Finally, In-Memory Applications for Oracle E-Business Suite on Engineered Systems

When Oracle introduced plethora of products and enhancements to its product portfolio, one key capability that was left out was In-Memory capabilities for Oracle applications on engineered systems. Looks like, Oracle EVP (for Applications Development) Steve Miranda’s group felt enough pressure to get the in-memory applications for all applications certified on Oracle Engineered Systems . Timing cannot be any better as the announcement came right during Collaborate ’13.

So who all impacted by this announcement or who can take immediate advantage of the new toy?

Well, any customers who use Oracle’s Applications business products such as Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle PeopleSoft, Oracle Siebel, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle Hyperion can take advantage of it.

So what does this announcement mean to you and to your company?

Companies whose decision making impacted by their business systems capabilities, limiting employees productivity in manufacturing, shop floor operations, order processing, and customer service and more importantly companies that have inability to meet service level agreements and regulatory reporting needs.

Today’s Oracle announcement trumpets above mentioned limitations can become an history as the new foray of engineered solutions can help companies run business critical applications 10-20 times. Announcement further articulates how Oracle In-Memory Applications change business dynamics, helping customers quickly discover growth opportunities, make smarter decisions, reduce corporate costs, and accelerate time consuming workloads.

In other words, you now have an opportunity to strengthen your resume

What are the technical benefits?

Oracle’s Internal benchmarking indicates that Oracle EBusiness Suite running on Oracle’s Engineered Systems performs 3 to10 times faster for forms and self-service applications depending upon the concurrency load profile. And linear scaling allows for very large deployments and multiple applications to run simultaneously while maintaining consistent response times. Oracle’s Engineered Systems are architected to deliver maximum availability, high performance, and scalability helping Oracle EBusiness Suite customers to consolidate environments, and reduce server footprint resulting in an overall reduction in cost of application ownership.

Here are some of the technical benefits delivered by Engineered Systems:

Oracle EBusiness Suite applications consists of many batch processing programs that create large workloads. These workloads are highly CPU intensive. High concurrency of these workloads requires systems with large memory capacity with large Systems global area (SGA) and Program global area (PGA) capable of processing high speed disk input/output (I/O). Oracle’s Engineered Systems are architected to deliver these superior technical capabilities to manage such large workloads.

• Engineered systems can handle twice as many users per core compared to other servers delivering the scalability required to add more application users during growth and expansion.
• Linear Scaling easily supports very large deployments.
• Resource Manager can help consolidation of database and application environments by controlling CPU usage, managing CPU contention via instance caging, controlling disk I/O usage, and managing contention via IORM’s interdatabase resource plans. Customers can achieve higher throughputs as more transactions can be processed using single Exadata core compared to other servers.
• Exalogic has been engineered to leverage a technique known as SingleRoot I/O Virtualization to eliminate virtualization overhead and deliver maximum performance and scalability. Missioncritical server virtualization offers a whole new level of consolidation where multiple virtual machines are sharing a single physical server in order to maximize the utilization of server hardware, while minimizing associated cost.
• Oracle VM template for Exalogic reduces installation and configuration time and allows rapid deployment of Oracle EBusiness Suite applications.
• Oracle EBusiness Suite customers can load balance web and forms servers, configure parallel concurrent processing and configure Oracle RAC and Oracle Data Guard for high availability.
• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (EM) helps with Exadata manageability and provides a composite view of all health indicators of a cell or cell group to diagnose and troubleshoot performance problems efficiently.

Reference:

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/in-memory-apps/index.html?SSContributor=true

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/ebusiness/ebs-engineered-systems-1931224.pdf

 

Introducing Concurrent Processing Analyzer

In many instances, to get holistic view of concurrent processing in Oracle E-Business Suite we either use Applications Management Pack (AMP) or run several scripts and analyze the results to determine the health of CP. I guess the wait is finally over. Oracle has come up with Concurrent Processing Analyzer (CPA) for EBS, a solid tool that can give you not only a holistic view of concurrent processing, but also provides recommendations based on best practices that can fit the environment. Interestingly, this is a non-invasive script that can be run in production too.

