Hans Forbrich Blog

Oracle Support - First Impressions

2012-01-30T09:53:00.001-07:00

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives. Make it a good day ...

Just logged on to the new My Oracle Support at https://supporthtml.oracle.com using Firefox 9.0.1 and Chrome 16. ... So far so interesting. As compared to my response to the Flash version, I am pleased to give this a passing grade.

Both browsers provide very snappy response, so the ADF implementation seems reasonably good. ADF is assumed since the URL references 'faces'. If true, this will be a great poster child for ADF and hopefully Oracle will provide some details - version of ADF, coding techniques, lessons learned.

On Firefox, I was greeted by a Personalization display to verify my information. Apparently Canada no longer has provinces, as that dropdown is greyed out. I'll assume an early implementation quirk.

Browser BACK BUTTON WORKS! At least for those areas I tried. Thank You!

Dashboard:

We still are forced to see "News" and "Getting Started". Hopefully these boxes will become intelligent but at least we can minimize them.

However: Psych 101 - excessively repeated exposure results in ignoring the message.

Knowledge:

Using the Knowledge Browser is amusing. First text box is 'Product Name' with autocomplete and type-ahead search. So type in 'Server' and instead of seeing Oracle Server, the company's bread and butter, we start up with all sorts of application server variants. Type in 'Database' and you still scroll down several pages to see that which the probable majority of MOS users will be needing. How about a check-box quick filter on "x Applications x Tools x Management x Middle Tier x Data Tier" to assist?

That said, it is fun to use the multiple box entry technique to get to Certify in stead of clicking the Certify tab.Seriously, though, I can see how this browser will help. Still a bit crude, but in the right direction.

Service Requests:

Looks clean. Right now I have no need to open a SR - and don't particularly want to have a need.

Patches and Updates:

Looks identical to the old HTML. Which is great, because that is the most important area of MOS for me, and the HTML version (especially the quick links section) was by far the most usable part of MOS. Also much more responsive than before.

Certifications:

I am reasonably pleased with the changes introduced in the Certifications area last year. Still a bit confusing, but very very functional. And also very responsive.

For the other screens, I can only comment on the clean lines, quick update response and general appearance. The look and feel is professional and clean - I wonder whether Oracle will allow us to use custom CSS to tailor that LAF?

First impressions are favorable. Now to see how it works in real life ... we have all experienced released Prototype code before which falls flat under production load and exceptions. Somehow I get the impression this will not be Prototype code.

New UI coming for Oracle Support

2011-12-23T06:29:00.001-07:00

Just received the email this morning - Oracle Support interface is changing again. In a nutshell, they are converting from the HTML and Flash interfaces to an Oracle ADF-based interface. This will be happening over the next month and a bit. I applaud the decision to use the Oracle ADF product. I look forward to seeing whether Oracle has learned anything about UI design from the miserable Flash interface. And I do wonder why they insist on eliminating the useful SupportHTML interface for pure query work.This should be interesting. A lot of the lull in the past few years has been due to the Support interface. If this works, I may just start being happy with Oracle again.

Yippee - Oracle VM 3

2011-08-23T20:53:00.001-06:00

Over on Oracle blogs, we find http://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/entry/great_things_come_in_3s

Announcing Oracle VM 3.0. Still not available for download, but at least there are white papers and stuff. RSN!

Oracle LA Tour Part 2

2011-07-26T11:58:00.005-06:00

Yes, Virginia, there is a Part 2. Not quite the same way as expected, though.

Last October we toured Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Costa Rica. A few of us added some extra trips - Dan Morgan (DB, RAC), Ben Prusinski (DB, Apps) and I added a day in Macchu Piccu, Peru (from where I celebrated my wife's birthday); I got a tour of Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay; Francisco Alvarez (DB), Ronald Bradford (MySQL) and I scooted to Galapagos; Ronald and I had a tour of the Costa Rican country and jungle.

But, by far more important and memorable was the amazing set of presentations and people in each location. In most cities, we ended up at a University to do the presentation. Local user group members hosted and presented. In spite of the language barrier, I learned an amazing amount and was able to present on the "Basics of App Servers for DBAs", "Spatial" and "Fusion Middleware". Due to Visa timing, (Immigration, not Credit) I had to miss Brazil in October.

Francisco organized an even better tour this time, although he himself could not attend in person. Debra Lilley (Apps) has a very significant description of the tour on her blog at http://debrasoracle.blogspot.com/ for those interested in more detail than I provide here. I posted an awful lot (for me) on Facebook as well.

The tour this time went San Jose, Costa Rica; Quito, Ecuador; Cartagena, Colombia; Lima, Peru; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Montevideo, Uruguay; Santiago, Chile.

I had a seminar to present at the beginning of July, so I missed Costa Rica, and the wonderful people there. I was sorry not to see Gerardo - who always gives us an interesting time - and people like Alejandra (my handler last time, and an absolutely charming young lady) and the rest of the ULACIT group.

So my first stop was with Paola, Christian and the ECUOUG. Debra's notes are more than decent for the area. I was a bit off-energy as I got to the hotel at 1AM before the 8AM conference on Friday. But the city and the people are exactly as friendly and welcoming as last time. Afterward, dinner with Tom Kyte and Megan, Debra Lilley, Kuassi Mensah (DB Connectivity) and Murali Vallath (DB, RAC), Ronald Bradford (MySQL) and Cindy. Tom and Megan ended their tour at Ecuador.

Saturday 3AM wakeup call came quickly since the plane to Cartagena, Colombia was fairly early. Robin and the Colombian team made us very welcome on Sunday, and I enjoyed the boat, although Debra didn't quite like it as much. On Monday, Arup Nanda (DB, RAC) joined us, as did Manuel Contreras and Pedro Andrade (Oracle MySQL) at the ASUOC sessions held at the Universidad Tecnológica de Bolivar. Many thanks to all there.

We left Cartagena Tuesday afternoon to fly to Lima, Peru. Arrived at 1AM on Wednesday the morning of our presentations. Debra was keynote in the conference, held at the NM Hotel in Miraflores. This one was a 2 day conference, with the second day providing some very in depth sessions. I did enjoy Graham Wood's session - he joined us there and stayed 'till the end. I would have enjoyed Miguel's session the next day as he is a good, very knowledgeable, speaker. As it was, we parted after dinner (thanks Miguel and PEOUG) the first night, with several of us heading on to Brazil on Thursday, some coming later, and Murali heading back.

On Thursday, Kuassi, Arup and I became the advance guard to Sao Paulo, Brazil. The GUOB – Grupo de Usuários de Tecnologia Oracle do Brasil is an amazing user group: extremely efficient, highly tuned, and very hospitable. Due to time required to complete the visa, I could not attend the Brazil tech day in person in October (only by webcast), so I excited to see Sao Paulo in person. I was certainly not disappointed. Amazing, astonishingly large, and astoundingly clean. You can tell the locals have pride in their city. Kai Yu from Dell joined the tour at that time, so I was able to enjoy both Kai's and Kuassi's sessions. Debra and Graham, Ronald and Cindy joined arrived Friday and stayed Sunday, whereas Arup and Kuassi returned home on Sunday and Kai and I headed to Uruguay.

Almost everyone knows that I have a soft spot in my heart for Uruguay. The landscapes are similar to home. (Except that Alberta does not have the sea.) The climate feels like our spring, summer and fall - so no harsh winters. And the people are all truly friends on sight. We managed to be there when Uruguay won the semifinal of the COPA Americas cup, and a great time was had by all. Debra has captured some small sense of the time there. A small timing challenge, as our sessions were scheduled between the long weekend (Uruguay's Constitution day) and the COPA Americas games, so I am amazed that so many people showed up for the sessions at the Communications Tower. (Excellent facility, by the way.) For me, well, I can't wait to get back. To Edel, Nelson, Daniel, Bruno, Pablo, and the others, who provided such hospitality and unqualified friendship with open arms, I miss you. ;-)

Ronald and Cindy split off in Uruguay, which meant that it was up to Kai, Graham, Debra and myself to carry on to Santiago, Chile. This was the start of the OTN Tours, several years ago, when Francisco had a number of us present at the Ritz Carleton. The sessions were somewhat reduced but reasonably well attended. I found the time in Chile much more relaxed than ever before, but that may have been because we were starting to wind down. Thank you Felipe, for your efforts and your hospitality. You have seen a lot of changes in these 3 OTN Days, and have done a lot of work. Thank you.

Graham caught the flight out the evening of the sessions, Kai and I headed out on Saturday and Debra caught some tours and stayed until Sunday.

I left Santiago at 6:30 PM on an Air Canada 093, a plane that started in Buenos Aires a few hours earlier. After 12 hours in the air flying due North, I landed in Toronto, and two hours later took off on a 4 hour, west-north-west flight back to Edmonton.

Seventeen days, 94 hours in airports and airplanes, a dozen hours of formal discussions about Oracle and several dozen hours of informal Oracle team-building, much food and wine, some song, and a huge number of memories and friendships later, I got home.

Thank you to all the translators and interpreters for making my talks, and those of our colleagues, accessible to the attendees.

Thank you Francisco and the members of the the LAOUC for making it happen. I look forward to the next one.

Thank you Justin, Vikki, Lillian, the entire OTN Team, and Oracle for making it possible.

Saturday, October 9, 2010 Lima to Cuzco (Part 1)

2010-10-27T16:17:00.004-06:00

Saturday, October 9, 2010 Lima to Cuzco

Wow, 3:30 AM came early. ‘Specially considering we only got to bed around midnight.

I’d planned on repacking to just take my grey carry on bag and leave the big bag at the hotel since we return after Macchupicchu, but that one is still in the Lima airport – on the wrong side of Peruvian customs. So the decision is to take the big bag and go through the bag check-in process.

(As I later found out, the bag check and the bag pickup is not all that bad, in comparison to the time required to simply check in.)

We used a different route back, and (in spite of being dark), this was a lot more visually comfortable. I’m starting to get a feeling that Lima is real big, that there are no traffic rules that will be followed, and that the police have given up on the bulk of traffic control. The driver confirms this. There are a number of traffic circles and a few stop lights. Officially the people entering have right-of-way, but the reality is that the first to get to a spot, regardless of which ‘lane’ that spot is in, has the right of way and the rest have the right to honk. I use the term ‘lane’ loosely, since the marked lanes do not in any way correlate to the number of lanes being used. The vehicles are smaller (Peugot is common, as is Fiat) and they can sometimes get 4 or 5 abreast on a ‘2 lane’ road.

The public transit system is based on bus. There is no light rail transit. The busses (all sizes and shapes) seem to be colour coded, and people just flag them down when they want on. Some seem to go about ½ a block before being flagged again. In some areas, the lineup of different busses is literally a block long, with a lot of stop and go.

Anyway, Dan and I got to the airport before our target of 6:00AM. Limo has it’s privilege as it dropped us at the airport door. The first thing we noticed was that we could have arrived an hour earlier, as the lineup at LAN was incredible and SLOW. They wanted us to get the ticket first at the kiosk, then line up for checked bags, but the kiosk didn’t accept our reservation information.

Note to self: Always allow extra time at Lima airport. Or travel executive. ;-)

An hour in the line and we got to the counter. (Still no sign of Ben.) Oooooops – an oversold flight and we’ve been bumped, but fortunately only by ½ hour.

From the checkin counter, we head upstairs, first to pay the airport fee (different fees for domestic and international) and then through security. Dan’s carryon got flagged – he had a pair of moustache trim scissors that obviously could be dangerous, so they got confiscated. Finally a quick breakfast, and off to the gate.

Takeoff in Lima was uneventful, and we soon had our first glimpse of the Andes. That was cut short by the clouds and the fact that I was in a middle seat. As we approached Cusco, things cleared a bit and we had an incredible sight – it turns out that Cusco metropolitan area has over 1¼M people, scattered across an amazingly large set of mountains and high valleys.

After a loooooong approach, apparently due to the thin air at 13,000 feet, we landed on time. Off the plane, onto the tarmac, and into the terminal. Since I had a bag, Dan went to find out about taxi to the hotel, and to see whether he could resolve an issue with his Macchipicchu train ride, while I waited for my bag. First thing to notice was the ‘oxygen bar’ and the ads for portable oxygen. We soon found out why.

Dan found a tour operator - an enterprising young lady who had all the answers! She arranged for a taxi and escorted us to the hotel (which she uses as a base). She got us checked in at the Sonesta Hotel and then made our arrangements. These included an afternoon of sightseeing (private bus and guide) around Cusco, shuttle from bus to train (and back) for Sunday, and a contact number in case of issues.

Note to self: In Cusco, contact Karen Buleje Lazarte (linda_kbl@hotmail.com or reservas@inkastreasures.com) to arrange tours.

We finally caught up with Ben at the hotel. He had decided to take his own taxi to the Lima airport somewhat earlier than Dan and myself, and actually made it on the original plane.
First thing I noticed in Cusco is that it is a tourist town. One can find all the favorite American amenities, such as MacDonald’s. ;-) Also, it is very mountainous (duh!) and they build on the side of the mountains with abandon.

It sure is high up here, and if I move quickly or do some moderate exercise (even climbing the 3 flights to my room) I notice a slight shortage of breath. So for the duration, I need to slow down.

Another thing, and one we found out as soon as we were in the hotel, is that everyone drinks Coca tea. According to my guide from Macchupichu (tomorrow), the locals of Inca descent chew up to ½ kilo of Coca leaf a day. It is a vitamin and calcium supplement, and contains trace minerals, all of which are needed by the locals. And visitors – it does help with the altitude. Even Stanley got into the tea.

After settling into our hotel rooms, I took a quick look at the neighborhood. In front of the hotel is a monument with artificial waterfall. The local cabbies get pails of water from the pool to wash their cars. Across from that is an art and craft market.

Note to self: Get gifts from the market!

We had a quick lunch in the restaurant down the street from the hotel. One of the staff is a young lady dressed in traditional costume. Since Ben speaks Spanish, we asked him to ask her for a picture with Stanley. She was kind enough to do that, but quickly returned to work. We returned to the restaurant that evening and she was still working there.

Just after noon, we met up with our guide for the day for a relatively quick tour through Cusco. It is interesting to note that Cusco is shaped like a Pumo. The tour followed a bit of that and consisted of a trip to the historical Cathedral and convent at the main square, Plaza de Armas, which was build on top of the ancient Inca temple. Amazing thing about the original temple is the lack of 90 degree corners and mortar in the ‘bricks’. The shape of the blocks ad the close fit is very earthquake resistant. followed by a trip to the archeological dig at Conventas del Sacramentos, over to a silver smith and wool products store for some shopping for Alpaca and Vicuna wool products, and another ruins.

My only comment is ‘Wow!’ Repeatedly! In spite of the (relatively light) rain.

Friday October 8th, 2010 Edmonton->Lima via Houston

2010-10-27T16:15:00.001-06:00

I got up at 03:00 to get to the airport for a 6AM departure on Continental. As usual, Brinky’s was there right on time and it was a pleasant, albeit dark, drive to the airport. It turns out that this dark drive was the first of many!

Check-in at Continental was pleasant and fast. Even better, my Nexus card got me to the front of the security lineup. I checked in 2 bags and had my backpack as carry-on.

The plane to Houston left on time, and I dozed off and on for the flight, Arrived in Houston ahead of time and settled in. Daniel’s flight was pretty much on time and we met at the gate with enough time to order a bite to eat. However the restaurant was too busy to deliver the meal in a timely fashion and Dan had to take his lunch ‘to go’.

On to Lima … plane left on time with reasonable travel weather. We crossed the equator and headed to South America in the dark.

Landing in Lima was amazing. I never realized that Lima is both a city and a ‘province’ made up of a collection of ‘administrative districts’. Population of the province is over 7million, and from the air at night you can tell it is huge. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lima_Province and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_districts_of_Lima for more on this.)

Immigration is a simple matter – fill in the form, stand in line, smile at the agent, and get the passport stamp. (Remember to keep the second part of the form tucked away safely, because it’s needed to get out.) Wander through the duty free area as one enters the country (man … there are a lot of bright colours), and get to the baggage area.

We got to the baggage area around 10:00 PM. Dan and I chatted while waiting for my baggage. He only used carry-on. We were tired and distracted each other, so when I spotted my main bag, I grabbed it and we left.

We need to go through the customs area. The main concern is import revenue, and protecting local agriculture from foreign contaminants. Simple matter of handing the customs form (yet another form) to the customs agent and pushing a button to determine whether you are going to be inspected or just let through. Both Daniel and I got the green light and out the door to the hawkers of taxi rides.

An hour later I realized I had forgotten my smaller bag. (sigh) That will prove to give an adventure in itself.

Our hotel was the Doubletree in Miraflores. Miraflores is one of those administrative districts in the Lima ‘province’. A $45 / ½ hour cab ride later we check in to the hotel around and get to the room around midnight. There was a taxi desk just outside the customs area, but before the various individual driver get to molest you, so I grabbed a round trip fare. If you ask, they will give a discount on the round trip – but you gotta ask.

The drive was ‘interesting’. Lima has older, impoverished areas and we drive through areas that I would hesitate to walk through (probably because of the cultural differences). Houses surrounded by tall gates with electrified or razor wire at the top, or garden walls deliberately topped by broken glass, could unnerve me. However, viewed from the inside of a safe taxi (actually a Limo, based on what we were later to recognize as ‘taxi’) while listening to a golden oldies DVD, things were merely interesting, rather unnerving.

