I know I’m not alone, and I know I’m not the first to express displeasure, but let me just say: AAAARRRRRRRGHHHH!!!!! I’m going to call the new Metalink “Metaflash.” Seems like a good name for it. It combines “meta” and “flash” which sounds really hip and technical, yet communicates nothing. Kind of like shoving “i” or “e” in front of a … [Read more...]
How to hire a really good Oracle DBA
Many of our customers have internal database administrators. FACT: Any remote DBA organization, and I mean ANY one of them, should be excited to work with a talented on-site person; in fact, part of good remote DBA support should be to help clients hire good DBAs when appropriate. Without fail, collaboration between solid, focused technical … [Read more...]
Linux is the only choice for the E-Business Suite application tier
Some single points of failure are often unnecessary with Oracle E-Business Suite. By design, application code may easily run on multiple, inexpensive x86 (or x86_64) nodes running Linux. I often see organizations spending lots of money on commercial, internally redundant application computing nodes when they could be spending far less while … [Read more...]
FRM-40501: Could not reserve record [2 tries]; Oracle Apps Record-Locking
One of your end users attempts to modify a record, and the user is prompted with a dialog box asking "Could not reserve record [2 tries]. Keep trying?" The user answers "yes" and after being prompted a few more times the user gives up. Ultimately the user gets a "FRM-40501: ORACLE error: unable to reserve record for update or delete." When … [Read more...]
Enterprise Database Security – A Practical Example
I attended this presentation without a lot of practical hands-on knowledge of using OID with either the database or E-Business Suite. Blue Gecko has several SOX-beholden customers, and we plan to implement OID for EBS soon; centralized control for database accounts would also be a huge boon. … [Read more...]
What should I check after bouncing E-Business Suite?
As an Oracle Apps administrator, it's a good idea to have a punch list of things to check after your applications have been started, to ensure all services are working correctly. For Release 11i, the following steps are a good starting point. It will take a few extra minutes to work through this list, but it's certainly more aggravating to get … [Read more...]
FNDCPASS doesn’t always use the SYSTEM password
FNDCPASS does not check the system password when used to change an applications user account. We can check this with a simple test. First, we’ll change the SYSTEM password to the default value “manager”: … [Read more...]
Why should I properly close my Oracle E-Business Suite session?
We've all been there before. It's noon, and you're co-worker is telling you to tidy up - it's time to go to lunch. Your E-Business Suite session is idle, and in your haste you simply click the 'X' at the top of your browser. You know it's not the proper thing to do, but you're not sure of the implications.... What happens when I close my session … [Read more...]
Seattle-area Oracle Applications Tech Group
Announcing the first meeting of the Seattle Oracle Applications Technology Group! This group will be dedicated to knowledge sharing and learning between Oracle Applications Technology professionals in the Puget Sound area. I'm hopeful we can get a regular group of Apps DBAs, developers, Apps admins, and other people connected with E-Business … [Read more...]
Firefox 3 certified against E-Business Suite
Steven Chan posted on his blog yeterday that Oracle has announced certification of E-Business Suite and Firefox 3. There are some pre-requisites which should be carefully reviewed, but this is great news for E-Business Suite customers pining to get off of Firefox 2. The framework patch 7651759 in particular specifically targets Firefox 3 users … [Read more...]
ORA-04031 and ASMM
Oracle E-Business Suite customer was reporting ORA-04031 errors being returned by the database. There were a number of ORA-04031 shared pool errors generated in the alert by background processes: ORA-04031: unable to allocate 168 bytes of shared memory ("shared pool","select t.ts#,t.file#,t.block...","Heap0: KGL","kglob") I checked the shared … [Read more...]
Monitor the X display for E-Business Suite
Those running Oracle's E-Business Suite on Linux/UNIX environments are probably familiar with a dependency on some X display technology to render graphics. One could use a VNC Server or Xvfb, for example, to fill this need. XML Publisher and OPP depend on an X display to create rich reports/documents with images & graphics such as AP Checks, … [Read more...]
Phase in the Sun JRE plug-in
By now you probably know error correction support ends for JInitiator for E-Business Suite on July 31, 2009 (see Metalink note 552692.1). There has been a lot of strong encouragement from Oracle to migrate to the Sun JRE Native plug-in prior to the de-support date: Note 393931.1: Deploying Sun JRE (Native Plug-in) for Windows Clients in Oracle … [Read more...]
Request for simpler E-Business Suite diagnostics
A few weeks ago Steven Chan posted an open question on his blog asking how support for the E-Business Suite techstack could be improved. Specifically, he wanted to know how interaction with Oracle Support could improve. I sent a suggestion, but it didn't make the cut; he didn't post it. :( Since I spent a bit of time writing and editing, it … [Read more...]
Proactive Maintenance for Oracle E-Business Suite
As a remote services provider, often we are often asked to provide proactive maintenance support for clients. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to separate operational support form maintenance support. Operational support surrounds management of the application operations, as they exist. For example, if I’m running 11.5.10.2 on … [Read more...]