is that FAIL!? I don't care. It's done.

I added the line (correctly this time) to /etc/fstab, rebooted and it's there.

Now, finally (finally), I can begin my install of EBS. The latest version has probably been released and the instructions are probably moot, but I managed something.

How Do You Normalize a Tweet?

2009-12-21T13:00:00.001-05:00

Second post by Mr. Myers, you can read his first one, How To Kill a Code Review here. I have always liked design topics, I don't think they are covered enough on the web, which is why I liked this one. I have often wondered what trade-offs designers make for these types of applications (Twitter, Facebook, etc). Are they even "designed" by a data modeler? Or are they created by application developers? Not really sure it matters to those companies as they are successful (in a strange, no business model kind of way) and, I don't believe, represent many of the realities that we as Oracle professionals are likely to deal with.

Firstly, I don't tweet. Alex (Gorbachev) mentioned it at a Sydney meetup. I had a look, but didn't get entrenched and I assume there will be others out there who aren't tweeters. Suffice to say a 'tweet' is a message broadcast by a twitter user to the twitter consumers. They are up to 140 characters long.

So what's to normalise ? Isn't it just a value ? Even Oracle 6 could cope with VARCHAR2(140).

But actually, a tweet isn't just a simple value.

A search for "beer" would turn up all messages that included #beer.
Similarly, the @ sign followed by a username allows users to send messages directly to each other. A message with @example would be directed at the user [example] although it can still be read by anyone.

Source: Wikipedia

First normal form states

There's no left-to-right ordering to the columns.

Every row-and-column intersection contains exactly one value from the applicable domain (and nothing else).

All columns are regular [i.e. rows have no hidden components such as row IDs, object IDs, or hidden timestamps].

Source: Wikipedia

The problem is that the tweet "@tom Come for a #beer or #burger. Don't let @harry come" definitely has hidden components, but there is a sequencing in the message that is just as important.

In a practical implementation, we would probably have the following tables:

TWITTER_USERS        : username (eg @tom), date_joined, email....
TAGS                 : tag (eg #beer)
TWEETS               : tweet_id (surrogate key), created_by (referencing twitter_user), created_timestamp, tweet_text...
TWEET_TAGS           : tweet_id, tag (eg #beer)
TWEET_DESTINATIONS   : tweet_id, username (eg @tom)

Our message would have the two child tag records (#beer and #burger) and two child destination records (@tom and @fred).

At the logical level, we are not properly normalized because we have the tweet_text duplicating information from the child entities and the potential for inconsistencies between them. We can say that the tweet just seems to contain duplicate information but it is really different. Is that just being picky ?

I am not suggesting the relational model is wrong, broken, incomplete or inadequate. Quite the reverse, in fact. In this case the value of the model is that it tells us the problems that will arise when we denormalise data.

For example, if @harry deletes his twitter account (because he was never invited for beers), do we delete the tweet_dest that referred to him or do we keep it and not enforce that referential integrity constraint ? If we delete the tweet_dest, we have an inconsistency between the tweet_text attribute and the tweet_dest child entities. Or maybe we delete the tweet entity itself and all its children. Those are really choices for the business (possibly with some legal implications though).

I don't have a solution to the logical model representation, and would be interested in feedback. But not by twitter please :)

EBS Install Guide - Part 3

2009-12-20T14:00:00.004-05:00

By John Piwowar [ blog | twitter ]
This is the third post in my "Installing E-Business Suite" series. Now that your Vision installation is (hopefully) complete, it's time to start exploring the system a bit. Thanks again to Chet for the opportunity to share here, and for his patience as I took longer than was strictly necessary to finish this installment.

Part 1 --> Part 2 --> Part 3 --> Part 4

It's impossible to provide a comprehensive overview of the various command-line utilities used to manage the E-Business Suite in the space of one (or even a few blog posts, but in this post I'll show you how to start and stop the services, and point you to a few references where you can learn more, if you're into that sort of thing. I don't ever claim perfect memory, but you can probably assume that anything you later discover to be missing was omitted to save space, not because I forgot about it.