Note to self: Going to the hotel from Lima airport, arrange the taxi at the desk just outside the customs area, and get the round trip price.

We are supposed to meet Ben at the hotel, or have some communication with him, since we need to catch the 8AM flight, and we find out that means leaving the hotel by 5AM. Nothing, so I send him an email.

All in all it was simply a day of travel.

Good night! From an incredible upgraded room in Lima are.

Latin America OTN Tour is finished

2010-10-27T15:53:00.005-06:00

And now I have the time to write the blog, including photos. So I'll do that - day by day.

What was the LAD Tour? Initiated by fellow ACE Director Francisco Alvarez, the tour was "7 one day OTN presentations by 5 ACE directors, in 2 weeks."

Although the exact number of people presenting in person and by webinar varied from city to city, the core group was Francisco Alvarez (DB), Daniel Morgan (DB), Ben Prusinski (DB, EBiz), Ronald Bradford (MySQL) and myself (DB, Spatial, Fusion Middleware)

Each day will get it's own blog post, but the general sketch of the tour is

Oct 8-10: Arrive in Peru
Oct 11-12: Peru
Oct 13-14: Chile
Oct 15-16: Uruguay
Oct 17-18: Brazil
Oct 19-20: Colombia
Oct 21-22: Ecuador
Oct 23 : Ecuador break
Oct 24-25: Costa Rica
Oct 26-27: Costa Rica wrap and return

Due to (time to arrange) Visa issues, I attended Brazil by Webinar while enjoying Uruguay.

Most of the presentations will be available from the User Group web sites at some time in the future.

Bottom line is that I want to thank Francisco Alvarez of DBIS for all the hard planning up front, the OTN Team (especially Lillian) for their support, my colleagues and friends who presented with me, and most of all my new friends, the leaders and executives of the 7 User Groups.

I am truly exhausted. And exhilarated. And happy that we did this. And sad that it's over.

But most of all, I am proud to be part of the success called OTN and the ACE program.

OOW - Day 1

2010-09-19T16:33:00.003-06:00

Dan Morgan (http://www.morganslibrary.com), Ben Prusinski, and I signed in to OOW early this morning at Moscone South. After the relatively painless sign-in, we wandered around and bumped into a dozen people I know from previous years or from my Oracle classes.

Officially OOW events, mainly those presented by, or sponsored by User Groups and partners, started at noon today. I managed to take in a few very interesting sessions already, including some from fellow ACE Directors Peter Koletzke and Cary Millsap.

I will always lean toward presentations by Oracle ACE Directors because I always learn something. Highly recommended.

Currently sitting in the session that discusses realities of migrating from OC4J to WebLogic Server, presented by Liran Zelkha of Scalebase. This is typical of the partner sessions - high quality and very informative. Since a lot of people will be migrating very soon (OC4J is nearing official end of life, and waaaaay past realistic end of life), a lot more people will be needing this information as well.

Next session is the OOW official opening keynote and the Party! I'll be at the Mason Street tent.

Open World, Oracle Develop AND JavaOne

2010-09-18T19:31:00.002-06:00

OpenWorld officially starts tomorrow. As does Oracle Develop and, new to the family, JavaOne.

I arrived at the Hilton last night and spent part of today walking around. This one looks to be even bigger than last year. There is a new tent taking over Mason right next to the hotel. See you there ...

Quick reminder - Oracle 'hosted' sites

2010-04-23T16:34:00.005-06:00

As much a reminder for myself, as a quick listing of the official Oracle websites:

Product info:
Oracle = http://www.oracle.com
Oracle Technet = http://otn.oracle.com

Software and Docs
Electronic delivery of software = http://edelivery.oracle.com
Developer license downloads = http://download.oracle.com
Documentation main site = http://docs.oracle.com (all docs)
Searchable doc site = http://tahiti.oracle.com (DB, AS, Beehive)

Education and Certification
Education = http://education.oracle.com
Certification requirements = http://certification.oracle.com
View YOUR Certification = http://certview.oracle.com
Understanding database = http://asktom.oracle.com

Support, patches, knowledge base
Support = http://support.oracle.com
Support - non-Flash = http://supporthtml.oracle.com

Communities
Wiki = http://wiki.oracle.com
Forums = http://forums.oracle.com
Oracle (employee) blogs = http://blogs.oracle.com
Oracle Support (moderated) = https://communities.oracle.com

Purchase
Shop online = http://shop.oracle.com

Usable & demo sites
Application Express = http://APEX.oracle.com
Sales = http://sales.oracle.com
"Semi-semantic" news filter = http://www.iamthenode.com/

Feel free to add others in the comments and I'll update the main list. (I'll create a separate entry for Useful Oracle-related Sites and Useful Oracle-related Lists)

Oracle 11gR2 for Windows is out

2010-04-03T06:44:00.003-06:00

###Update - the 32-bit version is also available now.###

Released this morning. Details are

Download from http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/index.html

And according to http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E11882_01/install.112/e10843/toc.htm

* Windows Server 2003 - all editions
* Windows Server 2003 R2 - all editions
* Windows XP Professional
* Windows Vista - Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions
* Windows Server 2008 - Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter, Web, and Foundation editions. The Server Core option is not supported.
* Windows 7 - Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions

Note: Check My Oracle Support (formerly OracleMetaLink) for more information about Hyper-V support.

No discussion in doc or in Support about 2008R2, even though it is a different core to 2008 (same difference as Vista to Windows7).

The release information discusses both32 and 64 bit. Keep checking for the 32 bit download if you need that.

Install guide is at http://www.oracle.com/pls/db112/portal.portal_db?selected=11&frame=#microsoft_windows_installation_guides

The database software is in 2 zip files, which include the database and companion distribution. Unzip them both into the same directory.

When you get the software, MAKE SURE you get the deinstall download as well. It is the only correct way to remove the software, and (on the *nix platforms) it does an excellent job.

ASM is moved to the Clusterware, so if you want ASM you will need to get the Clusterware s/w and install that first.

And yet another

2010-02-05T21:52:00.002-07:00

Another side effect of not having a Back button usable in MOS-F - I had written a reply and some suggestions to the MOS Communities discussion about the new Health Checks.

The session hung.

In a normal browser environment, I would have hit Back, copied my text to a safe place (Notepad), and tried again (perhaps later knowing that Communities is about to undergo some shutdowns this weekend).

In this environment, the feedback is lost forever.

Perhaps that was the intent ...

Another look at the MOS Certify UI

2010-02-05T09:43:00.005-07:00

Another set of Certify UI discussions has been announced for Feb 16th. Details later in this blog...

I still dislike the My Oracle Support Flash version, but that does not stop me from providing suggestions and feedback on the UI. Indeed, I have encountered even more reasons and opportunities to both dislike the interface and provide (hopefully constructive) feedback.

The latest is that I find MOS-F very very susceptible to local network traffic.

Since they postpone some of the look-up traffic, and perhaps even some of the software traffic, until needed, I find that when I want to access something that has a lookup (such as the list of values for Patch filters), the performance is directly affected by the total network traffic on the internet pipe. In a classroom of 15-20 attendees, all using Microsoft or Cisco remote desktop or VNC to a remote site, the delays in my additional MOS-F session become very noticeable.

The alternate is to use the non-Flash (ADF-based) site at http://supporthtml.oracle.com which is becoming more and more attractive every day. Even though is less exciting, it is only marginally less functional for my needs.

That said, the MOS-F team IS trying to address the issues and is trying to provide us with opportunities to give feedback. For that, they have announced another round of Certify UI dial-in forums.

The invitation apparently is not important enough to make it as MOS News or as MOS Community News. You can find it in the MOS Communities "Using My Oracle Support" forum under Featured Discussion title " Seeking Customers to Participate in Certify user interface reviews Feb 16 and Feb17 ". With TonyC's permission, the core of the invite is

The Oracle product team developing the enhanced Certify capability in My Oracle Support is looking for customers to review a Certify user interface redesign. If your job responsibility is to understand what products and hardware are certified for use with the Oracle products in your environment, we invite you to join one of the following web conferences:

Session 1: Application user experience

Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 9am Pacific.

Session 2: Data Base and Middleware user experience

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 at 9am Pacific

They have my input from previous 2 hours of 1-on-1 discussion, so I don't need to attend. Now it's 'your turn'.

Oracle DB - Personal vs Express

2010-01-20T21:17:00.004-07:00

After all these years, there is still a lot of confusion about Personal Edition and Express Edition capabilities.

First of all, the Personal Edition (PE), Enterprise Edition (EE), Standard Edition (SE) and Standard Edition One (SE-1) are all found in the same download. The choice of Edition is made at install time, not download time. Fire up the installer and the Edition will be available either in a drop-down menu or in a radio-button list. (On the other hand, Express Edition, or XE, is a separate download from http://download.oracle.com)

Second, there is no difference in the installed software between SE and SE-1, so the same selection is used for either one. The difference is in the license agreement as paraphrased on page 12 of the Software Investment Guide at http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/sig.html

When to choose PE or XE?

Personal Edition is *the most powerful version* for the price. It is a single user license of the Enterprise Edition with nearly all options and features turned on. It is designed for Developers who need access to Oracle Support.

Express Edition is the smallest version. It is light weight (under 300M download instead of 1-2GB download) and has the same SQL and PL/SQL engine as the Enteprise Edition, BUT it does not include Java in the database so advanced things like Java Stored Procedures and related Oracle-supplied functionality are not possible. It also has limits in how much data may be stored (4GB). That means it can only store about 20 years of accounting data for a typical under-25 person company.

Express Edition is IDEAL for a beginner to get used to developing using an Oracle database. However, one can NOT learn to administer an Oracle DB on Express Edition and therefore it is useless for a person who wishes to learn how to be a DBA.

Personal Edition also does not permit Management Packs to be licensed. Therefore performance tuning, diagnostics, etc. are not technically available. For DBA practice, Personal Edition is also not ideal - one really should install the Enterprise Edition to learn about those tools.

I really wish Oracle would rename Personal Edition to Developer Edition

... and make it available on Linux as well.

Getting users involved - interesting concept

2009-12-22T13:18:00.002-07:00

I just attended the second open web conference about the proposed direction of the Certify capability and UI in MOS.

Again, I was the only non-Oracle attendee.

Sad.

MOS: Taxonomy

2009-12-20T16:46:00.002-07:00

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. A chapter in the Oracle 10g Portal class discusses taxonomy when dealing with Portal organization. (I always recommend organizations who are serious about classification to hire a librarian to lead any taxonomy project.)

Since starting with the My Oracle Support, I have not felt very comfortable with the navigation. Admittedly, part of this is habit - once I'd figured it out, I'd been satisfied with the Metalink navigation style and requirements. But switching navigation styles should not have bothered me so much, and I've been struggling with 'why does MOS feel cumbersome?'

(I've discussed some of this repeatedly, and covered a few reasons. These are a few of my favorite things

Flash - form before function;
Flash - performance;
Flash - proprietary, security risk, banned from some customer sites;
non-standard UI - no back button, no 'open new window' on articles
... )

Today's topic is 'consistency in classification'. And this is probably going to be the most controversial topic of the entire MOS-related group of blogs. I hope this one will generate some discussion!

What is there?

MOS uses different classifications in different areas. This would not be so bad, if I could understand why they are different. "Knowledge" tab has a "Browse Knowledge" region (which seems overly complicated); "Patches" has a different classification scheme to select patches; "Certify" has an other.

"Browse Knowledge" was obviously sponsored by the Applications division of Oracle. At the top level, it classifies "AIA, JD Edwards Enterprise, JDE World, Siebel, Peoplesoft, E-Biz, More Applications, Middleware, Database, Linux/VM, Services, Support, Tools/Training, Doc, and Japanese KB". With all the dynamic changing of shapes and entries in other areas of MOS, I think I'd be happier if I could suppress those areas that have no interest for me.

"Patches" go by "Product or Family" which has a list of approximately 1400 entries of which you can select one or more.

"Certify" is undergoing change. But so far, they have invented "Product Line, Product Family, Product Area, Product, Product Release, Product Version" which seems to be some form of hierarchy. (In fairness, they acknowledge this needs to change. Hopefully some others will join us on Tuesday AM for the discussion about what should/could change.)

My thoughts

I have a chart that I use to help Oracle customers understand Oracle products. It's a bit dated, but basically it summarizes my thinking, which is that Oracle has 3 product areas

Services
Technology
Applications

Services to me are

Consulting (Tech Consulting, Apps Consulting, Upgrade Services, Partner Services)
Training (Oracle University, Knowledge Center, Oracle Academy, Certifications, CertView)
Support (Premier, Advanced, MOS-F, MOS-H, OSS)

Technology includes the following

Management Infrastructure: Oracle Server, RDB , Times Ten, Berkeley, (MySQL)
Middleware Infrastructure: WLS, OC4J, Tuxedo, TopLink,
Manipulation: Tools (SQL Developer, JDeveloper, Forms, Reports, etc.), AIA
Movement: Warehouse Builder, Data Integrator, Golden Gate, ESB, Queue
Consolidation: Portal, WebCenter
Collaboration: Collaboration Suite, Beehive
Control: SOA and all it's components, Registry, ESB, Web Services
System Infrastructure: OEL, OracleVM, OSS, Grid, ASM, OSB, Exadata, (Solaris)
Security: Single Sign On, Identity Management, OVD, OID
Intelligence: Discoverer, Reports, BI Beans, BI Publisher, BI Suite EE, ...
Management: Enterprise Manager, Grid Control, Packs (other than those included above)

and I often group the above into

Infrastructure (System, Data Management, Middleware, Security)
Development (Tools)
Coordination (Consolidation, Collaboration, Control, Intelligence)
Management (Grid Control)

Applications (something I try not to get involved in - as Tech above has enough areas to amuse me):

I acknowledge that the above is simply a list of the products from the referenced site, and that another meaningful classification is by business area (Supply Chain, Financials. HR, etc.) or by Industry.

Where am I going with this?

As an engineer and technologist, I drill into support requirements by product. "My 'product x, version y' is having the following problem."

My first thought is that the Knowledge Browser, Patch, and Certify should allow me to filter by area of interest.

That implies that I could set a global filter (which I think is the purpose of 'Power View') which would allow me to include one or more of the three areas. Within each of those areas, I would have product lines (as given above), product families, product, product edition, and product version.

A good taxonomy

A good taxonomy has 3 characteristics that I can identify:

It is designed by someone independent of the stakeholders, but with input by stakeholders
It is created over a number of years
It is NOT rigid - as things change, it will evolve.

That first one is perhaps the most surprising. My experience indicates that if the stakeholders try to provide classification, the job will never get done since too many people have a vested and personal interest. Hire a librarian - they know how to classify AND how to keep us in line. :-)

So perhaps

Perhaps more important than using a taxonomy based on what I describe, there needs to be a visual 'tree' that people could pull up while in MOS that would show whatever taxonomy Oracle intends to use.

(I note that there is not a single occurrence of a visual expandable-folder-like tree in the entire MOS UI that I can find. Anyone?)

And that taxonomy needs to be used consistently across all the tabs, areas, regions, communities, etc. With flexibility allowing changes - but with discussion and warnings when things are to change.

MOS Certify: An offer and an opportunity

2009-12-18T08:42:00.006-07:00

I wrote my first program in 1969 and have been using computers a lot since that first program. I've developed a bunch of habits, viewpoints and stodgy? ideas about how to interact with computers.

As a result, I am very vocal about the shortcomings of the new My Oracle Support interface.

I'm also a member of Toastmasters International. (AC-S.) A base philosophy in TMI is "feedback is important (even critical), and feedback needs to be constructive". As a result, I try to provide feedback that identifies positive things, things for improvement (including why), and how to improve.

Certify

I was planning on tackling MOS Certify this weekend. It's an important tool in the Professional's toolkit. But it ain't working quite right.

Timing is interesting - on Tuesday, I noticed the folk developing the Certify screens invited us to give feedback on proposed changes. So I signed up for the Thursday afternoon conference call.

To my major disappointment, I was the only customer on the call. At least 1/2 dozen people from Oracle were there, but no other customer.

A lot of my colleagues have whinged about MOS and about certify, but NOT ONE showed up to the opportunity to provide feedback.

COWARDS ?!? (Probably not - but as a community, I bet we going to hide behind a hundred and one excuses.)

To be fair, I just barely stumbled on the announcement.

As I've often said, the UI style in MOS seems geared toward teaching me to ignore information - Alerts that don't alert; News that becomes Olds; and multiple steps to accomplishing simple things like "the click on Community tab to get the opportunity to click on a button to get to a separate tab/browser on which we click to get to the discussion", training people to rush through - and past announcements.

(Has anyone noticed how BUSY the My Oracle Support Community Dashboard page is? Nothing can be suppressed, all has equal importance except the Spotlight which is 1) not relevant to me, and 2) has constantly distracted me from Announcements.)

