QLD Performance by Design + Optimising Oracle on VMWare, by Guy Harrison (Quest Software): Monday, May 24, 2010 03:00pm Where: Oracle House, Level 14 300 Ann St Brisbane When: Monday, May 24, 2010 03:00pm – 05:30pm RSVP: RSVP to vicepresident.qld@ausoug.org.au to advise your attendance by close of business on 20-MAY-2010. Alternatively, indicate your attendance now: Yes No No, not interested in topic

Guy Harrison, Director of R&D at Quest Software, will be presenting two great topics at our May meeting.

The first topic Guy will be sharing his insights on is Performance by Design and the second is Optimising Oracle on VMWare. We have also invited members of the VM User Group to attend, given the shared interest area.

Agenda:

3:00pm Welcome 3:10pm Performance by Design 4:00pm Tea break 4:15pm Optimizing Oracle on VMWare 5:00pm Questions, networking 5:30pm Finish

Guy Harrison is a director of research and development at Quest Software, and has over twenty years experience in application and database administration, performance tuning, and software development. Guy is the author of Oracle Performance Survival Guide (Prentice Hall, 2009) and MySQL Stored Procedure Programming (O’Reilly with Steven Feuerstein) as well as other books, articles and presentations on database technology. Guy is the architect of Quest’s Spotlight® family of diagnostic products and has contributed to the development of other Quest products such as Toad®

Please use the buttons on this email to RSVP for this event – we appreciate your co-operation and it helps greatly for catering purposes.

See ya round

Peter

I have finally gotten around to getting a small but decent Server set up to build a set of Oracle servers on to create some testing environments. To do this I have a with box with an Asus P5KPL-CM motherboard with a Intel E2200 CPU and 4Gb RAM, probably sort of small but this is a start to being able to do some half decent testing of new products.  For reasons not quite clear I tried to do this on Citrix Xen Server. No great drama, download the CD and the Linux Pack and get to installing this was around 300gb in total.

Next was to install Oracle Linux and I also have a Centos Server on this configuration to build non Oracle products Download a few ISO’s and there in is my problem. I should have installed and got Xen working first.  The problem I encountered is that Xen has types of templates it uses to create a build environment for installing various Linuxes and Windows.  I had in my wisdom downloaded Centos 5 Update 3 and Oracle EL 5 update 4. Xen is not able to install either. So two more Downloads and I had the appropriate version of each 5.2 for Centos and Update 2 of OEL.  I am not sure what is involved with the bits required to support newer versions but it is a bug bear when there is nothing obvious about this.

While that was happening I had tried to install Xen on the host in question, cannot recognize the Atheros drivers used on many mother boards.  Most Linux has problems with those. I went back to the computer shop I use FTC in Sunnybank and obtained a network card for it. this time a TP-link with Realtek chipset on board. Xen could see it, it could use it but the driver made this about as flaky as it could be.  So download the driver development kit try and install it to build a better driver. Installation of the VM into the server kept failing due to the flakiness of the river being used. Just to clarify that is probably a fine driver with the correct chipset, I think mine was a borderline case of a match. After a few days of trying out went the TP-link for an alternative. I finally settled on a D-Link 503 which is on the HCL and can be obtained for around $50. Using the Xensource HCL is a must it seems for some of your kit to get this working. In the end it is just plain easier..

So I have succeeded to get 5 update 2 of Centos and OEL installed and have yum updating the installation of OEL as I write this. Should have a 5upd4 install after this is finished, might yet bump that to update 5, but can do that later some time

To get the update to happen you need to link back to the public repository using the following

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d# wget http://public-yum.oracle.com/public-yum-el5.repo

Activate the repositories you want as per the instructions on Public YUM server

Information available from Public YUM Server

Certainly a challenge without a bit of foresight and knowledge learned

 

See ya round

 

Peter

 

 

 

I have been reviewing documentation for 11g and thought I might distil out a number of new features of Oracle Forms and Reports for 11g. The first one I found interesting is that  of JavaScript on the client applet to allow interactions around the applet with with other items displayed on the browser page. Let me see a possible scenario. I could use Java script to make calls to some data source and at any time by clicking on a field displayed from that data source cause either a search to occur in the form, or update a value in a filed in the form. Of course the reverse is also possible that I could be able to update records in another database when I update a form using Java script to call out to update a field external to the Forms applet. This could allow people to build integration between Java Apps and Forms apps that will be somewhat easier. I could from my Java Application call and load another application and display it on the screen. That screen could be a Forms application and based on the record displayed from the Java application display the appropriate data in Forms. I see how that might be useful for company with a lot of legacy tied into Forms applications. Of course what you can do in each application is regulated by its own security model is a user could be able to review in Forms and update the html driven data.

