Tuesday, August 31, 2010

NEWS FLASH: Oracle R12 Applications DBA Field Guide Now Available

As readers of this blog, you may have been wondering if we were just a flash in the pan....I am here to state that we are not!  Our lack of posts in May - July were due to our activities with our latest project, the second edition of a book titled Oracle R12 Applications DBA Field Guide.

The OAUG will publish a press release this week about the guide.  I am enclosing the full press release in this post. 

Thanks for your patience with the blog. We will once again work towards providing you great tips to help you survive in the field.

Best Regards,
Elke


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NOW AVAILABLE: Oracle R12 Applications DBA Field Guide
CONTACT: Elke Phelps in partnership with the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG)
WEB SITE: See publications at www.coquitechandpress.com
EMAIL: services@coquitechandpress.com or Cindy Force, cforce@oaug.com

Dateline (September 1, 2010, Louisville, KY) --

Is your organization considering an upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Release 12, or have you recently performed a new installation or upgrade to Oracle EBS R12? As an Oracle Applications DBA, you may find that managing Oracle EBS R12 is substantially different from its R11i predecessor. Administering Oracle EBS R12 can be made easier with the Oracle R12 Applications DBA Field Guide, a portable reference manual that is now available. The guide is brought to via the partnership between author Elke Phelps and the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG).

The Oracle R12 Applications DBA Field Guide is the second edition book authored by Elke Phelps. The new edition provides essentials for administering the updated Oracle EBS Applications tier and technology stack, including Oracle 10gAS and Oracle Database 11g. The book includes guidelines and references to guide you through the management and deployment of Oracle EBS R12. Included in the guide are topics ranging from architecture, configuration, installation, cloning, patching, monitoring, troubleshooting to performance tuning.

Excerpt from the foreword by Steven Chan, Oracle E-Business Suite Development, Oracle Corporation, http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/

“In the first edition of the guide, the authors and reviewers managed to distill hundreds -- if not thousands -- of pages of the relevant Oracle manuals, release notes, ReadMes, Knowledge Base documents, and their own hard-won expertise, into a dense but remarkably-compact volume.

It wasn't comprehensive by any means, and didn't claim to be. That was its strength. It was able to see the forest for the trees. It touched on nearly everything important that a DBA would really need to know about administering an Oracle E-Business Suite environment without drowning the reader in unnecessary details…

…and it was small enough to fit into a laptop bag.

They have done an excellent job with this second edition, which has been refreshed and expanded without losing its concise and practical focus. You hold the product of many years of experience in your hands, one that I expect will save you countless hours of arduous research and painful experimentation.”

Even for the experienced database administrator, Oracle Applications are complicated to administer, and most documentation that is available is difficult to find and understand. Whether you're an experienced Oracle Applications DBA or new to Oracle Applications, (perhaps experienced with PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, or Siebel), this book will enable and ease the administration and efficiency of day-to-day tasks. For more information about the Oracle R12 Applications DBA Field Guide by Elke Phelps or to purchase the guide, go to www.coquitechandpress.com

About the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG®)
Founded in 1990, the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) is the world’s largest knowledgebase for Oracle Applications users. The organization serves as an advocate to Oracle Corp. for companies worldwide. The OAUG provides users with education, networking and support via a wide range of activities and forums including conferences, publications, special interest groups and online communities. For more information about the OAUG, visit the website at oaug.org.

About the Author
Elke Phelps is an Oracle Certified Professional and Technical Architect focusing on Oracle Applications deployments. Elke's experience with Oracle Technology began in 1993. Her primary areas of expertise include Oracle Database and E-Business Suite deployments and upgrades, platform migrations and infrastructure design. Elke's advocacy of Oracle Technology through the publication of the first edition of the Oracle Applications DBA Field Guide (Apress, 2006), the publication of white papers, leadership of the Oracle E-Business Applications Technology Special Interest Group (SIG) and presentations at Oracle conferences since 2004 has earned her the designation of Oracle ACE in 2007 and Oracle ACE Director in 2009. She is a contributor to the blog hosted at http://www.fieldappsdba.com/.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Running Multiple Versions of JRE Plugin

It is possible to run multiple versions of the JRE plugin on different clients. The EBS is set to use one default value for the plugin for all clients. However, in some situations it may be required to run different versions for different clients. Maybe one part of the organization requires a laster version of the plugin for security purposes. Or some users could be testing a different version of the plugin before rolling it out to the rest of the users.

To allow some users to use a different version of the client, you need to complete a couple of steps.

First, you need to update the appsweb_${CONTEXT_FILE}.cfg file in $COMMON_TOP/html/bin to add a section for the JRE additional version you want to support.

There is also an autoconfig template file, appsweb.cfg, in $FND_TOP/admin/template/custom directory. This needs to be updated usig context variables in order to preserve your additions following AutoConfig runs.

Finally, for users who need to run the additional version of JRE, their ICX_FORMS_LAUNCHER profile value needs to be customized.

An example of these steps to update some users to JRE 1.6.0_17 is listed below:
1. Update appsweb_${CONTEXT_FILE}.cfg
[J16017]
connectMode=socket
serverPort=[your forms port]
sun_plugin_classid=clsid:CAFEEFAC-0016-0000-017-ABCDEFEDCBA
sun_plugin_version=1.6.0_17
sun_plugin_url=https://[your url]/OA_HTML/j2se16017.exe
sun_plugin_mimetype=application/x-java-applet;jpi-version=1.6.0_17
sun_plugin_legacy_lifecycle=false
plugin=jdk

2. In the template file, add the following.
[J16017]
connectMode=socket
serverPort=%s_formsport%
sun_plugin_classid=clsid:CAFEEFAC-0016-0000-017-ABCDEFEDCBA
sun_plugin_version=1.6.0_17
sun_plugin_url=%s_webentryurlprotocol%://%s_webentryhost%.%s_webentrydomain%:%s_active_webport%/OA_HTML/j2se16017.exe
sun_plugin_mimetype=application/x-java-applet;jpi-version=1.6.0_17
sun_plugin_legacy_lifecycle=false
plugin=jdk

3. Update user's profile value
fnd_profile.save('ICX_FORMS_LAUNCHER','https://[your url]/dev60cgi/f60cgi?config=J16017','USER',[userid]);

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Download VM Templates for Oracle E-Business Suite

The VM Templates can be a little tricky to find on the Oracle web site. If you go to the Oracle E-Delivery web site, the VM Templates cannot be found directly on that site. If you need to download the VM Templates for E-Business Suite you can follow these procedures.

To download the templates you have to navigate to the Oracle Virtualization Downloads web site.
This is http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/virtualization/downloads/index.html

From the Downloads tab, select the Oracle VM link.

This link will direct you to the Oracle E-Delivery Web site for Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM. In Media Pack Search screen, select the Oracle VM Templates Product Pack.

Choose the appropriate templates from this screen. For example, select the Oracle VM Templates for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.1 Vision Media Pack for x86 (32 bit) product that has eleven parts and 38G worth of data. Click Continue to progress to the screen with the 11 parts listed out. Select each part to download it.

Depending on your connection speed this can take quite a while. Be sure to track which parts you've downloaded so that you don't miss any of the parts. The last thing you want to do is unzip all of the files and begin the install only to realize that you did not download one of the files.