For these kinds of announcements, perhaps MOS should

- have a 'news' region on the relevant pages (Knowledge Browser, Patch, Certify)
- make sure that region contains only timely news
- get involved in the OTN community
- perhaps have a "MOS Announcements" forum in Community (if run by them ...)
- or make important announcements in "Community Feedback and Suggestions" forum
- put it on the Sign-On page, instead of the "Why Flash is good for you" message
and
- update the related MOSC Dashboard Announcement that is correct (since info is updated)

Offer

To make a long story short, Oracle is redesigning the Certify screen. They presented a variation, based on the 'Browse Knowledge' region on the Knowledge tab.

(I am not enamored of that 'Browse Knowledge' technique - it is not intuitive for me. But I'm willing to admit, that may be my problem, not MOS. I'll tackle that in another blog on 'MOS: Taxonomy', hopefully this weekend.)

The MOS team offered to listen. And indeed did listen to my individual voice. And while I do appreciate the chance at performing solo to a captive audience, my stage roles are usually part of an opera chorus, adding one voice amongst many.

Opportunity

There will be another opportunity to provide feedback. On Tuesday 22 December 2009, 8AM PST (11:00 AM Eastern; 5:00 PM CET)

Details available using the following steps:

1. Go to the "MOS Community" page

Log in to MOS (Flash)
Click on Communities
Click on the button
Go to the new tab or browser

2. On the MOSC Main Page (Dashboard) GO to the "Using My Oracle Support All Communities Discussion"

In the "My Communities" region (upper left), scroll to "My Oracle Support" category
Click on "Using My Oracle Support" discussion selector
On the center area, find and expand the "Using My Oracle Support All Communities Discussion" region
Click on the "UPDATE: Focus group to review Certify redesign - Two sessions December 17 and December 22" discussion

(And the above steps are supposed to be intuitive, right??)

Since this is hidden behind a Flash wall, the above link may not be an actual or useful link (sigh!). If I get permission from the MOS team, I'll post a link or the actual dial-in information.

This is our opportunity to provide design and usability input. I hope that someone besides me attends on Tuesday.

Why is the Back Button not used?

2009-12-13T19:10:00.004-07:00

One of the worst practices I see in developer-land is the need to reinvent the wheel. It costs money to create a duplicate of existing functionality, and it costs even more money to maintain that code.

Browsers are equipped with a Back button. This button has a known function.

MOS designers have created a system that is not compatible with this basic functionality. As a result, they need to implement a duplicate of that functionality all over the place in F-MOS. They decided to use a link and Bread Crumbs, rather than a button.

Unfortunately, the Back link is not on all pages or regions. So far the 'back' link is only visible in My Oracle Support Communities, and then only inconsistently.

Numerous examples abound. Too many to count. So I'll limit myself to one per tab.

1) Dashboard: Site Alert region: "Migration of Classic MetaLink Users to My Oracle Support: Top Frequently Asked Questions"

Click on the link, and we go to a new region "Dashboard > Alert Detail".

No 'Back' functionality. No 'Back' link. Browser 'Back' button does something but the result is not a change in display.

User is forced to use the Bread Crumbs to go back.

(There are two additional failures in implementation with this as wall:

Useless detail, it tells you to click on another link to get to a document;
Page title is 'PAGE_TITLE_NEWS' which is neither accurate nor useful.

But these failures will be discussed in more detail elsewhere.)

2) Knowledge Home: Knowledge Articles (Filtered for Oracle Internet Directory): Recently Updated: (first article)

Click on the article title, the 'Articles' region snaps to take over the page to provide

a scrollable 'article titles' area (30% of the screen, not re-sizable) and
the current article are (70%)

No 'go back' link. Browser 'Back' button does something but the result is not a change in display. User is forced to use the Bread Crumbs to go back.

(Three big 'Thank You' notes to the development team:

The region snaps to the new configuration. Very crisp and very much appreciated;
Page title gives the article number; and
Ability to open the article in a new browser page/tab after it is displayed.

So there are some positives, in spite of all of my grumbling.)

3) Service Requests Home: Service Request: click on any request

While you can move to next/previous SR and even select from a cute pop-up 'select list', you can not move back to the previous page/region/window.

(Inconsistently, it is not possible to open the current SR in a new browser window/tab; the SR page is very 'busy'; and the current SR # is not displayed in the browser title bar.)

All you can do is use the Bread Crumbs to go back to the SR Home.

4) Patches and Updates tab

Once you set up a search, you go to a 'list of patches' page with no Back capability. Selecting a patch causes the page to slither to a new shape (as compared to the crisp 'snap' in the Knowedge Browser articles) and again you need to use the Bread Crumbs to to back to the Patch home.

5) Community tab

Let's just say this us a wasted tab. No need for a Back button, because you don't go anywhere.

Click on the tab and you get to a static page with a button and some text which tells you to click on the button (and promises that the button will bring you to the Nirvana of moderated community support.) Click on the button and you get a new browser window/tab anyway. So 'Back' is not required.

6) More ...

The More > Systems 'tab' is a duplicate of the regions I suppressed on the Dashboard.

The More > Certifications 'tab' (should be where the Community 'tab' resides) is worthy of it's own discussion.

The More > Reports 'tab' is probably useful in a larger organization. The reports do not have 'back' functionality other than Bread Crumbs.

The More > Collector 'tab' is a functional duplicate of the Nag screen advertisement I finally got suppressed on the Dashboard. It invites me to download the collector and learn all about it. (Why this is not relegated to a Help topic, or Knowledge Article remains a mystery.)

The More > Settings 'tab' is designed is a way that it does not need the Back functionality. This is the first case in the entire system that seems to have been thought out from that perspective.

---

Why do I care? Because this lack of functionality is costing me AND Oracle money both now and in the future.

Me - because it uses a non-standard technique that requires me to stop and think about the peculiar variant for each screen. Time is money.

Oracle - because each peculiar variant needed to be designed and coded, and needs to be maintained. And eventually that will cut into the profits (and share price), or will be passed on to the customer (me) in increased Support fees.

MOS UI and Patches

2009-12-10T22:18:00.003-07:00

The Dashboard no longer bothers me that much. In the Flash version I can almost get rid of everything. In the ADF version the regions are pretty much static BUT the News and Alert entries include a date so I can consciously but moderately quickly tell which is NEWs.

It is time to spread out and look at some of the other 'designed or not' areas in the UI. Some of these I have already reported either inside the MOS Community or with Richard Miller on his blog. I'll create 'one blog per irritation' so I can track them. :-)

My criteria for irritation is pretty simple: anything that interferes with my problem resolution time. In other words: IF it requires extra bytes, or extra keystrokes, or extra scrolling, or extra concentration to refocus because of 'cuteness', I'll report it. (An example of the last: the window that slides on - distracting me through movement - to tell me what I just did ... and refuses to go away unless I tell it to hide.)

---

So on to the title story: Patches and the UI

I'm pretty happy that they did not break the old Metalink Patch capability (yet). It's stoopid slow, and I suspect that is caused by the process which seems to be reading the original HTML page and translating and re-rendering it in JSPX. (Why do something once if we can do it twice using 5x the CPU?)

But it works, and that is a major plus.

On the other hand, the Patch stuff in the Flash area is almost amusing, in a sad sort of way.

Patch Reviews

First thing to note is that users can write reviews of patches.

And when you look at a patch, you will see those reviews whether you like it or not. It does not matter whether you are getting that patch for the first time, or the 20th time - you WILL wait until the reviews are loaded. And 15-20% of your page will be used to display those (zero or more) reviews.

Apparently getting customer peer reviews is so important that other customers can not even opt-out.

Patch Tab Regions

There are 5 regions available for the Patch tab.

1) The 'Patch Plan' region seems to be an ad for Patch Plans. There does not seem to be any configuration possibility, so in reality this seems to be just another of the many different (and inconsistent) forms of 'knowledge article' available. A waste of space, but one we can suppress. (Just need to remember that is is a waste of space.)

Why not stay consistent with the Knowledge Article concept or with the Help system, I wonder? (-1)

2) The 'Patching Quick Links' region provides two links of interest to me: "Advanced Classic Patch Search" (found in the E-Business Suite area) actually points to the old 'Advanced' search page, and "Latest Patchsets" points to the old 'Quick Links and Latest Patchsets' page. Both of these very quickly pop up a new browser window (or tab) and work just like the old Metalink version

Score a BIG +1 for this!

3) The 'Patch Related Activity' region tracks the history of which ones I viewed, downloaded, reviewed, and which ones I've marked as 'Favorite'.

(I wonder whether a 'favorite patch' is just like a 'favorite teddy bear' I also note in another section that I can have 'Favorite Bugs'. Perhaps these favorites are something I can cuddle up with? But I digress, just some fun with words.)

It's nice to see Big Brother in action, keeping a history of my moves and telling me about it. I do see some hope for this region and think in the future it may become useful.

Score a modest sized +1

4) The 'Patch Recommendations' region is the most amusing for me. It is only useful if the collector is running.

I've set up the collector to run against a Dell Precision 490 2x dual-core, 2GB RAM, Windows 2003 SE (32 bit, fully patched) Personal Edition 11.1.0.6 patched to 11.1.0.7

I've started discussions with the Support folk to understand the recommendations. Suffice it to say that (as Matt Glover in MOS Communities said) MOS is a 'work in progress'.

Good idea, when they get it working. No points yet.

5) The 'Patch Search' region should be the most useful for the way I work. It runs in two ways: by patch number; and by using a set of filters to help get a list.

The search by patch number works. You enter the patch number (or a comma separated list) and optionally qualify by platform and/or language, and click 'Search'. (Note that hitting "Enter" is not good enough - you MUST use the mouse!) That takes you to the patch list page - a region that takes over the whole Flash area (even if there are no results).

There is no 'Back' functionality. The browser 'Back' button is inoperative, and the region does not have one. You need to use the "Chicken Track" (aka Bread Crumbs) navigator links at the top left corner of the page to 'go to a previous page'.

But it works. +1 (a very small +1 because of the lack of 'Enter' key and lack of 'Back')

The search by filter capability needs improvement.

To be 'fair', that filter capability was added in very short order and under extreme pressure after we were forced to move to MOS, so there is obviously opportunity for improvement - or perhaps just opportunity for basic design. (To be 'unfair', this is basic functionality that should have been made available and thoroughly tested before the transition. -1)

We start with a comma-separated Product entry. There is a list of values - by my calculations that list contains 1332 entries. We can type the product name (RDBMS Server) and the system will use a 'typomatic' technique to narrow the search in the list. (A big +1)

Then we MUST enter the release number. So for RDBMS Server we get 45 entries displayed in groups of 13 per page and we can select the ones we want. Although this is a similar action to the Product entry, this time we get check boxes and no typomatic. (-1 for inconsistency)

But the real pain is that list of 45 entries is sorted in ascending order and the currently supported releases are on the last page only. (-1 for dramatically slowing me down.)

Then we select one of more platforms - using the same technique as the Release. (+1 for a modest amount of consistency)

Optionally, and available only by clicking the funny (+), you can filter by additional criteria (classification such as security, legislative), by type (patch, set), by target (database, SOA, etc)

This one gets to me in the following areas:

I'm struggling why an RDBMS patch would be required for a SOA or OC4J target;
Not sure why PSU and CPU are not separate, selectable Types;
I really dislike being forced to switch between mouse (change fields, select) and keyboard.

And when the selection is complete and I hit Search, the resulting page (which may contain 0 entries, or even an error message) has not usable 'Back' functionality. However, I can call us a selection editor to refine my search.

If I get a list of patches, I can click on one of them.

The page rearranges it's shape: 20% is given to the list of (1) patches; 15% is given to the mandatory review (or "be the first to write a review") area; and the remaining area is for Patch Description. (My preference would have been a separate browser window/tab for the patch, and make the review area optional. A very simple rearrangement would put the Readme, Download and Platform selection in the main area.)

The 'Readme' opens a new browser window. (+1)

Clicking on the bug description replaces the patch search window (which took over the page, no longer a region) with the knowledge browser window which has NO easy way of going back. (-1)

---

Bottom line is that the Patch Search functionality, like a lot of MOS, seems to have been created using a 'look Mom, no hands' thought process.

In this regard, I really agree with kathryn's comment on Chris' blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/support, where she says "This should NOT happen. We should NOT have to email you to discuss and see what can be done about each and every error...We PAY you for a product that works..not to be the testers on a Beta product."

---

Richard Miller's blog (http://blogs.oracle.com/supportportal) has 3 entries on

Gathering Feedback from Recent Usability Research and Studies
Actual User Feedback
Special Areas of Feedback: Content, Quality, and Performance

Interesting.

I hope he blogs about the design process as well. There is much to be learned from the Oracle experience.

All that said, I know that this will work out in the end. Heck of a price (alienating a significant chunk of the customer base - remembering the old adage "for every one that complains, 10 suffer in silence and even more leave") - but it'll get there.

Dashboard - getting closer ... updated 3x

2009-12-09T06:19:00.005-07:00

I note this morning that the MOS dashboard 'Site Alert' that leads me to the migration FAQ has been dropped.

Thank you. It is appreciated. (update: I think...)

Two more things to do about Site Alerts:

Allow user to reduce the number of lines for the site alert, or allow it to be collapsed unless these is new information, or make it optional;
Select alerts based on user language settings so that only useful alerts (ones the user can understand) are displayed.

This is going to be a long process if we end up at 2-3 weeks per region ...

-----------
Update: The "Migration of Classic MetaLink Users to My Oracle Support: Top Frequently Asked Questions" site alert is back. On SupportHTML I see a date of Nov 18th.

Update 2: The foreign language entry no longer shows up on either Flash or ADF version.

I hope they are not just fooling me. I'll leave this for a week to determine whether this is indeed a step forward.

Update 3: 2009 12 13 - the foreign language info is back.

MOS one week later, things are ???

2009-12-06T09:27:00.006-07:00

Over the past week I have opened a number of Service Requests around the UI and had a large number of discussions with Richard Miller on his blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/supportportal and I've installed the Collector for a dummy system.

First and foremost, they got rid of the duplicated News region on MY dashboard. Thanks for getting that resolved. Turns out (from Richard) this was a known problem - if a second copy of a mandatory region is placed on a page the whole page needs to be 'reset'. However, through the SR process, it only took several screen shots and many hours of SR to get that out of the way, including several "we can't reproduce it" cycles with the dev team.

Second, I note the system performance is improving. Consistency of availability is a totally different issue, but when I can get in, it feels a bit faster. (Unfortunately the speed is wasted by extraneous activity. More on that later.)

Third, I sacrificed one of my Personal Edition licenses to the OCM collector and got rid of the nag screen telling me how good life will be with the collector. This was a pretty straight forward process:

create a GMail account so that I can monitor if any spam is generated
create an Oracle SSO account for the GMail account
get that account added to my CSI
find a spare box and install Windows 2003 SE (planning on doing that anyway)
install 11gR1 Personal Edition (11.1.0.6 for Windows)
install latest Collector and configure it to tie to that new account

I do want to understand how to use this tool so I am looking at the stuff it'll do for me. I note that the 'recommendations' for my 11.1.0.6 did NOT include patching to 11.1.0.7. I also note that manually upgrading to 11.1.0.7 somehow disabled the collector for the database, although it runs for the other products. (Thus another opportunity for wasting more time helping support make me effective ...)

(I note the collector also does a nifty job of monitoring XE - but that is another story. It does recommend patches. LOL!)

On my main login I now have a fairly simple dashboard - no nag screen and no recommendations stuff. Since it is optional, I can get rid of it and I'll use that only on the ID that is supposed to monitor the activity. The stuff remaining on the dashboard is 'Site Alerts', the 'News' and the 'Info Message' window that slithers on.

The "Site Alerts" region

"Site Alerts" region has a subtitle "Upcoming Outages that affect My Oracle Support". I think that means it is important. It certainly is important for me.

That region is capable of displaying 4 lines of important messages and if they use all 4 it'll be a sad day for My Oracle Support.

In the mean time, they are wasting my eyeball space with 2 useless messages - "Classic MetaLink ユーザーのMy Oracle Supportへの移行: よくある質問" (can anyone translate that and tell me why it is important ... which outages does it tell me about?) and "Migration of Classic MetaLink Users to My Oracle Support: Top Frequently Asked Questions" (ditto - which outages does this tell me about????)

Both of those titles take me to a new page that repeats the title and presents a link to a new page. Clicking on those links opens a new browser page (or tab in a multi-tab capable browser).

My thinking for an Alert region is

if it is important, and I click in it ... TAKE ME TO THE INFORMATION;
on an Alert 'page', make sure it is important;
you have my login settings, so extract my language preferences (get 'em if needed);
remove it when it not needed; and
don't display it if it is 'informational'.

As it is, the above two information messages have been there for over a week and can not be suppressed. After a week, I find myself ignoring it ... it has become just more visual noise.

In other words, MOS designers are training me to ignore alerts. (Make important information available, and train the reader to ignore that information. Good idea, what?)

If they want to provide information messages, and other infrequently accessed but generally useful links (according to someone) I suggest they take a page from Enterprise Manager and create a static 'Related Links' page footer. Make it static instead of a region so it is handled very very very quickly.

The "News" region

I've written about this already, so all I will do is reiterate: if I've seen it before, it is not NEWs. NEWs is not mandatory except in the dreams of the writer. Even then I have a choice between CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CBC, and so on. It is NOT Mandatory.

Either let me acknowledge that I have seen it, or make it totally optional.

Anyone respecting the time of the user community would make this optional. Or better yet - make access to the news available as a link in the static 'Related Links' footer.