Concurrent Processing Analyzer benefits are categorized into 4 and they are

• Helps to identify concurrent system setup and configurations
• Analysis and output of concurrent environment
• Identifies and recommends concurrent best practices
• and more importantly regular concurrent maintenance to compare trending.

Some of the benefits that we have realized by taking advantage of this tool are

• Number of eligible records in FND_CONCURRENT_REQUESTS that can be purged.
• Current list of patches in the system
• Volume of daily concurrent requests
• Request managers with Incorrect Cache size
• Long running reports during core business hours
• Based on current concurrent processing, it helps to identify possible bottlenecks with recommendations to resolve those based on best practices.

Here is a screen shot of the tool

To get comprehensive list of benefits that can be realized by CPA, please refer to MOS note

 Concurrent Processing – CP Analyzer for E-Business Suite [ID 1411723.1]

Kudos to ATG proactive support team. 

 

Maximizing your MAA investment by reducing reporting load in Oracle EBS environment.

Double-dipping on MAA (Maximum Availability Architecture) investments in Oracle environment is always an attractive proposition. That being said, it should be imperious to make better use of MAA products such as Data Guard. Instead of Data Guard adding value only during primary instance failure, wonder how else we can reap the benefits of Active Data Guard.  Well as we know, in a simple database configuration, it works exquisitely. Since this blog post is in connotation with EBS, its vital to understand the  doles and as well as the limitations of Active Data Guard before getting excited and jumping into the implementation.

Since there are tons of information online on Active Data Guard, I just want to limit the benefits section to the stand-outs.

• Redo based physical replication
• End-to-end Oracle validation, isolates the standby from corruption
• Significantly low replication latency
• Several Flexible Recovery Options including Automatic database failover, Automatic application  failover to new primary database
• Flashback standby and use Oracle Data Pump to extract data
• Use RMAN incremental of primary to quickly re-sync standbys

How can I unburden primary EBS instance using Active DataGuard?

• Instead of integrating reporting systems such as Hyperion Essbase, OBIEE, custom DB reports with primary EBS instance, Active DataGuard removes that overhead by integrating those systems with Active DataGuard instance directly.
• Certain EBS reports can be run out of DataGuard instance too. More information available in below sections.

Where do I start to benefit the most out of Active DataGuard in an EBS environment?

• Ensure you have the right ADG interoperability patches on top of EBS R12.1.3.
• Your Oracle Database is at least 11.1.0.7 or 11.2.0.1.
• Refer to the additional MOS notes referenced below.

Since not all EBS reports can run on Active DG, what can I do to identify ADG ‘runnable’ reports?

Oracle certifies only Report Writer programs for ADG. Please refer to section 11 in MOS note: 1070491.1 to get the list of Oracle ‘certified’ reports. This list is in a way partial based on Oracle’s testing. Since there are thousands of reports including custom reports, Oracle provides simulation mode to run the reports and thus generates any READ-ONLY violations. TO detail, you can run a simulation where a report runs on primary but is executed as if it were running on standby. Please refer Section 7 of the MOS note 1070491.1 for more details on simulation.

How can I re-route the identified reports to run on ADG without asking the users to run certain reports in ADG and the rest in Primary instance.

Oracle allows to change the session properties in concurrent program definition form by specifying the right ADG instance. Thus the request is automatically pushed to run in ADG instance.

Reference:

Using Active Data Guard Reporting with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 and Oracle Database 11g [ID 1070491.1]

Question on Active Data Guard Reporting With EBS R12.1 [ID 1451500.1]

Business Continuity for Oracle E-Business Release 12 Using Oracle 11g Physical Standby Database [ID 1070033.1]

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/availability/s316924-1-175932.pdf

MAA Advisor:

http://www.oracle.com/us/media/survey/index-mm-191198.html

 

Responsibilities are still missing even after removing end_date

Tip of the week: Responsibilities are still missing even after removing end_date

Problem: Many times even after removing end_date on a responsibility, it will still wont show up in Navigation Panel.

Resolution: Run concurrent program in 2 passes and this will resolve the issue on hand.