Stopping EBS services
It's a good idea to shut down the EBS database ASAP after installation to take a full backup. Before you can shut down the database, you need to shut down the applications tier, or your system will probably become cranky. The "shut down everything" script for the apps tier is called adstpall.sh, and it calls scripts to stop individual components and bring down the system in a (usually) graceful manner. Run adstpall.sh as the applvis user:

[applvis@londo ~]$ $ADMIN_SCRIPTS_HOME/adstpall.sh


You are running adstpall.sh version 120.10

Enter the APPS username: apps
Enter the APPS password:
The logfile for this session is located at 
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/logs/appl/admin/log/adstpall.log
Executing service control script:
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/admin/scripts/jtffmctl.sh stop
script returned:
****************************************************
You are running jtffmctl.sh version 120.3
Shutting down Fulfillment Server for R12VIS on port 9355 ...
jtffmctl.sh: exiting with status 0

.end std out.
.end err out.
****************************************************

Executing service control script:
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/admin/scripts/adcmctl.sh stop
script returned:
****************************************************
You are running adcmctl.sh version 120.17.12010000.3
Shutting down concurrent managers for R12VIS ...
ORACLE Password:
Submitted request 5798328 for CONCURRENT FND SHUTDOWN

adcmctl.sh: exiting with status 0

adcmctl.sh: check the logfile 
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/logs/appl/admin/log/adcmctl.txt 
for more information ...

.end std out.
.end err out.
****************************************************

Executing service control script:
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/admin/scripts/adoafmctl.sh stop
script returned:
****************************************************
ERROR : Timed out( 100000 ): Interrupted Exception
You are running adoafmctl.sh version 120.8
Stopping OPMN managed OAFM OC4J instance ...
****************************************************

Executing service control script:
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/admin/scripts/adformsctl.sh stop
script returned:
****************************************************
ERROR : Timed out( 100000 ): Interrupted Exception
You are running adformsctl.sh  version 120.16
Stopping OPMN managed FORMS OC4J instance  ...
****************************************************

Executing service control script:
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/admin/scripts/adoacorectl.sh stop
script returned:
****************************************************
ERROR : Timed out( 100000 ): Interrupted Exception
You are running adoacorectl.sh version 120.13
Stopping OPMN managed OACORE OC4J instance ...
****************************************************

Executing service control script:
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/admin/scripts/adapcctl.sh stop
script returned:
****************************************************
You are running adapcctl.sh version 120.7.12010000.2
Stopping OPMN managed Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) instance ...
opmnctl: stopping opmn managed processes...
adapcctl.sh: exiting with status 0
adapcctl.sh: check the logfile 
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/logs/appl/admin/log/adapcctl.txt 
for more information ...

.end std out.
.end err out.
****************************************************

Executing service control script:
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/admin/scripts/adalnctl.sh stop
script returned:
****************************************************
adalnctl.sh version 120.3
Shutting down listener process APPS_R12VIS.
adalnctl.sh: exiting with status 0

adalnctl.sh: check the logfile 
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/logs/appl/admin/log/adalnctl.txt 
for more information ...

.end std out.
.end err out.
****************************************************

Executing service control script:
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/admin/scripts/adopmnctl.sh stop
script returned:
****************************************************
You are running adopmnctl.sh version 120.6
Stopping Oracle Process Manager (OPMN)  and the managed processes ...
opmnctl: stopping opmn and all managed processes...
adopmnctl.sh: exiting with status 0
adopmnctl.sh: check the logfile 
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/logs/appl/admin/log/adopmnctl.txt 
for more information ...

.end std out.
.end err out.****************************************************
adstpall.sh:Exiting with status 3
adstpall.sh: check the logfile
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/logs/appl/admin/log/adstpall.log 
for more information ...

You may not see the timeout errors listed above for the 10gAS components, but you might, if your server is slow or particularly busy when you're trying to shut down services. Shutting down the apps tier can take a while, particularly while waiting for the concurrent managers to exit. Eventually, though, there shouldn't be any apps-related processes left running:

[applvis@londo ~]$ ps -ef  | grep applvis
applvis  16667 16665  0 19:55 pts/2    00:00:00 -bash
applvis  18927 16667  0 20:34 pts/2    00:00:00 ps -ef
applvis  18928 16667  0 20:34 pts/2    00:00:00 grep applvis

Once the apps are down, switch over to the database software owner (oravis) and shut down the database services. It's possible to do this using the normal lsnrctl and sqlplus commands you already know, but for purposes of completeness (i.e. egregious pedantry), we'll use the EBS-supplied wrapper scripts. First, use addlnctl.sh to stop the listener:

[oravis@londo ~]$ $ORACLE_HOME/appsutil/scripts/$CONTEXT_NAME/addlnctl.sh stop R12VIS
You are running addlnctl.sh version 120.1.12010000.2
Logfile: /u01/ebs/R12VIS/db/tech_st/11.1.0/appsutil/log/R12VIS_londo/addlnctl.txt
Shutting down listener process R12VIS ...
addlnctl.sh: exiting with status 0

Finally, use addbctl.sh to shutdown the database:

[oravis@londo ~]$ $ORACLE_HOME/appsutil/scripts/$CONTEXT_NAME/addbctl.sh stop immediate
You are running addbctl.sh version 120.1

Shutting down database R12VIS ...