As it stands, this is another case of training the user to ignore the information. (GUI designers should perhaps take a psych 101 course?)

The 'Info Message' window

I think someone suckered Larry into hiring the team that created Microsoft Clippy and assigned them to MOS.

We have a beautiful example. When you take an action affecting the look and feel of the portal, you are told that you took that action and then you have to acknowledge that you are told that you took that action.

I remove a region to my page.
I get a windows that slithers across the top right corner to tell me I removed a region.
And the only way to get rid of that message is to tell it to hide.

I am not sure whether the designers are at Sesame Street levels or whether they think their users are at that level.

Three distinct actions, two of which telling me what my eyes confirm. With apologies to the snakes around the world - yes, it slithers (like so many other regions in MOS) . (Snakes and MOS 'slither', military and good UIs 'snap'.)

If there is a reason for the extra activirty, such as help for the disabled, tell me how to set the parameter on the system saying that I am NOT in need of this.

The biggest difficulty with MOS

I am often called upon as an Oracle Trainer. I find myself standing in front of a class of JEE developers and explaining how and why to use JEE, SOA, ADF and other Oracle technologies.

The single biggest difficulty I have with MOS is that I have to give good reasons to give these (often hostile) professionals to use ADF. And with all the tools owned by Oracle - Oracle Support went outside and chose Adobe Flash.

Thanks Oracle Support for such a brilliant shot across the bow of my credibility. (And that of Frank Nimphius, Steve Muensch, and many others in the ADF blogroll of whom I stand in AWE.)

Ouch!

My Oracle Support is starting to perform

2009-11-22T18:50:00.003-07:00

Not sure whether this is due to the lighter weekend traffic, or significant changes in the programming, but I notice that My Oracle Support - Flash version - is considerably faster today.

If this is a permanent change, then I am duly impressed.

Some areas of the UI are also starting to become operational. For example, I find if I 'follow the rules' for getting certification info - filling in lots of drop down boxes to get a strong filter - the result is returned in a not-unreasonable amount of time.

That means there is hope that eventually the UI will become less irritating as well.

News! Is it really?

2009-11-18T18:48:00.003-07:00

Anyone who read my previous blog will realize I am not a fan of mandatory dashboards.

The main reason is that usually someone else gets to decide what information is good or important for me. Since I almost always work at the fringe of mainstream, usually in support and guidance of mainstream, what is important for me is rarely the same as what is important for mainstream administrators.

What makes me upset with mandatory dashboards is that some else is taking control of my time and my eyeballs. And usually for a reason that is not relevant, or indeed very useful.

Case in point: I logged on to My Oracle Support and was greeted by the Dashboard again. In addition to the non-removable 'offer' to teach me OCM and the duplicated and Mandatory regions of News that have not been updated with anything new in over a week, I now have a new Mandatory region added called 'Site Alerts'.

The new 'Site Alerts' region sports an attention-getting icon and a header saying it will tell me about upcoming outages for MOS. (Which is actually the kind of information I would call 'News'.)

And it has some content.

That content is a separate page that tells me to click on a link to get to another page to get some answers to Frequently Asked Questions about what to do if I had any issues with the migration.

Not, as far as I can tell, any advice about upcoming outages.

So now, when I want to get an answer in a hurry, I have the opportunity to wait for 4 regions to update (or at least bottleneck my download bandwidth) and divert my attention from my objective of solving a problem.

And I suspect that by the time they DO contain some important information, I will have been trained to ignore the content.

Come on guys - if you will not let me remove those regions, at least give me the opportunity to ack and hide the stuff that is is old. So that the important stuff you will tell me will not get buried.

In search of My Oracle Support - Part 2

2009-11-17T21:58:00.003-07:00

Continuing the search of the functionality of the new tool that Oracle Support has provided to the professional community, I think it's time to look at that Portal aspect of MOS. (In particular, I'm going to look at the dashboard.)

According to Wikipedia, "Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether."

I'll try to work with this definition for now ...

Consistent look and feel? - Yup
Access control? - Yup (sort-of)
Procedures for multiple apps and database? - It's so consistent that I can't tell whether there are multiple apps and databases.

So that implies that MOS is a Portal.

It is kind-a cute, especially the way a message window slides across the upper right corner to tell me that 'I actually did what you asked me to do - please tell me to go away'. (For example, "region x removed from page - undo, hide".) Reminds me of Clippy.

But hopefully that portal should help me do my job. So let's look at that 'job' part for a bit.

The way I see it, the portal needs to address several classes of users:

manager and administrator (the ones who pay the bill)
casual tech (the majority)
expert in a focus area (the bread and butter folk)

and there are 3 major modes of operation

proactive
casual (search for information)
reactive/crisis

It is extremely obvious that My Oracle Support is oriented toward Proactive support. Heck, the I can't get rid of the 'very important alert' nag screen on the Flash dashboard that tells me to install OCM so I can get this system to provide me with Proactive Support for my single user Personal Edition licenses. (Come on - that's a bit overkill, isn't it????)

So let's look at the combinations and what simply logging in shows me.

When I log in, I am immediately taken to a Dashboard. That Dashboard gives me News which I can not remove. (In fact, I have 2 occurrences of the News, neither one will disappear.)

By it's very definition, News is very important. It is new. It is supposed to distract me into paying attention. And I have seen the 'News' - a 'Welcome to the new Metalink users' several times a day for the past week. (I am already inured to the news, so truly new News will likely be ignored. Which is bad for News.)

And so I get the News (twice) at whatever the bandwidth requirement is to get the region and to get that very important information that I am likely never to consciously see in the future.

Combinations?

Proactive & Casual Manager

Get OCM working and they can configure their Dashboard to show the targets, the general health check, bugs, and so on. They can even get high priority 'knowledge articles' such as the 'ALERT: Oracle Database 11gR2 Support status and Alerts' (which says it is 'under construction' and tells me that '11g R2 is available')

The dashboard appears to be useful for this role. GREAT!

Reactive Manager

It's Crisis time. As a manager in crisis, my people have been entering SRs. I can get status of my critical Service Requests.

Not bad at all.

We're covering management fairly well in terms of functionality.

Performance will be an issue, as a manager needs to get that information very quickly. That somewhat implies that the manager is expected to keep the portal open pretty much during the day.

Given the attention span that a manager can afford to provide (other than one specifically charged with support), I'm not sure that the page will be open very long and refresh time is critical. Given that the same manager possibly also has BAM and other dashboards open, and I'm thinking we may have a collision of priorities. (It may also explain why managers need the fastest CPUs and newest machines.)

Hopefully those dashboard regions are JSR 268 compliant ...

Proactive & Casual Tech

Pretty much the same as a proactive manager. Possibly not responsible for a lot of systems but at least can see the articles, and peruse the news (again and again). Could have the SR summary available on the dashboard, IF this person actually creates SRs.

Not bad!

Reactive Tech

It's crisis time, and this tech is not an expert. There are possibly 1/2 dozen windows open, each with a 'wait for me to get all sorts of information across the net' timeout. And the boss is coming down the hall, looking for answers. Remember that OCM is probably running and this tech has already had the opportunity to review recommended patches. Unless the 'SR summary' region is available to monitor other SRs, calling for help (by opening a SR) is still several clicks away.

We need to switch to the Knowledge Tab or the SR tab before anything can be done. Ouch!

So, not quite so good for the regular tech. Again, the biggie here is 'how much time will this person have the portal open'? Most admin techs I know are busy researching, scripting, glancing at health checks, checking mail, and so on - outside of Support. Can that person afford to have a window dedicated to a support portal?

And this is assuming the technical person is in the admin area. One whole class of potential users is missing and that is the class of developers. Not quite sure what is available here at all to the developer.

Expert

So let's look at the last of my categories - the 'expert'.

This is a relatively small group in count, but remember that the expert is hired specifically for the ability to get things done fast and accurately. This is the person everyone else turns to as a walking/talking library. This is the person who is called upon when the proverbial fan gets dirty.

This person is the front line of support. If this person is worried, management and the others are probably frightened.

Proactive Expert

The proactive expert may want the dashboard for the occasional glance. (But probably already has other tools up and running, such as Grid Control, HP OpenView, or the like AND personalized scripts.) Total time spent on the dashboard in a week, probably 1 hour, 45 minutes of which is in configuring it.

Over time, the expert may learn to be comfortable with OCM and the dashboard for health checks. I'm just concerned about the overhead of the dashboard page, time to access it if it;s not open, and the duplication of effort.

Still, not a bad possibility.

Casual Expert

It is my belief that one of the things that creates experts is the drive to see new situations, learn and research.

If that is true, the expert, in casual mode, will be wanting to research in the knowledge base. I honestly do not see anything at all in the dashboard that will be useful at this time in the quest to learn more.

So for the expert in casual mode, the 'dashboard' is a wasted interception. (Unless he wants to see that old News again.)

Reactive Expert

And in reactive mode the expert is driven to research. The key here is getting to the information source as quickly as possible. That, as far as I can tell, is safely tucked away on the knowledge tab, a click plus 5 seconds of screen refresh away from login.

Unless the expert is expected to have the portal open at all times. Perhaps in conjunction with the company portal. I wonder if that would be a good business case justification for dual monitor?

Conclusion

So far I can see the dashboard has it place. One place appears to be on the manager's desktop, open at all times. There are definitely some interesting aspects. (Although they appear to compete with Grid Control. Hmmm ...)

For me ... I'd prefer to have a few configuration tweaks: allow me to clean the dashboard totally (no region displayed at all), especially the old News and overkill alerts; let me select the page on which I land at opening - in my case, the Knowledge page.

I'm sure that when I grow up and have a few more systems to manage, or when I'm in a customer site that allows me to monitor the health of their systems, I'll find the various capabilities of the dashboard very useful.

Since I learned the trick of how to use, it the ideal Portal landing page has been the Oracle Tech Net page. Fast!

Definitely a first glance at the dashboard. As time goes on I'll need to review it again. But the next one - the MOS Knowledge tab ...

Totally aside, I have no idea why getting to the community pages requires 3 steps in Internet Explorer 7 & 8:

1) click on the MOS 'Community tab', which presents the 'welcome page' with a button;
2) click on the 'Go to community' button, after reading the 'welcome to the community' verbiage for the nth time;
3) click on the 'MOS Community' IE tab that is opened in response to the button.
(And then I click on the Discussions tab because the community opens on a totally static (and traffic heavy) welcome page which I've now read n-3 times.)

I have to admit, all this 'welcome' is very ... bandwidth intensive?

Single Sign On or Same Sign On?

2009-11-17T16:14:00.002-07:00

Just thinking aloud ... one of the things Oracle has introduced is 'userid consistency' across their applications. This is called 'SSO'.

I thought that SSO stood for 'Single Sign On', and the functionality is 'sign on once and use all applications'.

I am finding it actually means 'Same Sign On' and the functionality is 'log in to each of the the different applications one at time, using the same userid & password'. However, signing out does efficiently log me off all applications.

Still trying to get my head around the reason, and the benefit, of this. I'm sure it'll come to me.

In support of My Oracle Support? - Part 1

2009-11-15T09:31:00.005-07:00

I have previously written about issues with My Oracle Support. I still have issues and will probably always have issues, with the new system.

However, there is another side to the same story. It's a tool. It's a tool that has been made available to me. I strongly believe that a professional (counting myself in that set) I need to understand when, where and why the tools might benefit me.

So here starts my process of discovering the tool and understanding where it might help.

(Note to self - Next parts: MOS is a Portal but do we need portals?; MOS has a lot of functionality and is based on user feedback; MOS provides automation & who benefits?)

In support for MOS - part #1 of the learning process

I suspect the reason for Flash is similar to the JInitiator in the early Forms days.

We wanted rich functionality that was provided by Java in the client but no client (browser) consistently supported the JVM requirements. The first few iterations of JInitiator included complete (and excruciatingly slow) downloads and many many concerns about automatically downloaded software. Indeed, Oracle lost some Forms customers as a result of that.

As time went on the JInitiator download was split to download only the functionality required to accomplish the next task, if it was not there yet.

I see that Richard Miller's blog and Chris Wartiki's blog indicate they are looking at that change using Flash. (Having learned from history :-) the MOS team starts this after production.)

Back in the JInitiator hey-day, Oracle was constantly hammered by customers and competition as imposing non-standard, proprietary, software on the users. I often heard "it isn't Microsoft", "it is non-standard" as the reason for not allowing JInitiator. So people moved to Visual Basic, or some competitors, many of which have now disappeared. (Although underneath is was frequently "if it's Oracle we have this convenient excuse".)

So Flash is a non-proprietary (read non-Oracle) pseudo standard that should be acceptable to many users.

The next generation (HTML 5) is not available universally yet. (Hopefully the MOS Team will have designed to support the transition in the future.)

Indeed, one excuse for selecting Flash was to support the IE 6 users out there. (Better to support the rather large community that is stuck with non-compliant environments than to have a well-designed ADF environment for the future? It's about the numbers!)

The security issues that are found nearly daily are probably not as worrisome to many users as the benefit in user experience. Users seem to be complacent about security anyway, and there is a non-Flash alternative (http://supporthtml.oracle.com) for those of us who are squeamish.

In support of MOS, I think Flash addresses a significant part of the user community and probably addresses it well. I will be looking at that seriously, when I have lots of time.

And they have provided me an HTML alternative which limps along to satisfy my needs.

My Oracle Support survey

2009-11-13T20:45:00.004-07:00

schavali has the following excellent suggestion at http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=3902274#3902274

---------------------------

I would encourage all that are facing issues to provide feedback to Oracle in one or more of the following ways -

1. Use the "Contact Us" link in MOS (which creates a non-technical SR)
2. Respond to blog posts at the Support blog sites - http://blogs.oracle.com/support and http://blogs.oracle.com/supportportal
3. Respond to survey being run by Daniel Fink - http://www.misterpoll.com/polls/460968
4. If your organization has an Oracle Service Delivery Manager, pl send him/her an email requesting that your feedback be forwarded on to Support Management.

---------------------------

According to Richard Miller's response to me in the comments, those of us who do not use Flash are in the minority and the majority seem to be quite happy with the new MOS Web 2.0 user experience.

I would certainly encourage responding to the survey. (Daniel Fink's MOS survey)

My Oracle Support is Web 2.0

2009-11-13T09:59:00.002-07:00

My Oracle Support has been upgraded. There are pains in the upgrade.

The Oracle people are working very hard at getting over the pains. And they are blogging about it, much in the defense of the new system.

IN particular, Richard Millar writes a decent set of comments at http://blogs.oracle.com/supportportal/2009/10/part_three_-_-_special_areas_o.html

In the comments following the blog, he makes some very interesting statement about the technology and tech choices. Why Flash, for example.

Here is my response (also posted as a comment to his Blog - so let's keep the discussion over there ...):

You write that "Older ADF 10 and HTML DB are very limited (or impossible) for Web 2.0 type interactions (and if we can get past the production bugs, I think you might find these new features valuable!)."

There is a HUGE assumption about the way we work in that statement.

Web 2.0 has it's place. Even with Support.

But not all of us need, want, or can benefit from Web 2.0 The problem is that Web 2.0 makes assumptions about the way we want to, or need to, work. And that means the design team is pigeon-holing the user community.

Think of it this way - Web 1.0 is command line, web 2.0 is GUI. GUI is 'friendly'. Command line, once learned, is 'efficient'.

There is a significant amount that can be done with Web 1.0. And much of that can be done faster and at a MUCH lower costs to both your side and ours.

Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 can coexist, just as command line and GUI can coexist.

Red Pill, Blue Pill

2009-10-15T18:31:00.002-06:00

With acknowledgment to the writers of Matrix, parts of this Oracle Open World left me with the feeling that I could chose the Blue Pill and continue with 'life as we know it' or chose the Red Pill and wake up to a new reality.

Surprisingly, the big announcements in database have very little to do with database. If anything, the core tech announcements around database have everything to do with backing off and letting the database do what it does best. In particular I'm talking about the directions I see both OracleVM and Oracle Clusterware heading.

Over the past month I've been looking at 11gR2 and starting to look at RAC in that version. On the surface, the story seems 'more of the same'. Bigger, better, badder RAC. Since Oracle9i I've been teaching and consulting on RAC, and the constant story I've spooled has been 'get the infrastructure right, pay attention to the clusterware because it'll make or break the RAC'.

With 11gR2, Oracle has been concentrating on the Clusterware to a level I've not seen before. Grid Plug and Play; Multiple Public Interface; SCAN; no need to highlight the Private IP - once they've been shaken out in the real work, I can tell "there are a few of my favorite things".

Between OracleVM 2.2, the directions for OracleVM 3.0, and Oracle Clusterware, it promises to be a very interesting year coming up.

(And this is from a database guy ...)

OracleVM - making my jaw drop

2009-10-13T22:09:00.005-06:00

Last night I went to the Oracle Open WorldLinux Installfest hosted by OTN and Todd Trichler. In part due to a mix-up in communications about where it was held, the turnout was disappointing underwhelming, however the session was taped and should be available to spool at some time.

Wim Coekaerts and several of the FOSS team were there giving some presentations and demos. This stuff got my attention!