5.1 “Workflow Directory Services User/Role Validation” Parameters : 100000, Yes, No, No
5.2 “Workflow Directory Services User/Role Validation” Parameters : 100000, No, Yes, No

 

Implementing Simplified Chinese or other languages in Oracle EBS R12

Tip of the week: Implementing Simplified Chinese or any other languages in Oracle EBS R12

As more companies continue to expand R12′s globalization capabilities, one of the requests I recently came across was to eliminate ambiguity on implementing a new language. Furthermore, many folks wanted to ensure their existing Oracle E-Business Suite language packs are in sync with the primary applications language American English.

Now you can hit both the sparrows in one stone, as they say.

In the past, we apply the language specific 4440000 patches and then apply the relevant language patches. Now that has become history, Oracle has considerably enhanced yet streamlined the process to address the requirement.

So where do you start?

Identify the language that you wanted to install and activate it using Oracle Applications Manager’s (OAM) License Manager.

Oracle recommends that you run maintain multi-lingual tables from the Maintain Applications Database Entities menu in adadmin.

To be on safer side, run the maintain snapshots from adadmin.

Now you have set your environment to install the new language pack.

Oracle provides scripts such as adgennls.pl to generate the manifest of your R12 EBS environment, Output of those scripts needed to be uploaded to https://updates.oracle.com/TransSync .

In 2-4 hours you will start receiving emails for each language in your environment from Translation Synchronization Notification team. Similar to the below.

Dear Customer,

Your R12 Translation Synchronization patch 12345678 for Simplified Chinese is available at:

https://updates.oracle.com/ARULink/SimpleSearch/process_form?search_type=patch&patch_number=12345678&plat_lang=14L

 The current authorization password is “hello2323″. It is valid for 7 days from the date of this email. You may access all your Translation Synchronization patches at any time, with up-to-date passwords, at the following URL:

https://updates.oracle.com/TransSync

 Contact Oracle Support if you have any issue or concern with this patch.

 You just have to download the patches and apply in the appropriate instance using adpatch.

Once done, ensure you generate the message files.

Thats it

Useful MOS note: Requesting Translation Synchronization Patches [ID 252422.1]

 

Tip of the week: changing IP in EBS environment

Tip of the week

What you need to do if ip addresses of EBS servers changed.

In apps-tier perform the following.

1. Clear cache and Force compile all the jsp pages using the following:
$ cd $FND_TOP/patch/115/bin
$  perl -x ojspCompile.pl –compile –flush

2. Regenerate JAR files

Thanks to Marc Cole.

 

Reset Weblogic password in Oracle Fusion Middleware Environment

Tip of the week: How to reset Weblogic password in Oracle Fusion Middleware Environment

As weblogic being core to Oracle’s Fusion Middleware product suite, we tend to get into embarrassing situations such as losing weblogic password

If it happens to you, below post should help you to reset the password.

NOTE: Take a backup of entire domain completely before making any changes.

1.- Take the back of the LDAP folder of the admin server as well as managed server (you may rename those folders) and then delete the actual LDAP folder (found at <Domain_Home>\servers\<MyServer>\data\ldap).

2. Make sure WebLogic instance is down.

3. Set your environment variables using setDomainEnv.cmd

4. cd to security directory in your instance.
(eg: $WL_HOME/user_projects/domains/base_domain/security)

5. Run:
java weblogic.security.utils.AdminAccount admin_user admin_pass .

Remember to change “admin_user” and “admin_pass” to your required username and password.
Also, don’t forget the period “.” at the end of the above command, it is required.

6. After running the command, the file “DefaultAuthenticatorInit.ldift” will get updated.

7. Delete the following file from “ldap” folder:

cd WL_HOME/user_projects/domains/base_domain/servers/AdminServer/data/ldap
rm DefaultAuthenticatormyrealmInit.initialized

8. Go to folder DOMAIN_HOME/servers/AdminServer/security

9. Edit the boot.properties file and change the password to the value already used on step 5. Do this for all the servers in the domain.

10. Start Weblogic Server (Weblogic Server will encrypt the password for you)