SQL*Plus: Release 11.1.0.7.0 - Production on Sat Dec 12 20:44:35 2009
Copyright (c) 1982, 2008, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
Connected.
Database closed.
Database dismounted.
ORACLE instance shut down.
Disconnected from Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.1.0.7.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

addbctl.sh: exiting with status 0

Backing up the database is left as exercise for the reader, but I suggest using RMAN.

Starting EBS components
Okay, time to start everything back up, in reverse order of shutdown. First, the database listener:

[oravis@londo ~]$ export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/appsutil/scripts/$CONTEXT_NAME
[oravis@londo ~]$ addlnctl.sh start R12VIS
You are running addlnctl.sh version 120.1.12010000.2
Logfile: /u01/ebs/R12VIS/db/tech_st/11.1.0/appsutil/log/R12VIS_londo/addlnctl.txt
Starting listener process R12VIS ...

addlnctl.sh: exiting with status 0

Then, the database...

[oravis@londo ~]$ addbctl.sh start
You are running addbctl.sh version 120.1

Starting the database R12VIS ...

SQL*Plus: Release 11.1.0.7.0 - Production on Sat Dec 12 22:29:22 2009
Copyright (c) 1982, 2008, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
Connected to an idle instance.
ORACLE instance started.
Total System Global Area  521936896 bytes
Fixed Size              2161272 bytes
Variable Size               218105224 bytes
Database Buffers    289406976 bytes
Redo Buffers                 12263424 bytes
Database mounted.
Database opened.
Disconnected from Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.1.0.7.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing optionsaddbctl.sh: exiting with status 0

You'll note that I also used the database downtime to downsize the memory footprint of the database a bit. I'll confess that I didn't do any careful testig to arrive at these values; I just whacked a bunch of parameters by 50%. Your mileage may vary. :-)

Finally, back to the applvis user to start up the apps. I'll demonstrate an alternate means of running adstrtal.sh that doesn't involve prompting for a password. This is also a legitimate way to call adstpall.sh, but in both cases, be mindful that the password for the all-powerful APPS database user will be in your command history. Seems convenient on the surface, until you consider the security implications. Yes, it's just a test server, but safety begins in the sandbox. ;-)

[applvis@londo ~]$ adstrtal.sh apps/apps
You are running adstrtal.sh version 120.15
The logfile for this session is located at 
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/logs/appl/admin/log/adstrtal.log
Executing service control script:
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/admin/scripts/adopmnctl.sh start

[[I'll spare your eyeballs the full, verbose startup of all the components. It's unsurprisingly similar to the output from running adstpall.sh, and admit it, you didn't really read through that output in great detail either, did you? ]]

adstrtal.sh: check the logfile 
/u01/ebs/R12VIS/inst/apps/R12VIS_londo/logs/appl/admin/log/adstrtal.log for more information ...

Again, on a slower system you may get some timeout errors from the 10gAS components. For your peace of mind, you can check the status of those components with adopmnctl.sh until the status of all the components reads, "Alive."

[applvis@londo ~]$ adopmnctl.sh status
You are running adopmnctl.sh version 120.6
Checking status of OPMN managed processes...
Processes in Instance: R12VIS_londo.londo.local
---------------------------------+--------------------+---------+---------
ias-component                    | process-type       |     pid | status
---------------------------------+--------------------+---------+---------
OC4JGroup:default_group          | OC4J:oafm          |   22974 | Alive
OC4JGroup:default_group          | OC4J:forms         |   22836 | Alive
OC4JGroup:default_group          | OC4J:oacore        |   22678 | Alive
HTTP_Server                      | HTTP_Server        |   22619 | Alive
adopmnctl.sh: exiting with status 0

Yay. Carry on, then.