First and foremost, OracleVM 2.2 is right around the corner. Apparently the code has been submitted to the delivery team and should be ready to download in the next few days. I've got some significant hardware that's been sitting semi-idle (only used for testing) for 4 months now waiting for this release. So, perhaps I'll be able to download when I return home this weekend.

Second was a demo of a new system packager. Drag and drop systems (WLS, DB, RAC, OHS, client, apps) into the GUI and get the builder template. I'm going to go over the video in detail when I get my hands on it - this is to dream for.

My jaw dropped, and my brains (such as they are) froze when they discussed a JavaVM / WebLogic Server effectively as a standalone DomU. The implications of this are staggering.

The OracleVM Management Pack looks like it will provide the complete OracleVM Manager functionality inside of the OEM Grid Control. The only hiccup I see is that we need to choose between OracleVM Manager and the Management Pack. I'm going to study this in detail in the very near future.

Wim sounds very very excited about the things VirtualIron will bring to OracleVM 3.0. No secrets were revealed, but there were a couple of sparkles in his eyes. My curiosity is definitely peaked. (Actually, you need to put that into context - he's probably the most laid-back person in all of Oracle)

There was a whole lot more, including confirmation that ACFS (ASM Cluster File System) and ocfs2 do not compete - ocfs2 is for files, acfs is for database/ASM. And interesting tidbits about the projects Linux kernel maintainers work on while working for Oracle.

It never fails to amaze me how much Oracle contributes to the FOSS. (And how much the FOSS community under-appreciates, and even fears, Oracle.)

In any case - 'cause I'll likely never get my hands on an Exadata-2 - so far the biggest solid (non-Apps) news for me out of Oracle Open World has been the Linux and OracleVM news.

*UPDATE* You can watch the Install Fest through Oracle's OnDemand Flash feed (http://www.oracle.com > click on the "Big Picture" > On Demand (in the Flash player) > scroll down to Install Fest) or go to
http://bit.ly/3f5Bhi

Oracle Support - Classic is no more, BUT ...

2009-10-13T21:29:00.002-06:00

... the HTML Options is now available!

Many of us who use Oracle Support have been warned for the past few months about the transition from Metalink Classic to the new Flash-based MyOracle Support.

There is a fairly extensive thread on the Community Forum of Oracle Forums about this, with quite a few of us expressing our disappointment that Oracle decided to use Flash. Although Flash has the potential for providing a richer user experience, many of us commented that the lack of performance and the fancy effects available were serious impediments to using Oracle Support.

Last week we were informed that Metalink Note / MyOracle Support Doc Id 841061.1 - Classic MetaLink and My Oracle Support Transition Information Page - was updated to include a section on "My Oracle Support HTML Option (for non-Flash Player Environments)".

In a nutshell, when I use a browser that does not have Flash (or in which Flash is disabled/blocked), pretty much all the original Metalink Classic capability seems to be retained - at least everything I needs stays. The missing part is the stuff that I am not allowed to use, by corporate policy, in any case.

I'd like to thank Oracle Support for listening.

When Others Then NULL

2009-10-11T16:54:00.002-06:00

Dan Morgan and I had a great chat at breakfast and then we jumped the bus from Moscone West to the Hilton where we saw Tom Kyte's keynote.

Assuming you work with Oracle database, are a developer of applications that store information in an Oracle database, or are in management for a company that has such developers, you have probably heard of Tom.

If you have not had the chance to listen to Tom, I strongly encourage you listen to one of his presentations. He has two types of presentations - technical details and philosophy. The tech details presentations are always interesting, but I now believe the philosophical ones are much more important.

This keynote was in that latter group.

Of the many nuggets Tom presented, the one I liked best was: design your application for production - keep security, performance and error handling in mind early. Indeed, trying to patch those on after the fact is rarely properly thought out.

As a specific example, when doing error handling avoid the exception block 'When Others Then NULL'. That exception block simply states

"If there is a problem, ignore it, and complete. Therefore any successful completion may be suspected of containing incorrect information. Therefore the reliability of the application is irrelevant."

That is not a nice way to treat your users ...

Oracle Open World - Again!

2009-10-11T16:42:00.002-06:00

Yippee. Oracle Open World again. I'm here in not-so-sunny San Francisco for Oracle Open World 2009. Over the next 4 days, I'll be attending sessions, getting together with friends and colleagues, and learning about a lot of new stuff.

Oracle Database 11g Release 2 has been available now for just over a month, and this OOW will surely get me up to speed on some of the new features. At the same time, Fusion Middleware 11g has also recently been made available and OOW will give me new ideas in that direction.

Stay tuned as I report - near real time - about the things I learn.

A new blogger on Oracle RAC & cluster

2009-09-23T18:58:00.002-06:00

Just highlighting that a colleague and co-instructor has started blogging about Oracle RAC and Oracle Clusterware, amongst other things. Eric has started posting 'How To' videos for 11gR2 at http://www.masterschema.com/

I've known Eric for a couple of years, and he has had a significant history as an OCP, and a loooong history with Linux. Pretty sharp guy when it comes to Linux, Apple, clustering and high availability technologies and RAC - I intend to follow his blogs carefully.

New test provider for Oracle Certification exams

2009-09-22T09:43:00.003-06:00

Oracle has recently announced that Pearson VUE will take care of the logistics for Oracle's Certification exams. (See http://education.oracle.com ... look at the Certification link on the left edge.)

Anyone who has had a Prometric ID needs to register with VUE before taking any new exams. This blog presents my experience in that registration process.

Sep 19, 2009 9:33 PM

Started my process today - new user to VUE. The objective is to create my account, but not schedule an exam.

Action: Go to http://www.vue.com - I want to create an account, closest button is perhaps 'Sign In'? Click on it.
Observation: Greeted with "What type of test have you taken in the past?" and a cluttered cascading list-of-values screen
(I'm not interested in taking a test yet - want to create an account!)

Action: Select IT / Oracle
Observation: Greeted with 'Oracle Certification Testing - Schedule an Exam" page. There is no 'create account' button on the 'Activity' page.

Action: Select 'My Account' ... perhaps that will have a 'create' step.
Observation: Greeted with "What type of exam are you wishing to change?" .. still no 'create account' link

Action: Select 'Proctored' exam (only link available other than same buttons from prev page that didn't appeal last time.)
Observation: Greeted with "Sign In" page, with a link for First time users to 'create a new web account'

Action: Select that link
Observation: Form to fill in, including 'Oracle Candidate ID'

Action: Fill in the blanks, assume Prometric ID is Oracle Candidate ID, click Next
Observation: 'Web Account will be emailed within 24 hours'

Action: we wait

Sep 22, 2009 8:55 AM
Observation: Email received at 06:23 with new username and temp password
- no choice to use a specific userid. Oh well, guess this one get written down!

Action: log in, forced change of password
- password strength is monitored. good thing I have a strong one in my standard rep

Concluding comments:

My first name, middle initial and last name (for printing in certificate) have been converted to lower case, with no opportunity to correct that. (I know I entered them in mixed case.) The personal profile page indicates that I must contact customer service to fix that. (LOL)

None of my test history is transferred. The page does indicate it is 'history of tests with Pearson VUE', so I'm not sure whether that matters yet.

This was a moderately painless 'first registration' with VUE. Just took a bit of time and patience.

Hope this helps others

Getting Oracle Software

2009-09-19T19:21:00.002-06:00

Where to get Oracle {product} software for { operating system }

Oracle makes most of their software available on the internet under one of several development licenses. This software is the same as you use in production. There are no time limits, and no functionality missing. What is usually missing is the ability to get support and patches.

PLEASE READ THE LICENSE TO WHICH YOU AGREE!

The software is available under either http://edelivery.oracle.com or http://download.oracle.com - follow the links for your favorite product and select the download for the operating system you want.

What about old versions, such as Oracle8i Database?

When Oracle stops supporting a product, they revoke the ability to download it. Then the only hope is to get a copy from Oracle Support (using your Support Identifier) or getting it from a friend. (Please note, I am not your friend when it comes to this! Don't bother asking.) I have seen copies available on eBay and other auction sites as well. In any case, you may have to pay for that. You may not be able to get it at all.

Occasionally Oracle maintains links to old software as part of a Metalink / MyOracleSupport document. For example, note 763603.1 links to the BEA WebLogic Server archive.

But be aware that old software will usually not work, or will not work well, on new operating systems. (Blog about that is coming.)

How about a new version for my platform? When will it be available?

Oracle recently released "Oracle Database 11g Release 2" and have made the Linux x86 and x86-64 available. As of today, it's not available for any other operating system.

There is a bit of a dilemma when it comes to releasing software for other operating systems. Part of that stems from customers wanting to be able to use the software. So Oracle needs to assign developers and testers to ensuring that the s/w is ready (sic).

Most Oracle employees are not allowed to discuss release dates. There are legal and Security Commission related reasons. Customers and partners who have access to release date information are usually under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and can not talk either. People without authorization could end up in court if they discuss release dates - so please don't ask.

Bottom line is that when it shows up in the Download area for your favorite operating system, there will be much rejoicing and you will likely see announcements in various forums.

Oracle release dates and end-of-life dates

2009-09-19T18:38:00.003-06:00

I note there are a lot of people asking for obsolete versions of Oracle, and some asking for dates of Oracle releases.

When was that version of Oracle x released? How much longer will it be supported?

To get information about what is currently supported, when it was initially released, and when it will become desupported or go into extended support, there is a great set of documents provided by Oracle Support on their website at http://www.oracle.com/us/support/index.htm (http://www.oracle.com > "Support" in top menu). Click on the Lifetime Support link and select the product area. (Database and App Server are in the 'Technical Products' doc.)

New policy on comments

2009-09-19T07:16:00.002-06:00

Comments in Asian languages have been appearing on my blog over the past months. Using Google translation indicates that these are spam, trojan or other unwanted or potentially nasty texts.

As a result, I have enabled moderation for the comments, and I will not accept any in languages other than English.

Sorry ...

Rehash of Oracle Networking

2009-09-12T16:47:00.003-06:00

It's that time again. A new crop of DBAs is trying to connect their app to their database. A quick overview that might help one or two of them:

You got your Database SERVER. It's isolated. The only way to get to it across the network is via a LISTENER. The listener listens on the network based on the rules in the LISTENER.ORA but those rules may be modified by the SQLNET.ORA

On the flip side

You got your application (Informatica, SQLPlus, TOAD, whatever). It wants to talk to the database. To do that it talks to the Oracle Networking (aka SQLNet) CLIENT. That is governed by the rules in the TNSNAMES.ORA (but those rules may be modified by the SQLNET.ORA)

If not Java and assuming TCP/IP, your CLIENT is told (by the app) to connect to "user/password@alias". It looks up 'alias' in the TNSNAMES.ORA to get 'host, port, database-service'. (Java/JDBC needs the same info, but in typical Java fashion, it's syntax is 'different'.)

- The host is the one where your database should be.
- The port is the TCP/IP port the listener is told to listen on (using LISTENER.ORA)
- The service represents the database the listener should know about, to which you want to connect

Possible Failures:

- CLIENT does not understand the alias (ORA-12154) ... bad entry in TNSNAMES.ORA - or DEFAULT_DOMAIN in SQLNET.ORA
- CLIENT can't find host (DNS issue?)
- CLIENT can't get to port (Firewall)
- CLIENT can't find LISTENER on port (ORA-12541) (listner not up; listener on a different port; listener.ora vs tnsnames.ora mismatch)
- LISTENER doesn't know what client is talking about (ORA-12514)
- - database is not up or has not been registered with Listener (check 'lsnrctl status')
- - Listener on an unexpected port (check DB init parameter 'LOCAL_LISTENER' - default=localhost:1521, compare to listener.ora)

Oh - and ORA-12560 means that the piece (client OR listener) can not verify it is on the network. Often means that the tnsnames.ora (client) or listener.ora (server) has a hostname or port problem. That may be due to DHCP (hostname) or firewall (port).

There are other reasons, of course. The Oracle Network Administration manual has a fantastic set of chapters for troubleshooting.

News galore

2009-04-20T12:15:00.005-06:00

I was going to blog about my recent trip to Santiago and the Chilean Oracle Users Group. My thanks for a wonderful reception and great time by the CLOUG and especially to Francisco Munoz Alvarez (http://oraclenz.com/) for all the hard work. And also to Oracle Technology Network team for their support and effort in getting a bunch of us Oracle ACE and ACE Directors coordinated and on site. Some of the details available on other blogs, such as Tim Hall's at http://www.oracle-base.com/blog/

I understand there is to be 'round two' in November ... I'll be back!

As enjoyable and fulfilling as that was, I need to sit back and absorb the really big news.

While in Chile, I had the opportunity to have dinner with two people I respect a lot in the Oracle world - Tim Hall and Graham Wood. Graham was there for the Exadata launch, and that took us to the topic of storage and storage vendors. I mentioned in passing that "If Sun is being sold anyway, I'd think there would be no better buyer than Oracle." (The discussion, as so often happens, turned down a side path to RAC and interconnect and the like.) Indeed, I see many, many positives for the industry and very few (if any) negatives to the deal.

For all those doubting Thomases, I have to point to the Peoplesoft, Siebel, Hyperion acquisitions to form a definitive statement about Oracle's ability to make M&A work in this industry.

Needless to say, on first blush I am excited.

Morgan's Library

2009-04-01T10:54:00.002-06:00

Many of you know that I provide Oracle training. As such, I use any and all resources I can get my fingers on.

One of the most important resources for me is Dan Morgan's library of information about Oracle SQL, PL/SQL and various features.

I am pleased to note that Dan has a new URL for his library. http://www.morganslibrary.com/ which promises to provide even more great information.

Mommy ... it's over*

2008-09-28T09:28:00.002-06:00

*With apologies to Victor from Just for Laughs

Oracle Open World is over for another year. This one has been rather interesting and very special for me for a lot of reasons, not the least being this was my first as an ACE Director.

There are a lot of thanks to hand out
- to Justin for being the energy and brains of OTN;
- to Lillian and Vikki for herding the cats called ACEs and ACE Directors;
- to Lewis for getting the Birds of a Feather session going;
- to Eddie and Tim and Mark and Dan and Mogens and ... for mentoring;
- to Oracle Open World team for the great show;
- to all those I've inadvertently insulted by leaving your names out;

and to each and every one who introduced yourselves and chatted with me.

As always, I learned a lot about Oracle and the Oracle community, and leave wanting more. I spent much more time networking than ever, which simply confirmed how great of a community this really is.

I already have some tentative invitations to speak or teach and hope to see and meet more of you through the year.

Unravelling an Oracle hardware mystery

2008-09-27T13:17:00.003-06:00

As already noted, my first reaction to Larry's announcement was "nice - but irrelevant". However, I promised myself that I would look at the Oracle hardware announcement in more detail.

Of course, I took a look at Kevin Closson's blog and related 'FAQ' at http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/ and that is giving me some ideas of the Exadata capabilities.

I also started to read some of the materials at OTN. And the relevant pages at Oracle.com. And the Oracle online price list. (Note to Oracle: it is not easy to find the Exadata info from OTN home page. And there is no entry at all in the Oracle Store.)

Some up front observations:

1) The Exadata is a storage machine, independent of the HP-Oracle Database Machine;
2) The HP-Oracle Database machine is a specific packaging of server and Exadata storage;
3) The size and price point of Exadata Storage server indicates it could reach into the mid-size business market;
4) Oracle still uses 'interesting' pricing.

My previous comment about not being applicable to my region was based on my reaction to the price and configuration of the full-blown HP-Oracle Database Machine. Not quite correct ...

From the announcement on Wednesday, and the side conversations, I managed to totally lose sight of point 1. Indeed, Oracle has announced they are in the disk storage business - a natural outgrowth of their foray into file systems and disk storage management with OCFS and ASM.

The size ranges for Exadata will indeed introduce some interesting issues. It is indeed valid for mid-range business and may even reach into the upper small-sized business. However, every mid-size company I deal with is looking at reducing the storage footprint, as well as reducing the number of storage vendors. Hardware sales is a different process, and requires a completely different sales relationship and entry point to the organization - Oracle really needs to look to third parties like Edmonton's Interdynamix if they want to be successful in that market.

My point about interesting pricing is taken from the referenced price list. Oracle sells the storage using either 300GB SAS drives or 1TB SATA drives. The amusing (or distressing) concern is that Oracle charges a simple hardware price for the 'shelf' including the 12 disk drives, but then has a software charge per disk in that shelf. Unless I totally misinterpret that pricing doc - possible, as I'm sitting in the airport waiting for my name to be called on standby.

Keynote ..

2008-09-25T15:04:00.002-06:00

Larry Ellison used his keynote to announce an Oracle-HP hardware solution to the problem of getting data quickly from database (disk) to the instance (memory). I'm sure I'll admire the technology under this, and the obvious place to look is Kevin Closson's discussion around this.

Like Tim Hall, I am underwhelmed by the announcement. I'm certain there is a use for this, but this is nearly irrelevant in the small to medium market - and in Canada, the bulk of the potential Oracle customers are in the small to medium business class.

Similarly underwhelming, I note that the conference seems to have emphasized everything but database. (As compared to previous years, I don;t remember being told what the portion of Oracle revenue comes from database.)

Indeed, in a separate briefing, we were told about middle tier enhancements that provide zero-latency and infinite scalability, making the 'unscalable and slow database' effectively obsolete. I'm waiting for the announcement of sub-zero response times and virtual persistence that does not need any data store at all.

