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...]
Using Checksums to Ensure Table Consistency in MySQL
If you're using MySQL replication, chances are your master and slave databases aren't entirely consistent. There are a number of reasons for this. Some MySQL functions like UUID() don't replicate properly with statement based replication. Poor network connectivity can sometimes result in corrupted relay logs. Misconfigured software can … [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...]
Exploring Oracle 11g Tablespace Encryption
Tablespace encryption encrypts data at the datafile level to keep people from being able to peek at the oracle datafiles directly. Oracle 10 allowed us to encrypt certain columns, and starting in Oracle 11, tablespace encryption is made available. First we'll need to setup oracle wallet. … [Read more...]
MySQL 5.1GA
As is usually the case with fresh versions of software, we advise clients to move forward judiciously. This release has a bit of a hubbub surrounding it on the internet regarding Monty Widenius' post titled "Oops we did it again". Monty's article is an excellent summary of what does and doesn't work as well as putting in an obligatory (though … [Read more...]
BlueGecko’s focus on people true to brand
Blue Gecko has been mentioned in a great article on brands. Sharpen Your Competitive Edge with Tangible Brand by Mary Weisnewski Consulting Magazine, October 30, 2008 … [Read more...]
New whitepaper: Proactive Maintenance for E-Business Suite
This paper outlines a proactive strategy for maintaining Oracle E-Business Suite. By developing a core technology maintenance plan, future patching and upgrade efforts will be easier, and E-Business Suite will be more stable. Download the paper from our whitepaper page. … [Read more...]
Managing databases and other stuff
Databases exist to store data. That said, a database is infrequently useful entirely on it's own. So, managing databases means that we're often interacting with applications that access that data. Some of the common applications that we work with include Oracle E-Business Suite, Tomcat, Apache and ColdFusion. We had an entertaining problem … [Read more...]
Busy couple of weeks
We've been working on lots of new customers and in our spare time writing a few scripts and white papers. I've added a link to the right to download Chuck Edwards' paper on encrypting Oracle traffic with SSH tunnels. Ed's been working hard on some handy Oracle scripts and I'll have that tarball published sometime this week. In the mean time, … [Read more...]
Monocle – Can’t Sit Still
Well, it’s been a little over a week since we’ve made our monitoring tools available to the open source community. It’s always a bit interesting to take something used internally and try to package it in such a way that it will be useful to others. I hope those of you who have downloaded Monocle have had an opportunity to … [Read more...]
Monocle – Open Source Oracle Monitoring
Last week we soft launched our new monitoring product Monocle. We’ve been slowly adding more links and publicity to point people to our code repo. Get Oracle database monitoring here. (Couldn’t resist a bit of SEO linking.) Anyway, this is the official press release. We’re super excited about actually sharing the monitoring … [Read more...]
Alfred P. Sloan Award for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility
Blue Gecko was named a winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Award for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility in 2007, 2008, 2009 & 2010 distinguishing us as one of the top practitioners of workplace flexibility in the nation. “Two of the biggest issues for employers in today’s economy are recruitment of top talent and retention of valued … [Read more...]
New whitepaper: Exploring ADR in Oracle Database 11g
It’s inevitable that at some time failures will occur in a database, particularly when the database has issues with self-reporting of faults. DBAs often lack the necessary time, knowledge, and/or skills to resolve an outage. For this reason, Oracle has introduced the Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR) in Oracle Database 11g. Jeremiah Wilton … [Read more...]