Single sign on with OID has had an enhancement for password changes. In 11g when a user changes their password in the Form, as has been the case, the password propagates to the database as necessary. It now also updates the Resource Access Descriptor (RAD) in the Internet Directory. This would mean that in cases where two way integration was enabled to the Corporate directory server which might be Active Directory the password would change in that system as well propagating that password change across the organisation. I know I am going to find others that are of interest so I shall keep looking and post any updates.

See ya round

Peter

oracle, fusion middleware, forms 11g

For those of you that have been around Oracle Application Server for some time you will know that the repository or as it may be known Metadata or Infrastructure database  had a number of shortcomings, one of which that you could not install two SOA instances in 10.1. 3 using the same database. Now don’t ask as to why you might do that, it was however considered a requirement at the time, so we did what we could to implement it and no you cannot.  With 11g the Repository Configuration Utility (RCU) which you use to build the repository allows you to have a prefix. I see this as great as I can have a database for all my developers central on suitable hardware and each developer works with their own repository tables. if these screw that up then its only there development that is impacted. There will be a lot of other fine uses, like multiple test domains that we can now host those repositories in a single database. I really love this feature and good on you Oracle for including it. The other thing I like about rcu is that I is only available in Windows or Linux, no that doesn’t mean you can only have your repository on Windows or Linux, it can be in any supported database on whatever platform is  allowed. Its a GUI desktop tool and they are the chosen platforms to run the tool. This will make this tool more robust as there is only two platforms.  The tool is pretty straightforward to use, you only need build a database on a suitable platform and then unzip the download files and run rcu.bat on windows in the bin directory. Follow the prompts and after about 1 to 2 hours depending on hardware you end up with a ready repository

I encountered an issue or a quirk that could do with ironing out. The screen where you can set up credentials for each schema/user that needs to be built and by checking check-boxes. When doing that if I checked 2 check-boxes I could overwrite important information which included the schema name. Perhaps radio buttons might be better there.

Great and

See ya round

Peter

oracle, fusion middleware

The Melbourne conference is over and had a great time. It was great to meet up with some old friends and meet some new ones.  As I have in recent times been doing much more work with Middleware I opted to do a presentation on the first day which went all day with the title of “SOA for DBA’s” presented by Lucas Jellema for Amis in the Netherlands. For anyone who works with Oracle databases and has an interest in working more with SOA I recommend this. If you need to learn a bit of what it is about to help provide better support to the middleware people working with SOA this is a presentation well worth the time. From someone who was  interested I got my moneys worth on this one day of the conference.

After a bit of effort to learn some of the material I will hopefully be able to present some of that to the local Oracle consulting people via the Queensland AUSOUG section.

The next day I was fulfilling my obligation to support the conference by taking up the role of a room monitor for the day. I was provided the opportunity to support Peter Koletzke with his presentation of “A Guide to Fusion Web Development with JDeveloper 11 ” this was another full day session and he provided us with an insight into how far Oracle’s vision of Forms development with Java has come. I enjoyed this presentation as it has further expanded my idea’s of the future of Oracle middleware as a platform. I did not realise how simple it had become to develop applications with 11g. Whilst Java purists might baulk at the idea that I  can create a full working application without writing a line of code, I think it is brilliant. A large part of the application can be done but screen builders, but the stuff I might need a Java expert for would the the sort of stuff any Java expert would want to get there teeth into. This is going to be great for Agile development going forward as in a day I could knock up functioning screens for an application to present to a client for initial review, using the functionality of Jdeveloper 11g as it now stands.

So my summary was is that I had a great conference. I did learn a lot of great new information and will certainly be expanding my skills further into the middleware space as it sure is going to be exciting in the near future as projects come online. It was great to catch up with Connor and Chris and others.

I have a bit of video and some photos to go through to see if there is anything that came out good enough for publishing online of the conference

A patch update came from Jdeveloper 11g came out in the past few days It is probably worth the upgrade as there  is a few glitches in the original release 11g Jdeveloper

See ya round

Peter