SQLDeveloper, APEX,, Modelling, Oh My ...

2008-09-24T10:06:00.005-06:00

I've been around databases since late 70s and started with Oracle database in 1984. One thing I've learned is that they get more complex as time goes on. Anything that reduces that complexity interests me. SO I decided to attend the Soup to Nuts presentation in Moscone South.

I've used Oracle*SDE and Designer, ERwin, and other ER modelling tools. These tools did not make life easier when doing the initial design. In fact, they often slowed me down, as I can usually stream-of-consciousness code faster than design and code. But nearly all (of my) code eventually needs upgrading or troubleshooting, and SOC coding is a royal pain to debug, since I probably can not remember how or why I did something. So I learned from experience that I should design first, then code.

Emphasis on 'should' - the sheer weight of most of the modeling tools encouraged a prototype first, or SOC programming, attitude.

SQLDeveloper, based on the JDeveloper's extensible framework, is an exciting product. Fairly easy to use, SQLDev is definitely in conflict with Oracle's traditional NUIs (Non-Intuitive User Interfaces).

In this session, we got a heads up for a graphical ER tool extension to SQL Developer, including relational and multi-dimensional modeling. With a distributable 'viewer', and eventually a database-based repository. Some subset of the demoed features should be in public beta 'Real Soon Now'.

When I worked for Oracle, a number of us were privileged to use the ARIA project built on an early internal release of HTML-DB. So when Oracle released HTML-DB as a 'feature' of Oracle8i that peaked my interest, especially as a possible replacement and consolidation for the myriad of small Access, FoxPro, DBase personal databases that was proliferating. Unfortunately, Portals were the flavour of the year, and it seemed that HTML-DB was sidetracked as the Oracle Portal took precedence.

Fortunately Oracle came to their senses and re-released HTML-DB, which has been upgraded and renamed to Application Express. This is another example of conflict with NUI standards as APEX is indeed quite usable. I have built a few small apps in Apex 3.1 and am quite pleased with the results, especially for small business and work group apps.

The SQLDeveloper extensions - such as those which understand Application Express and that provide ER modeling - have helped make SQL Developer one of my favorite database access tools in Oracle. Between SQL Developer and APEX, I suspect I could spend a lot of my life learning features and futures such as the ability to use the Oracle Forms XML definitions to initialize new applications, and unit testing made simple (with check-boxes to define limit testing), and ...

I'm looking forward to the day when SQL Developer includes extensions to administer Oracle Warehouse Builder.

For now, I'll be keeping a closer eye to Eddie Awad's blog at http://awads.net/wp/ and Sue Harper's at http://sueharper.blogspot.com

Day two ... expanding horizons

2008-09-23T15:41:00.003-06:00

... and the planned schedule is definitely out the window. With some interesting results and inputs.

I've been using my iPod Touch to keep up with email and web access. My calendar, my schedule for Open World, my customers, even my web cam from home - all on the iPod. The network here is pretty loaded and things can be slow. So, based on some reading about iPod Touch performance challenges, last night I started the upgrade to my iPod Touch. Due to the hotel network, that aborted. This morning, I come to Moscone Center early to complete the install. As an official blogger, I have access to the Press Room and Blogger's Lounge, which is where I decided to do the upgrade. About 45 minutes before my first session for the day is to start.

What I did not realize - there was a press Q&A scheduled around Social CRM and the changes in CRM over the past several years, including the latest things introduced by Oracle. Of course my upgrade - with dire warnings about not unplugging before it's complete - is running during the Q&A. So I listened in.

Interesting topic, and I was surprised to find out how close the topic is to the heart of this techie. Social CRM, in a nutshell, is a simple expansion of the Birds of a Feather concept we all have used for ages - people like to deal with, socialize with, and trust, people who have similar interests. So why not use CRM-oriented data mining to help customers meet relevant customers, as well as help companies understandf what is indeed relevant to customers. I found this interesting because I am both a customer who loves to meet other like-minded customers to share ideas, and because I am a techie who may be asked to manage the the mining tools and the database from which this is mined. I suspect DBAs will be asked about this stuff in the near future.

After that session, I headed over to Marriott and enjoyed Tom Kyte's keynote. Tom's theme was one some of us are very familiar with - the best way to do anything in Oracle depends on the real question. As always, Tom's ideas got me to thinking, especially in two areas: today's best practices can easily become tomorrow's myths, so retest our facts frequently; and yesterday's myths could easily become today's best practices.

Tom's presentation fits in nicely with somethings I've blogged about and frequently presented about - ROT or Rules Of Thumb. Every Rule Of thumb is based on (often unstated) assumptions and when those assumptions are violated, the result is a pile of rot. The assumptions that forced us away from things last version might no longer be valid due to changes in technology. Or the assumptions that caused us to use certain techniques yesterday might no longer be valid - such as having few users, few schemas and relatively small data sets, potentially encouraging separation of index from data to simulate manual striping for performance ... as compared to ASM, logical volume management, disk striping and SAME invalidating that entirely in most situations.

It was certainly nice to see Tom again.

After Tom's session, I headed over to iDevelop Hands-On session for APEX. Due to a logistic mix-up during registation, I managed to lose my Develop track access and could not preregister. So I ended up in the stand-by line for the session. The cutoff to get was the young lady in front of me. So I wandered over to my second choice. a session on SQL Developer and Migration Workshop.

I'd seen the Migration Workbench back in 2001 and 2002. Recently a number of customers have indicated they might need consolidation from a number of different databases. Migration Workbench has finally found a good home under the SQL Developer umbrella. And the demos by Oracle, and the supporting presentation by Finra, certainly opened my eyes. Even more to go home and study. I hope someone get to writing an APress OAK Table book around SQL Developer soon.

After that, I headed over to the Moscone West demoground and got a lot more information about Beehive. I'm still trying to frame my own interpretation about Beehive, as compared to other Oracle products such as WebCenter and others. I need to digest this before I blog about it, but I am definitely looking at that product more seriously. Much more as time goes on, but for now I'd say Beehive is Oracle's only 'consolidated Collaboration Content Server', whereas WebCenter and Portal are 'content consolidators' which could also present Beehive content.

Still to come - something about the OTN Welcome party last night, and the OTN ACE get together tonight. After all, Oracle Open World is all about meeting people ... and regardless of how convenient it is, face to face is still the best form of Social CRM.

(Speaking of which ... where are you Hector Madrid?)

Plans of mice and men

2008-09-22T15:16:00.003-06:00

Dan Norris has a couple of tips for Open World attendees. With appropriate apologies, here is my paraphrase: wear comfortable shoes; drink lots (of water); prepare to pare your carried load.

I did just that. I carefully went through the schedule and decided what was most interesting or most important. Put that on my schedule. Signed up for the Information Overload DVD pack to make sure I get all the information I'm missing.

Well, like so many best laid plans of mice and men ... the schedule has gone out the window already. The news about Beehive interested me so much, I decided to visit the Beehive booth at the demo grounds. As a Collab Suite customer who prefers to run a Linux OpenSUSE/KDE desktop, I wanted to see what the future holds.

On the way, I ran into the WebCache group. Good news - they demoed filter rules for the cache. So in addition to LBR, we can look forward to intelligent request handling, including source IP blocking and request redirects. And it sounds like they will confirm to the Oracle management BLAF (Basic Look and Feel) when the admin is handled through the newer releases of Grid Control. From discussions with the booth teach, in the future it will hopefully be possible to assign admin for WebCache separately, which would be a bonus. Traditionally (in my geography) the App Server admin is defaulted to DBA or a general Web Server admin. This change means we could assign the cache admin to a network administrator, which might make more sense for some customers.

I finally worked my way to the Beehive booth, where I learned some exciting news - Beehive does not depend on Outlook. It works with Thunderbird, and some of the team apparently has been using Linux desktops and 'all sorts of front ends'. The only piece of the old Collab Suite still to come is the web conference - aka web desktop - and that should not be that far down the road.

Even though it's officially one-person company, collaboration is still important - CEO, accountant, legal, temps, customers all need access, and simple EMail and unified client OS and environment is simply not enough.

Time to start looking at Beehive seriously.

Monday morning

2008-09-22T09:51:00.005-06:00

Lineups, lineups, all I want is lineups. To be expected! there are 43,000 people registered to attend. To put that into perspective, that's just a bit short of the size of my home town next to Edmonton ... all of us in the core of San Francisco.

Like last year, Judy Sims welcomed us to the opening keynote. She described some of the changes based on the feedback from last year. Wow - the improvements are amazing. Oracle really does listen, from balancing between greening the conference vs usability (conference book is about 1/2 the size and weight from last year ... saved 965 trees over last year) to dedicated exhibition hall time and more Unconference sessions.

Highlights from Charles Phillips' keynote: "A year of Innovation" "$3B investment in R&D" "50 acquisitions in 44 months" "84K employees" "Complete. Open. Integrated." "Being number 1 helps Oracle help us [customers] by being able to invest."

Keys in the Vertical Apps are: Define solution map by industry and buy/build to that map and then standardize the integration through Application Integration Architecture. Think "Packaged Applications of the 90s become Packaged Integrations of the new millennium"

Keys in the Horizontal apps (Fins, CRM) are: Get feedback from customer

Keys in Middleware: FMW 10gR3 & EPM 11gR1. Going forward, more integration with BEA. Announcing JDeveloper 11g, ADF 11g, TopLink 11g available this week. Announcing FMW on the Amazon Cloud. Announcing Beehive to replace(?) Collaboration Suite.

Beehive is a ground-up communication/coordination/collaboration server. (Collaboration Suite, in spite of it's tremendous promise, was one of the most difficult to set-up and administer products in the Oracle toolchest. Beehive is supposed to be pre-integrated.)

Beehive looks very interesting and should be extremely useful, especially when the desktop sharing capability is released. It includes automatic IPR and security, so deleting or removing access to a file will be enforced even for remote copies.

After the install and administer issues, the biggest headache I had with Collab Suite was the dependence on Microsoft product. The Charles/Chuck demo so far only shows using Microsoft Outlook as the client. If Oracle truly believes in Linux, they need to show support for Linux desktops - I run KDE and most classes I teach use gnome - so I'll be asking about that in the demogrounds.

The discussions around Database (new options, such as the "Times ten" cache), Infrastucture (innovation around Linux with BTRFS and CFS, VM and Enterprise Manager) flew by.

The final announcement is "My Oracle Support", which seems to be a Flash-based, Web 2.0 version of Metalink, is now available. Since this is personalized suupport, there should be a lot of interest in this area.

Seemingly in keeping with the theme of integration, NetApp's keynote is appended to the end of the opening. The theme of that presentation is 'innovation in tech' - very interesting discussion around technology innovation helping ROI. Key ideas: overprovisioning, deduplication, thin cloning. From a ROI perspective the topic of the presentation was interesting. From the number of people heading out during the talk, I note that Open World still cuts across many parts of the customer base - honestly, how many techs care about business cases.

Summary ... the obvious theme is 'progressive innovation'. (Which may not make for much spectacular splash.) The one take-away for me is it's time to look when I'll upgrade my Collab Suite licenses to Beehive.

Things Oracle May or May Not Announce

2008-09-21T22:56:00.003-06:00

Today was a day of product briefings. It was a long day starting with meeting fellow ACE Directors and getting some ideas of what is to come in the areas of database, app server, tools and even applications. One thing came through loud and clear - there will be some interesting announcements in all areas, many related to the recent BEA purchase.

Most of the announcements will end up with a strong ROI component. Going forward I think I'll be spending a fair amount of virtual ink looking at Return on Investment and why Admins (SysAdmins, DBAs, JEE Admins, etc.) should be interested in the topic.

Oracle released database patchset 11.1.0.7 last week. Note to self: look at the new graphical Explain Plan in depth. It promises to be very very important for performance analysis.

On a more fun note, I finally met face to face with a few of the many OTN heroes. After many pleasant discussions on OTN forums and email, and threats to get together for a glass of wine or two, I got to meet Nicolas Gasparato. And Rob van Wijk. And ... I stop there, or I'll have listed hundred of names by the end of the week.

Today was the first time Lewis Cunningham, Tim Hall, Mark Rittman, Eddie Awad, Brown Bradley, Arup Nanda and I could meet before our Birds of a Feather session (#S300480) on Thursday at 10:30. I am really looking forward to that.

Tomorrow will be a busy day!

Ahhhh ... San Francisco

2008-09-21T10:03:00.003-06:00

Oracle's Open World is, like Oracle itself, big. And exciting.

And I'm here - again. My 3rd Open World as an independent. I can't remember how many I attended while at Oracle, DLGL or Nortel. (Perhaps I should set up a database - APEX should make it easy.)

This year I'll be blogging about my experience here. Hopefully several times a day.

First off, Kudos to the Open World registration team who made the arrangements to get me here. I arrived yesterday afternoon on a direct flight from Edmonton. The flight was pleasant and - surprise - the plane and the bags all arrived at the same time. Got to the hotel and the check-in process was flawless. (You would be surprised at the number of times I have glitches at hotel check-in.) Met with Dan Morgan (Morgan's Library at www.psoug.org) and a few more Oracle ACE Directors.

Took the bus from the Hilton over to the Moscone Center this morning to check in and get my registration package. So far everything looks just like it did last year. Same party tent, same registration process (but without the snags from last year), same location for the OTN Lounge, and the bookstore (which will probably get me to buy a lot of stuff, same as last year). So a lot is already familiar.

On the agenda for today - get my iPod tied in to the hotel network and the Oracle conference Wifi so I blog and get my emails without carrying the laptop. Attend some IOUG sessions. Meet with a lot of the ACEs and ACE Directors.

If you are here, check out the OTN lounge. I'll be there for a fair bit, and I hope to meet a number of people I've chatted with, emailed, and met on the Forums.

This promises to be fun ...

PSOUG Oracle Days is over for another year

2008-07-19T15:54:00.004-06:00

Just got back from the PSOUG-hosted training and OracleDays 2008. A great week - three days of training and two of conference and breakout session. As always, I caught up with old friends and met people who I'd only known by reputation, or had met electronically.

The one challenge with this kind of conference - and it'll be a nightmare at Oracle Open World - is deciding what to attend. I started with 2 days of intense discussion about indexes by Richard Foote, but had to pass on classes by Jeremiah Wilton (http://www.ora-600.net/), Kyle Hailey (http://www.perfvision.com/) and the dynamic duo of Cary Millsap and Karen Morton (http://method-r.com/).

Talk about flattery - one person admitted to thinking twice about my presentation on Oracle Spatial before coming to his senses and attending Tom Kyte's "Worst Practices" session. Can't blame him, as I would have loved to attend Tom's session myself.

Thursday and Friday were filled with keynotes and breakout sessions. As usual, the hot topic of the day is governance, but there were some interesting announcements by Pillar (ASM compatible storage) and IBM's z10 mainframe taking the cost effective Oracle-on-Linux discussion to the net level.

One Thursday and Friday I managed to attend sessions by Kyle and Jeremiah (but I collided with Richard's high level Index session). These guys have it together - I highly recommend listening to them if you get a chance.

Bottom line is a big thanks to the PSOUG, especially Dan Morgan and Jack and Chris, as well as the sponsors and speakers. I've already got this on my calendar for next year.

Why do they always ask for version information?

2008-07-06T07:51:00.002-06:00

Over in the forums, one of the most frequent complaints by people who try to answer questions is around the lack of information about the Oracle product version and the operating system version and edition. This information is usually missing by people who want to learn Oracle by installing it on their home/school/laptop computers.

A general hint for all of you who want to learn by installing Oracle product on your computer ...

It may be a surprise that Microsoft has different versions and different editions of Windows. Each version has different internals. Each edition has different capabilities.

When Oracle programs are written and released, they expect certain internals (DLLs, registry layout, etc.) and certain capabilities (supporting applications, such as security administration)

If you try to install Oracle product on a Windows version that is too old or too new, Oracle may not be able to call the operating system properly. So installing Oracle 8i database 8.1.7 on Windows XP Professional may not work, and installing any Oracle database version lower than 10.2.0.3 on Vista will not work.

(All right, technically Express Edition is at version 10.2.0.1 - but it was modified to work with Vista and a lot of the incompatible features are not included in XE.)

If you try to install Oracle product on a Windows Edition that is too limited, you may encounter problems because of Windows capabilities being missing, turned off, or just being limited. So installing Oracle 9i or 10g Database on Windows XP Home may or may not work (or some aspects may not work) partially because some features require security settings that are not exposed in XP Home. This seems to be especially true of the Vista Home vs Vista Business editions.

Please mention the version & edition of Windows! (And the product, version and edition of Oracle!)

Some thought about Oracle Certification

2008-06-28T15:55:00.002-06:00

This blog is based on questions I have received, and seen on the Certification forum at http://forums.oracle.com

1) Where to find out about (exams, certification, requirements, etc.)

Go to http://education.oracle.com or http://otn.oracle.com and look for the Certification link. Check the menu bar on the right edge. Or (same place) click here

2) Problems with the certification process

If you have written the exams and done all the other things right, but still have not received your certification kit - look through the FAQ., You can find it under the Support menu on the certification page. If you have any otrher questions about the process - look there as well. If you honestly can't find the answer, then ask in the Oracle Forum for Certification at http://forums.oracle.com

3) Why Certify?
Two main reasons that I can come up with

prove to yourself and others that you understand the basics of the topic
help get a job

4) Is it worth it?