Other important stuff
Now you know how to stop and start Oracle Applications. If you're just going to be exploring the apps as a hobbyist, that should be enough to get you going. There's a lot more to learn, however, if you're interested in understanding common EBS maintenance tasks, including:

adadmin: This utility is used to maintain objects in the Apps database and applications tier filesystem. Common tasks include recompiling invalid database objects, regenerating forms and reports files, and enabling and disabling maintenance mode (a required task during patching). adadmin is invoked by the applications owner (applvis in our case). To get an better idea of what adadmin does, type adadmin help=y from the command line, or just type adadmin to invoke its text-based menu system and explore from there.
Autoconfig: In the Dark Ages of Oracle Applications, making configuration changes in EBS was fraught with peril. Changing the value of a directory or port for an application server component could involve touching multiple config files, and missing one file could lead to confusing (at best) or disastrous (what's worse than disastrous?) results. Nowadays, Autoconfig takes care of configuration file management for you. The trade-off is that any manual changes made to Autoconfig-managed configuration files will be overwritten when Autoconfig is run. There are two versions of Autoconfig: one for the applications tier ($ADMIN_SCRIPTS_HOME/adautocfg.sh), and one for the database tier ($ORACLE_HOME/appsutil/scripts/$CONTEXT_NAME/adautocfg.sh). In general, you'll be using the apps tier version of Autoconfig much more frequently. It's worth noting that Autoconfig does not manage the database pfile or spfile; changes to database initialization parameters can be made without concerns about Autoconfig clobbering them.
adpatch: This may not be relevant to your current sandbox, but in the real world you are unlikely to run an unpatched EBS system. adpatch is the utility that drives the patching process for the applications tier file system and Apps database objects. It does not handle patching the database and application server ORACLE_HOMEs, however, you still get to use the trusty Opatch utility for that.

Almost done!
The 4th and final part of this little "scratching the surface of E-Business Suite" adventure will take a look at a few parts of the UI. You know what that means, right? Yup, more screenshots! I bet you can't wait!

References:

Michael Taylor (mdtaylor), Oracle Ace and "installing EBS on unsupported versions of SUSE" guru (among other things), posted some recommendations on OTN for extreme downsizing of the memory consumed by the EBS database and concurrent managers.
My Oracle Support Doc 396009.1 breaks down the database initialization parameters for R12. Configure for the low end, unless you're really building out a Vision instance for use by lots of people, in which case you need to stop reading this guide before you get yourself into trouble. ;-)
If you're interested in setting up your applvis OS user's environment so that the Apps environment is sourced automatically and the various Apps administration utilities are added to your path at login, I know a guy who wrote not one, but two blog posts about that.
Chapter 4 of the Oracle Applications Maintenance Utilities guide covers the adadmin utility
The Oracle Applications Patching Procedures guide covers the use of adpatch, and the patching process in general
And, finally, Chapter 5 of the Oracle Applications Concepts guide discusses Autoconfig, and provides a context for use of the tool (that's a pretty bad pun, but only if you've read the guide).

Random Things: Volume #11

2009-12-18T01:12:00.003-05:00

Work: Consulting
I just returned home from my first week consulting. I went to the northern part of Alabama and didn't have much of a connection (phone or data) most of the time.

From my perspective it was a rousing success. Now I just need to wait and see if the client approved of my work.

I chose to drive as it was semi-last minute (last Thursday I found out) and I haven't had a good road trip in years. I promise it wasn't a fear of flying.

On the way I picked up the guy I would be working with at the Atlanta airport. We had only (briefly) communicated through email and one "get up to speed" phone call. I think it's safe to say that we got along pretty well. After a couple of hours with the client the following day, they asked how long we had been working together and were absolutely shocked to learn that we had just met.

As to the work, I got to rekindle some of my OBIEE administration skills, specifically the rpd (or metadata). It was fun to get back into it as I had been prepping for this the past couple of weeks. By day 2 I was in a zone (adding physical tables, replacing logical table data sources, etc).

My colleague's expertise was in Answers, so I got to see some pretty cool stuff. I'm trying to talk him into blogging and offered him a guest slot to see if he likes it.

The clients were great and easy to work with...overall an A+.

Google Latitude
As I have a new blackberry (couldn't afford the droid yet), I managed to download my Google Contacts, GMail and most importantly, Google Maps...which ties in with Google Latitude.

I could see myself driving up I-75 and even better, I could expose my location to my wife and parents (I am an only child...the center of their universe :). I even tried to use it to find my phone which I had misplaced this afternoon (it had fallen under my seat) to no avail. Basically, I believe it uses the cell towers to approximate your location, the closest I saw it was within 800 meters.

Amusingly, as we're driving to Atlanta this afternoon and my father calls...WTF? he says. "I'm taking my colleague to the airport"

"Are you going back?"

"No, I'm headed home"

I had neglected to tell him that I would be there through Thursday...he of course thought the worse.

I have 2 pretty cool guest posts on the way. Mr. Meyers has one and Mr. Piwowar finally got to Part 3 of his EBS install guide. :) I'll post those next week so they don't get lost in the weekend down time.