Well we all have had a love hate relationship with My Oracle Support/Metalink or Metablink as it was satirically known by some in its earlier days. More recently I along with some friends and colleagues have had issues with how the flash interface altered how we do some things and I have had a grievance with using the knowledge base in particular how to return to a prior location when I click through support notes. It has neither been intuitive nor has it really worked all that well. This would not be my only gripe but I did what I could at various times raising concerns with things that bothered me.

I raised a call about a problem I was encountering with the function to log in again when the session expired and had a surprising response, stick with my work around as the Flash interface is leaving us. Of course the usual Safe harbor statements where included, but joy oh joy it is going, one can only hope the usability of the next iteration is a whole lot better. The question I am now interested is will it be HTML5 and does that mean the next update of APEX is html5 compliant. I can see a lot of developers being very happy about that.

I gues teh other question everyone will now want to know is when?? OpenWorld or sooner, this is the big question, I guess when the next Apex release is out might be the time.

See ya round

Peter

The decision that was announced on the 23rd March 2011 to drop Itanium support for new development seems to have ruffled some feathers and is being taken as an anti competitive stance. Well this is probably a very long bow to draw. Oracle may have an agenda to force people to use Sun/Oracle hardware. This will only have one benefit and that will be for IBM as a database vendor with wider cross platform support. Customers who bought Oracle for its open platform availability that there is no vendor lock in probably didn’t buy it for all the right reasons. Of course it is also a pretty hard to argue that they are somehow shrinking the vendor options with Oracle supporting the database and other products on Linux of various flavours as well as hardware vendor of choice. I think many bought Oracle for its feathres and whilst cross platform has enhanced its power as a vendor its not the key reason businesses bought it

Itanium has had a troubled history and as a result probably never reached the market penetration it might have had. I can remember going to a HP roadshow back around1998, where HP touted the replacement of the current PA-Risc architecture with these new fancy Itaniums. Unfortunately they had many performance issues in the early days that took the gloss of the platform. I think it was being touted as a Alpha killer. This never eventuated and the Alpha only got killed when DEC was sold to Compaq who on sold to HP who sold the Alpha to Intel and then Intel after studying it scrapped it as they had already made an investment in Itanium.

So this now looks like the end of Itanium and it is probably a lesson to the world on outsourcing. HP outsourced the chip which was a flagship product in effect and now suffer the consequences of this decision. Without Microsoft and Oracle on the platform that takes a lot out of the software choices for that platform.

Image via CrunchBase

I suspect it will take more than ten years to see its end and the last one to end its life in business.

So is it anti-competitive as it pulls the rug from under HP well no not really unless you some how equate databases as only being from Oracle and that means you haven’t looked very deep in the market. HP will still have Oracle on Intel. IBM still have Oracle on P series and with the choice of any Intel vendor with Windows or Linux there is little place for calling it anti-competitive.

I am sure Larry will sell HP some Sparcs for a few servers if they want them

See ya round

Peter

• Practical Analysis: Oracle Vs. HP — Who’s Got Your Back? (informationweek.com)
• Oracle on Intel Itanium: HP misleading customers (zdnet.com)

Working to get an Identity Management installation up and running using Oracle 11g Fusion Middleware and hit a stumbling block. You see I found an error code I cannot find any reference to when trying to get Oracle Internet Directory installed. It seems to be trying to find something of which I cannot seem to identify.  The error contains the error code INST-5145 This is caused by having firewalls and SE Linux enabled, it seems it couldn’t connect to some component to asses something and that breaks the installation process.

It is a little annoying that Oracle hasn’t published these installer errors anywhere, it would be good if they were available as a list in My Oracle Support. I have found a number of these INST errors in my attempts to build this test all caused by issues that are not shown as prerequisites, like 4gb RAM is an absolute minimum to get an installation Identity Management  running. I have come across a number of blogs relating to installing Identity Management (OIM) and I must be the luckiest guy around, because none of them it seems encountered any errors.

I have a beef about the installer as well, I have run into errors, caused by me for the most part, hey if you don’t break it how do you learn. The installer once you start configuring if it finds an error you need to go back and redo your configuration again, why can I not use the back button why only the retry, this seems a little silly to me, but hey I am only the guy trying to install it.

Some additional issues encountered are problems with Nodemanager doesn’t start during configuration, if this is supposed to be started why doesn the install guide say so.

There is a good one here to help with a real show stopper i had and that is the problem of running out of memory. Check out this “My Oracle Support” note [ID 865166.1] to get some very useful assistance. Until you are ready to go into some solid testing or production I would suggest you try altering the described parameters to suit your requirements getting the best out of a given set of physical resources.

So my recommendation for anyone trying to install OID use more than 4GB, it should save you finding out some things.

See ya round

Peter

Taking a week off while Open World is on might not be such a great idea, but being disconnected from the net for a week was pretty refreshing.

Oracle has decided that Kernel development needs a shove, and has decided to release its own variant of the kernel for Linux. With what I can see there is no real reason to be concerned with what Oracle has done, the API fro the kernel still support the standard glibc for that level of kernel. Oracle says that if an application runs on Oracle Linux without the modified kernel then it will run on a system using it. Seriously from my way of thinking, if I run Oracle Linux, I can always run Centos or Redhat to support my non Oracle software.

I have been working with a site that has been looking at setting up a RAC cluster and the question was asked of me as to what should we do about this event. incorporate the kernel or avoid it. As the project is still in its early phases I have said adopt it and test it. There is always the fall back in the event of real issues being identified that provide a severity one bug case and no timely fix.

I will be doing some testing of the system with some other non oracle products to see if I encounter any difficulties.

I guess from the point of what Oracle does  with this, if they radically alter the kernel and stop other software running then it is always Linus’ choice to look to revoking the Linux License from Oracle on the basis that it is then no longer Linux. I highly doubt that Oracle is really interested in treading that path.

Summing it all up I think this is good for Oracle and good for Linux as sooner or later these enhancements will filter back to Linux

See ya round

Peter

I was  just read again the article at ITNews about how Larry sees the future of Oracle under his stewardship. I can only say that for someone that relies on the Oracle ecosystem for my bread and butter I can’t be happier. The business that will keep me going with employment is in the middle of this and will require myself and many others that want to be involved for some time to come. I must say I am surprised by the Exadata figures, $1billion in the pipeline is pretty impressive and shows how the future of the Sun Oracle relationship might improve the livelihood of those people that relied on the old Sun ecosystem and that there is a lot of life in the old Sun dog yet and that can only be good for them. Interesting the statements about Silicon it makes sense, there is a number of technologies that Oracle has that will excel as embedded technologies in the silicon. These would include database functions for data handling, already doing this in the Exadata, but expect it to become more widespread as time goes on. There is crypto capabilities in some of the inherited hardware for Sun and this will become more tightly coupled for Advanced Security, SSL on the middle tier  and other functionality where crypto is required in some measure. Embedded databases using say Times Ten might become a reality Coherence embedded in the network layer., so caching is very close to the network adaptor.

What else did Larry say of interest EMC is vulnerable, thats interesting they have a great product group and solid products with a strong market share in virtualization and yet Larry has in effect said watch this space. Interesting fight ahead is what I see.

See ya round

Peter