Yes.

The process of certification, when followed, forces a person to look at relevant material. Sometimes it is a review, but sometimes it is new to them. That is a good thing. And supports 'Why Certify' reason #1.

And No.

Unfortunately there are people who cheat. When cheaters get hired, their employer often gets cheated and is left with the wrong impression of the quality of certification. Then everyone who has certification is suspect. That invalidates 'Why Certify' reason #2 - for everyone.

And, (whether true or not is totally irrelevant and not something I will debate) there is a perception in some areas that vendor certifications are simply money-grabs. As far as I can tell, this perception crosses ALL vendor certifications.

5) Which certification should I get?

Only you can answer that. You need to assess whether you are an architect, a developer or an operations person.

Database Administrators, App Server Administrators, System Administrators, Functional or Application administrators are involved in long term operations, often years at a time. They keep the machinery of business moving, and hopefully keep it oiled and running efficiently. Good administrators will keep up with technology changes but will mainly study and expand their knowledge of internals.
Developers and Architects are involved in changing the direction of the business. Projects can be measured in days, weeks and months and these people specialize in change. Good developers and architects will learn how to introduce change more efficiently, but also need to learn how that change integrated and affects existing systems. A good knowledge of internals is important here as well.Reviewing the exam and certification requirements may help you decide.

6) I've made a decision. How do I get a job as a insert title here

First step is to be honest about your ability. An honestly achieved certificate will help you self-assess your ability.

Finding a fitting job may be tough. You may need to use the same research skills you learned in getting your certificate in finding an appropriate job. You need to find out which jobs are available - through contacts, friends, local user groups, news papers. Then you need to apply for those jobs, and tailor each application to explain why you are the best person for that specific job. Finally, if you don;t get the job, you should find out why and use that information to make the next application better.

7) Where do I get information, tests, books, brain dumps, and so on

First, lets be clear. Getting certified is not supposed to be easy. It is supposed to provide you with the knowledge that you will need to do your job professionally. If it was that easy, your job would not be worth that much.

And remember that cheaters who are caught will lose their certification and perhaps lose their chance at any certification in the industry. Using Brain Dumps is considered cheating. Using Gunners is considered cheating. Passing an exam based on purely memorized material without understanding the material is as bad as cheating in the long run.

Now that's out of the way, here are some ideas:

You can get books related to nearly each exam. Oracle Press and Sybex are some of the better known publishers. You can find these books at many local bookstores as well as many online bookstores such as http://www.amazon.com If you use an online store, try searching for the exam number, such as 1Z0-001 as found on the site listed under the first question above.
Join a local users group. Not only will that help you with getting a job, but many professionals are willing to lend or sell their study books.
Get the exam requirements (see #1) and learn to search, especially in the online documentation at http://otn.oracle.com (see Documentation) or http://docs.oracle.com or http://tahiti.oracle.com
Search in the forums. Go to the relevant forum (don't simply pick the first one available) and use the search capability. If you can't find anything ask for help understanding. Explain what you want to learn and explain what you currently understand. Ask for pointers in the documentation. Ask for additional reasons. (But search first ...)

Keep reminding yourself "If it was that easy, your job would not be worth that much."

8) The Hands-On Course is so expensive. Do I need to spend [ insert value here ]?

Basically, it's Oracle's certification process, and they require all of us to attend instructor-led course[s] before getting OCP, OCE or OCM certificates. (Upgrades are generally exempt.) In many ways, it is simply Oracle's way of ensuring we are exposed to a wide variety of information.

And I'm not going to debate the obvious responses about money grab ... There are many ways of meeting the requirement and some are not that expensive. Consider it a challenge and a sign of a serious OCP candidate to have met the hands-on requirement within budget.

Where to look for XML-DB info

2008-06-27T15:47:00.004-06:00

There have been recent questions about where to find information about Oracle's XML implementation, and how to use XML DB

You might want to start the online tutorials. (http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/start/index.html) Drill into the Database 10g tutorials and go to the Extended Data management ones at the end.

You also might want to start at the XML-DB portal to see whether they have any demos or samples. All product portals start at OTN (http://otn.oracle.com), go into the product family (Product [left edge] > Database), then into the feature set (Content Management sounds like a good guess) and finally to the component (XMLDB) and see whether there are any discussions, white papers (venter area) or samples and tutorials (right edge)

Or you might want to look at the XML technology portal to see whether they have any demos or samples. All technology portals start on OTN at http://otn.oracle.com, go to the Technology Centers (Technology [left edge]), select Technology header if the area is not immediately visible, go to the XML Tech Center, see if there are some discus edge)sion papers or Sample Code (right edge)

Barring that, you could use a web search for "load xml into oracle" and perhaps select the first link that pops up (Loading A Large Xml Document Into The Database)

Or you could go to a book store such as Amazon, search for "Oracle XML" and buy a book like
- "Oracle Database 10g XML & SQL: Design, Build, & Manage XML Applications in Java, C, C++, & PL/SQL (Osborne ORACLE Press Series) by Mark Scardina, Ben Chang, and Jinyu Wang (Paperback - May 31, 2004)"

or my favorite

- "Building Oracle XML Applications by Steve Muench (Paperback - Oct 2, 2000) - Illustrated"

Want help with an Oracle listener problem?

2008-04-05T07:41:00.003-06:00

Especially if you are on the Oracle forums, and you are asking for help getting your listener to run.

For us to troubleshoot the problem properly, please provide the following information:

1) Windows

Tell us the operating system (Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, Vista Ultimate, Vista Business) ... PLUS service pack information! You can get the appropriate information from the Control Panel > System

Tell us how many ORACLE_HOMEs you have. Several ways to find out, one being to go to the SERVICES (Control Panle > Administration Tools > Services) and simply looking for entries that start with 'Oracle' and end with 'TNSLIstener'

Copy/paste the listener.ora to the forum - You can ignore the samples, but be aware that you may have several. If you have more than one search for all the listener.ora files on your system.

We need basic Computer naming and IP/interface information. From the command line (Start > Run > cmd)

hostname
echo %COMPUTERNAME%
ipconfig /all
route print

It's very useful to see whether

And we need to understand what your listener thinks it is doing, so provide a copy paste of the output (also form the command line) for

lsnrctl status

If the listener is not running, you may want to start it using 'lsnrctl start'

IP interface config (Windows: ipconfig /all, route print; Linux: ifconfig; route)

2) Similar information from Linux would be

Linux distro (RedHat EL4 Update 5, Ubuntu 6.10 Server, SUSE 10.1, Fedora8, etc.), and especially useful is the output from

uname -a

Please copy/paste the /etc/oratab file and the listener.ora file(s) from the ORACLE_HOMEs found in that file. (The Homes are the second colon-delimited field at the bottom of the file.)

We need basic Computer naming and IP/interface information. From the command line

hostname
/sbin/ifconfig
/sbin/route

We need to see your Environment.

set | grep -i ora

and you may want to set the environment using

. oraenv (that is a dot space) and answer with aan ORACLE_SID from the above oratab
. oracle_env.sh (if you are using XE)

And we need to understand what your listener thinks it is doing, so provide a copy paste of the output (also form the command line) for

lsnrctl status

If the listener is not running, you may want to start it using 'lsnrctl start'

If you provide that information up front, we won't have to ask for it

"I'm a volunteer, not a dentist"

2008-03-16T08:40:00.005-06:00

(** With dues apologies and thanks to the writers of Star Trek http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/I'm_a_doctor,_not_a...)

I spend a lot of time responding on Oracle forums. One consistent frustration is that we apparently need to be dentists - getting operating system and product version information is like pulling split teeth (both painful and tedious).

When asking a question, the combination of operating system edition and service pack AND Oracle edition and patch are very important pieces of information. A number of us volunteers are now starting to ignore questions that miss these basics.

I) Microsoft product

Very quickly, here is my perspective of 'What is Windows', or 'What do I need to help you'.

Windows is Microsoft's brand name. It covers a lot of families of products.
Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista are Microsoft Windows product family names.
Each family has 'configurations' or 'editions' (which have Service Packs)

Windows XP comes in Professional, Media Center, Home and Mobile Editions
Windows Vista comes in several Editions Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate Editions
and so on.

When asking a question, PLEASE specify the detail, such as "Windows XP Professional SP2" (or an understandable acronym, such as XPP2)

II) For Oracle

Similar thing with Oracle

Oracle is Oracle Corporation's overloaded brand name and trademark
Oracle {product} {family} is Oracle's product brand name
These product brands may be divided into releases
Then we have Editions which gets us to a product that may be used (and patched)

Typical Oracle product Families

Oracle Database 10g,
Oracle Database 11g,
Oracle Collab Suite 10g,
Oracle Business Intelligence 10g,
Oracle Application Server 10g

Example releases

Oracle Database 10g Release 2

Editions in the DB10gR2 (in increasing 'included functionality' order)

Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Express Edition,
Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Standard Edition One
Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Standard Edition
Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Enterprise Edition
Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Personal Edition

III) Linux product

The naming conventions for Linux are much more nebulous. Simply put, the information I need when responding to a Linux question is

Vendor (optional, may be implied with community projects)
Distribution
Release
Kernel release (from uname -r)
Userid under which the problem occurs (root, oracle-owner, other)

So I would want to see "Using oracle on OpenSUSE 10.3 - 2.6.18.8-0.7-default"

More Oracle Networking troubleshooting - ORA-12514

2008-03-12T15:16:00.003-06:00

As always in database servers, you have two completely separate sides - the client and the server. The TNSNAMES.ORA file is for the client and must reside with the client. The LISTENER.ORA file is for the server and must reside with the server.

It is easy to get confused about the TNSNAMES.ORA because it can be found with the LISTENER.ORA file. This is mainly because there are a bunch of client tools on the machine, such as sqlplus, sqlload (and even the database when it uses database links).

The first step is on the server side: determine whether the listener is running and how it is running. To do that,

enter the command line 'lsnrctl status'

if the listener is not up, start it

check host for which the listener is listening

if not correct, fix the the LISTENER.ORA

this is a common problem when using DHCP (esp. Windows)

check port (on that host) on which the listener is listening

if not correct, fix the the LISTENER.ORA

check whether the listener knows of a service for the database

if the listener does not know about the service, start the database, or register the database using sqlplus DBA command 'alter system register;'

the database may be configured to support many services (see my blog)

Now you are ready to connect using

sqlplus user/password@alias

The second step, and this is repeated at each client that has a problem) is to check the TNSNAMES.ORA (using the output of lsnrctl status as reference)

find the a entry that starts with 'alias = Descrip...' (DESCRIPTION might be on a separate line)

if no entry, add one

enter it manually if you know the syntax, OR (preferred)

using netca (Start > ... > Ora ...> Network Configuration Assistant

verify the entry's ADDRESS points to the correct host (HOST = xyz)

common issue causing 12514, esp. when server has DHCP

should match the host name from the listener record above

verify the entry's ADDRESS points to the correct port (PORT = 1521)

should match the port number from the listener record above

verify the entry's ADDRESS points to a known service (SERVICE = my_database)

should match a service from the listener record above

If that still does not work, check the SQLNET.ORA to see whether there is a DEFAULT_DOMAIN= record. If there is, append the value to your alias in the TNSNAMES.ORA

Rename the database? WHY?

2008-03-09T19:25:00.002-06:00

I've seen repeated questions around renaming the XE database. Many of the reasons are not legitimate - you really can only use one XE at a time on a specific system.

However, there are a few legitimate reasons for wanting a different name. And a few easy workarounds that just might do the trick.

If all you want is a connection to the database other than connecting using @XE, here are two fairly easy ways:

1) Create a new alias in TNSNAMES.ORA
2) Create a new database service for XE

Demo time ... I want to connect to XE using 'sqlplus test/test@test'

Before


C:\temp>sqlplus test/test@test

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Tue Mar 4 07:30:42 2008

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

ERROR:
ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified


Enter user-name:

Solution

1) Create a new alias in TNSNAMES.ORA on the client ... TEST is the alias, XE is the SERVICE for the database


TEST =
 (DESCRIPTION =
   (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = FCC003L)(PORT = 1521))
   (CONNECT_DATA =
     (SERVER = DEDICATED)
     (SERVICE_NAME = XE)
   )
 )

and the above yields

C:\temp>sqlplus test/test@test

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Tue Mar 4 07:30:36 2008

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production

SQL> exit
Disconnected from Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production

The above will work quite nicely for any client that connects to the database using a TNS alias. But it still assumes the database service (often mistakenly called the SID) is XE. So let's go to variation 2)

2) Create a new database service for XE

Since Oracle8i, every database registers the services it wishes to provide with the listener. We can have up to 100 services coming out of one database. There are a few internal services, every Advanced Queue gets it's own service, there is one default service that matches the database name/SID. And we can add some ourself.

So let's ADD a service

a) add the service to the database


C:\temp>sqlplus / as sysdba

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Tue Mar 4 07:18:46 2008

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production

SQL> show parameter service_names

NAME                                 TYPE        VALUE
------------------------------------ ----------- ------------------------------
service_names                        string      XE
SQL> alter system set service_names='XE,TEST';

System altered.

SQL> alter system register;

System altered.

SQL> show parameter service_names

NAME                                 TYPE        VALUE
------------------------------------ ----------- ------------------------------
service_names                        string      XE,TEST
SQL> exit

b) Verify it is known to the listener


C:\temp>lsnrctl status

LSNRCTL for 32-bit Windows: Version 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on 04-MAR-2008 07:19
:42

Copyright (c) 1991, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Connecting to (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=IPC)(KEY=EXTPROC_FOR_XE)))
STATUS of the LISTENER
------------------------
Alias                     LISTENER
Version                   TNSLSNR for 32-bit Windows: Version 10.2.0.1.0 - Produ
ction
Start Date                04-MAR-2008 07:17:41
Uptime                    0 days 0 hr. 2 min. 1 sec
Trace Level               off
Security                  ON: Local OS Authentication
SNMP                      OFF
Default Service           XE
Listener Parameter File   C:\oracle\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\network\adm
in\listener.ora
Listener Log File         C:\oracle\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\network\log
\listener.log
Listening Endpoints Summary...
 (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=ipc)(PIPENAME=\\.\pipe\EXTPROC_FOR_XEipc)))
 (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)(HOST=FCC003L)(PORT=1521)))
 (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)(HOST=127.0.0.1)(PORT=8080))(Presentation=
HTTP)(Session=RAW))
Services Summary...
Service "CLRExtProc" has 1 instance(s).
 Instance "CLRExtProc", status UNKNOWN, has 1 handler(s) for this service...
Service "PLSExtProc" has 1 instance(s).
 Instance "PLSExtProc", status UNKNOWN, has 1 handler(s) for this service...
Service "TEST" has 1 instance(s).
 Instance "xe", status READY, has 1 handler(s) for this service...
Service "XEXDB" has 1 instance(s).
 Instance "xe", status READY, has 1 handler(s) for this service...
Service "XE_XPT" has 1 instance(s).
 Instance "xe", status READY, has 1 handler(s) for this service...
Service "xe" has 1 instance(s).
 Instance "xe", status READY, has 1 handler(s) for this service...
The command completed successfully

c) Update the tnsnames.ora


TEST =
 (DESCRIPTION =
   (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = FCC003L)(PORT = 1521))
   (CONNECT_DATA =
     (SERVER = DEDICATED)
     (SERVICE_NAME = TEST)
   )
 )

d) Verify


C:\temp>sqlplus test/test@test

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Tue Mar 4 07:30:36 2008

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.

Connected to: Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production
SQL> exit
Disconnected from Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production

Services are the basis for resource management and are critical for future instance consolidation in which we collapse multiple single-instance databases into one instance that can service [sic] many applications.

Another prerequisite to instance consolidation is the use of CURRENT_SCHEMA as described in an earlier blog.

Quotes about quotes

2008-02-15T13:14:00.004-07:00

Occasionally I need to use quotes inside a string when dealing with a database. Question also turned up in the SQL and PL/SQL forum today.

Since tracking those quote marks is a pain here is a trick I've used in the past:

Write my statement using a caret (shift 6 or ^) in place of the quote around the literal, and using regular single quotes inside the literal. Of course, if a carat is supposed to be in the string, us another character - even a letter will do.

INSERT INTO ABC VALUES ( ^This is a 'quoted' string with several 'quote' marks.^, ^'quoted at start and end'^);

Then edit it to turn every single quote into two quotes so the literal handler will see those as quotes

INSERT INTO ABC VALUES ( ^This is a ''quoted'' string with several ''quote'' marks.^, ^''quoted at start and end''^);

And finally edit it to turn the caret into a single quote

INSERT INTO ABC VALUES ( 'This is a ''quoted'' string with several ''quote'' marks.', '''quoted at start and end''');

as in

C:\temp>sqlplus test/test

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Fri Feb 15 13:03:49 2008

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.

Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production

SQL> drop table abc;

Table dropped.

SQL> create table abc ( s1 varchar2(256), s2 varchar2(256));

Table created.

SQL> INSERT INTO ABC VALUES ( 'This is a ''quoted'' string with several ''quote'
' marks.', '''quoted at start and end''');

1 row created.

SQL> select * from abc;

S1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

S2
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a 'quoted' string with several 'quote' marks.
'quoted at start and end'

Of course, these days in Oracle I'd use the quote operator which uses the syntax

q'{delimiter}string{delimiter}'

as in

INSERT INTO ABC VALUES ( q'#This is a 'quoted' string with several 'quote' marks.#', q'!'quoted at start and end'!');

as in

SQL> delete from abc;

1 row deleted.

SQL>
SQL> INSERT INTO ABC VALUES ( q'#This is a 'quoted' string with several 'quote'
marks.#', q'!'quoted at start and end'!');

1 row created.

SQL> select * from abc;

S1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

S2
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a 'quoted' string with several 'quote' marks.
'quoted at start and end'

Thinking through an ORA-12514

2008-01-21T13:49:00.000-07:00

There are a LOT of people who run into Oracle Networking problems. Funny thing is that it just ain't that hard. It simply takes a bit of time to think through the problem. Most of the time it's blindingly obvious IF you understand what is happening.

Oracle has a wonderful explanation of each message, including this one for the ORA-12514. In a nutshell, the user is requesting a connection to a specific service, but the listener has no idea how to find that service.

Let's take a quick and very high level, look at the connection process as it pertains to this problem:

1) listener gets started on the service to listen on a specific port for a specific host name or IP address. This is configured in the $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/listener.ora

Note that hostname/IP and port are in that file. You change the hostname (as happens with DHCP) and the file is no longer valid.

2) Database gets started and registers itself to the listener. Until the database registers itself, the listener does not currently know of the requested service

If the database gets started before the listener, it may be necessary to force registration by using the DBA's 'ALTER SYSTEM REGISTER' command.

The database uses the initialization parameter LOCAL_LISTENER to either point directly to the listener or to a TNSNAMES.ORA entry that points to the listener. (The default value for LOCAL_LISTENER is null which means 'local host on port 1521.)

If the host name changes or the port changes, the database may not be able to 'find' the listener at which time, the listener does not currently know of the requested service

3) The user then attempts to connect using the user's client. The user generally specifies an alias (to look up an entry into the client's TNSNAMES.ORA) or a connection description (which looks like an entry in TNSNAMES.ORA)

The description lists a host, a port and a service. If the system can get to the host (via IP, via /etc/hosts name, or via DNS resilution) and find the listener listening on the port, it asks the listener for a connection to that service.

If that service is registrered, all is well. Otherwise if the service is not registered, or an unregistered service is requested, the listener does not currently know of the requested service

So the problem can be in one of 3 areas:

1) listener is not configured right (but it is started, otherwise we get a 'no listener' message)
2) database is not started or is not registering correctly to the listener
3) user is asking for a non-existant service (possibly a typo)

Breakpoint, or is that Checkpoint?

2008-01-06T11:26:00.000-07:00

Forums are interesting beasts. And addictive.

I know. I'd been a frequent poster on the comp.databases.oracle.* newsgroups - the original forums. Totally addicted. There is a certain adrenaline rush to watching for a new post and creating a reasonable response.

I never did feel quite comfortable with the original bulletin board systems. But when the hotels and airports blocked the newsgroup port, apparently under the assumption that all we really want is mail and http, I got heavy into the Oracle Forums. Lately, though, I've been on the Oracle Forums too much. I'm responding too quickly. Not checking my facts properly. Making novice mistakes.

So it's time to take a break. Not quit ... I doubt that I could quit totally. But take a break.

Perhaps it's just a checkpoint. I plan on using the time to collect and organize a lot of my notes. Review and reinforce what I know, correct my assumptions and fallacies, and enhance the 'good enough to get it working' knowledge. There is enough for a book - or two. But it's got to be checked. And verified. And will be before I post again.

Besides, I have a few other things coming up. My paying jobs - consulting, training and singing - beckon with contracts that will keep me very busy for the next few months. And we (Edmonton Opera) are putting on Mozart's Requiem soon and Falstaff at the end of April, so I better learn my parts.

What are Oracle Statistics?

2007-12-27T07:30:00.001-07:00

Question on the Oracle forums, asked for a brief, non-document explanation of Oracle statistics. Here is my answer:

Oracle can do things in several different ways. For example, select might be done by table scan or by using indexes. It uses statistics - a variety of counts and averages and other numbers - to figure out the best way to do things.

It does the figuring automatically, using the Cost Based Optimizer. Your job is to make sure the numbers are good enough for that optimizer to work properly.

To get information about statistics (all links to 10gR2 docs):

General overview of statistics is found scattered in the Oracle Database Concepts manual. For 10g Release 2, Chapters 13 gives an overview, Chapter 15 gives details related to Table segments, Chapter 16 is about Index segments, Chapter 21 talks about automatic admin tasks.

The preferred tool for collecting statistics used to be the ANALYZE command. Over the past few releases, the DBMS_STATS package in the PL/SQL Packages and Types reference has taken over the statistics functions, and left the ANALYZE command with more mundane 'health check' work like analyzing chained rows and the like.

The definitve reference for using statistics is Chapter 14 "Managing Optimizer Statistics" of the Performance Tuning Guide manual.

As always, Dan Morgan has a great demo for DBMS_STATS at the Puget Sound Oracle User's Group web site in Morgan's library.

As well, Jonathan Lewis has some great hints and advice, although he still has not had a chance to classify that and it's getting stored under the Misc topics.

I have to admit some surprise that neither Howard Rogers nor Richard Foote has an in-depth discussion around DBMS_STATS, although both refer to statistics in their various articles and responses.

They may simply be leaving the details to Tom Kyte's discussion around the package.

Oracle Synonyms are unnecessary - Part 1

2007-12-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

I've been doing an inordinate amount of responding on the Oracle Forums over the past few weeks. One recent thread related to visibility of tables to a new user. Most of the respondents suggested using synonyms - something that will reduce the flexibility of the application in the long run.

Basically, synonyms are aliases or alternate names, of an object. The use is well documented but ... I find that synonyms can lead to

security risks (inevitably by granting everything to public) and
future-resistant administration (namespace collisions requiring separate instances)

The biggest use of synonyms seems to be to "make the schema qualifier go away in the SQL statement". For those cases, use the session-based current_schema capability. Here is a quick demo:

1) Create a new user r2 with next-to-no privileges, other than to connect.

C:\temp>sqlplus system/oracle
SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Wed Dec 26 14:31:46 2007
Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production

SQL> create user r2 identified by r2;
User created.
SQL> grant create session to r2;
Grant succeeded.

2) Create a table in schema TEST and make it available to the new user

SQL> connect test/test
Connected.
SQL> create table x ( x number );
Table created.
SQL> create table x ( x number );
Table created.
SQL> grant select on x to r2;
Grant succeeded.
SQL> insert into x values (3);
1 row created.

3) Log on as the new user and select from the table

SQL> connect r2/r2
Connected.
SQL> alter session set current_schema=test;
Session altered.
SQL> desc x
Name Null? Type
----------------------------------------- -------- ----------------------------

X NUMBER
SQL> select * from x;

X
----------
3

SQL> insert into x values (4);
insert into x values (4)
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01031: insufficient privileges

Using current_schema basically tells the system to use 'test' as the current schema, eliminating the need to create synonyms.

It is a basic session command, so it is available for all applications.

How to get help with Oracle - Part 3

2007-08-31T19:37:00.000-06:00

A lot of people are intimidated by Oracle's vast documentation. Since it is the source of a lot of knowledge about the Oracle products, they need to 'get over it' or there is a good chance they will never use Oracle products effectively.

There are 141 books in the Oracle Database 11g book set. And there are 183 in the Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2 (10.1.2.x) boot set. These include Javadoc. How should one approach the documentation?

The key is to use them as a resource set, not as a book that must be read. Get familiar with the concept of the contents and then you can generally find the information when it relevant. Here is the way I do it

1) Chose your Portal

http://tahiti.oracle.com
http://docs.oracle.com
http://otn.oracle.com > Documentation (same as previous link)

Some people swear by Tahiti because it has an excellent search facility.

I use Docs directly, and have most of the product and version portals bookmarked. Currently Tahiti is missing the documentation set for the Enterprise Manager, but I'm convinced Oracle will change that!

2) Print out the master book list

The titles themselves are pretty meaningful so it's worth while getting familiar with them. For a few weeks after a new release, I've got a copy of each posted above my computer monitor, which I skim for 2-3 minutes a few times a day. That's all it takes to get get the idea of what is available.

3) Start with the basics.

Whether you are a developer or a user, you need to understand the Concepts. But you really do not need all of them to start. The

a) Read Chapter 1 of the Concepts manual
b) Read, or skim, the Licensing manual (for database it's only 2 chapters)
c) Read Chapter 1 of the manual in the stream you need

Database Developer
8i, 9i, 10g: Database Application Developer's Guide - Fundamentals
11g: Advanced Application Developer's Guide
Database Administrator
all: Database Administrator's manual
Application Server Developer and Admnistrator
all: Application Server Administrator's Guide

I now print the table of contents for the Concepts manual and the manual just mentioned. Same approach and same reasoning as with the book list.

And then, after all this, I look at / study / print the table of contents of the SQL Reference manual. It has a lot of information, including some that ends up being relevant to app server administrators.

4) Specialize your knowledge

Now we have the introduction to the concepts, an introduction of the stream and the list of books. So we can decide what is next on the list.

In general Oracle seems to use the following titles

- Licensing Manual answers the daily 'is it included' question;
- Installation Guide is a 'How To' for installation;
- Administrator's Guide is a post-install 'How To' manual;
- User's Guide or Developer's Gude is a mini-Concepts, often with examples;
- Reference Manual drills into syntax and permitted parameters;

There are a few variations on the theme, but after a week or two, they actually become obvious.

So from this point on, and regardless of what we need to understand, I find it's always the same approach:

- look in the Table of Contents of the Concepts manual
- get an overview of the topic in the Concepts manual
- identify several keywords from the overview
- see whether the Concepts has a more in-depth chapter or
- use the Book List to find the User Guide relevant to the topic
- use the table of contents to get feel for the book
- dig into detail in that book
- use the Book List to find the Reference manual

5) Keep up to date

With each release, Oracle provides a "New Features" document to give a high level overview of the new areas, and a "What's New since the last release" section at the beginning of each manual.

I make a point of reading the New Features manual end-to-end for a new release. The Concepts gets a pretty thorough work-over, after which I use the same process as described before to hit the "What's New" sections on-demand.

But WHY?????

I constantly hear that Oracle is expensive. I totally disagree - I honestly believe that Oracle is NOT expensive. It's lack of understanding in the product, the features, the capabilities that makes an Oracle project appear expensive. I think that lack of knowledge is expensive.

Ignorance, with a deep pocket book, is bliss. Ignorance, without an unlimited budget, is simply painful.

So I dedicate at least 1 hour a day to reading Oracle manuals simply to help my customers get the best bang for their buck.

What happened to 9i's OEM

2007-08-27T19:46:00.000-06:00

I've been seeing this a lot, so here's the answer (I posted in the Oracle forums) in a nutshell ...

What is Oracle Enterprise Manager

OEM, Oracle Enterprise Manager, is a family of products designed to help monitor and administer Oracle products and other technology.

Some of the products in the 'family' include

Oracle8i Enterprise Manager
Oracle9i OEM [database] Console
Oracle9i OEM Management Server
Oracle10g Database Control
Oracle10g Application Server Control
Oracle10g Grid Control

In Oracle9i database, we used Oracle9i OEM [database] Console in either standalone or management server mode.

The successor to Oracle9i OEM [database] Console in standalone mode is Oracle10g Database Control

In Oracle9i database, the Management Server mode used
- a central repository,
- a central management server and
- database agents,
and this was accessed by
- Oracle9i OEM [database] Console in management server mode

In Oracle 10g, we now have additional products that are manageable using the Enterprise Manager family, and these are all visible through the Grid Control. From a database point of view, the Grid Control is successor to the Oracle9i Management Server stuff above

The Grid Control is a set of software that consists of
- a central repository,
- a central management server and
- host agents,
and is accessed by
- a web browser

The Packs

For many releases now, Oracle has been extending the functionality with add-on Packs. These packs are available at an extra cost. Two points about the cost:

1) In most cases, the packs are licensed against the product being monitored - not against Enterprise Manager;

2) The cost can often be justified, or at least offset, if one realistically looks at the scripts that are written and maintained (and re-maintained for every version and for every instance being administered). If one does not value their time, then the packs are expensive!

Although the Enterprise Manager controls are fairly useful without the Packs, the Packs make the difference. At the very least, the Diagnostics Pack is a real blessing in any multi-host, multi-product, multi-instance environment.

Gotchas

1) I really do not like the behaviour of the Application Server Control and Grid Control towards the Oracle Forms and Oracle Reports. As soon as Forms and/or Reports are included in the App Server, the Grid Control (10.2.0.2) shows 'down' even though all components are up. And the discovery of Reports servers feels like we are dealing with a poor and almost unwelcome cousin.

2) In 10g, the default behaviour is to turn on all Packs. But these cost extra money! So any Packs not used should be turned off by going to the Setup link in top right corner of any control, clicking on Management Pack Access, and turning the pack access off in the resulting page. After the access is off, the Enteprerise Manager will not provide access to the functionality - in most cases the functionality will not even appear.

3) The 10g Release 3 is actually only a major patch to 10g Release 2. That means you need to install 10gR2 and upgrade - there is no fresh 10gR3 install.

More Information

Several places to get more information:

1) As always, start at OTN

Overview: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/index.html
Self Help: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oem/tutorials/index.html

2) Docs (from http://docs.oracle.com)

Documentation: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B16240_01/welcome.html
and each product has it's own section as well

3) Education (from http://education.oracle.com)

Oracle U offers an excellent ILT course "Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Release 2 "

4) Pricing and Licensing

Use of database as Grid Control Repository is in Chapter 1 of the Database Licensing manual.

General Enterprise Manager Licensing Information

Pricing at http://store.oracle.com

My conclusion

The Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g is a pretty powerful family of tools. It is well worth learning. As with all tools of this sort, if you don;t spend the time to learn it well, you will simply not get the most out of it.

I've had no end of discussion with others about how product X does the same thing (in this area) or product Y has a better or more intuitive interface. Go for it - obviously those people have invested the time to learn those other products.

But, especially with the Extensibility capability and the number of new capabilities and packs, I suggest the Oracle Enterprise Manager is something to seriously investigate. (If investigation means 'click, click, click, it does not work', then it simply will not work for you )

How to get help with Oracle - Part 2

2007-08-26T16:41:00.000-06:00

When dealing with Oracle products, self help is mandatory. But there is no doubt it can be confusing, especially since there are a lot of Oracle 'things'. So where do we start?

OTN - Oracle Technology Network

The best place for a technical person to start is with the Oracle Technology Network reference site. OTN should be your Portal to Oracle. It points to a huge amount of information. Unfortunately Oracle periodically changes the layout, so the locations described may not be accurate when you look at it. But in the 8 years I've been using it, OTN has not changed in content.

The following is a brief guide to what is there and when you should look at it.

1) The subject menu (usually at top of page) gives quick access to

Getting Started

Quick start guides, tips, and things you absolutely need to know as a beginner ... or a beginner to that area of Oracle.

Downloads

Everyone's favorite area, with the new and improved "yes, you can use this software for personal education" notice that clarifies the license

Documentation

A quick link to http://docs.oracle.com - if you have never been there, go there NOW!

Forums

The interactive community (that wsa the subject to my previous post)

Articles

The best source of Oracle-related 'How To' documents this side of APress

Sample Code

For those who believe in Pattern-based programming, this is the place

Tutorials

Learn Oracle by Example. These are self-guided, self-paced tutorials

2) The Products mini-portal menu (left strip)

The Products mini-portals are the source for overviews, white papers and relevant information. A great place to get an idea of WHY I want to use something, and then get additional information about how to use it.

Each mini-portal has it's own preferred layout, but they tend to be reasonably consistent

- left edge to get you back to the OTN portal
- center to drill into the product by topic
- right edge to get to other resources (docs, video, forums, events, how-to and tutorials, etc)

So if I have a question about the general way a feature - say Advanced Queue - works, I'll go down the Products > Database > Integration > Advanced Queue info.

The trick here is to be patient enough to go down 2 or 3 sub-folders or portals.

3) The Technology mini-portal menu (left side)

Same idea as the Product mini-portal, but oriented towards solutions (technology) rather than products. That allows the mini-portals to call in information across products,

4) The Community mini-portals and links (left side)

There are a lot of human resources available to help with Oracle. This is the place to look!

Pricing and licensing

Oracle Pricing and Licensing seems to be a mystery. It's not really. There are only a few ways to license Oracle products. And there are only a few basic rules to follow:

1) All Oracle products are owned by Oracle. To use them we need permission. That permission is called 'licensing'.

Oracle has a number of different licenses that cover different kinds of use. In some use-cases we need to pay to get permission, and in others we can use the product without added payment.

2) Most Oracle technology can be freely downloaded from the Download link at OTN (see above).

When we download, we agree to a specific license. Oracle's download site has several licenses, but most give us the right to use the software for prototyping and learning.

However, if the software goes into production we need to have a 'right to use in production' license - some of those are also free.

Remember to read the license before you agree to it. It is a contract!!!

3) Patches are available from Metalink and access to Metalink always requires a support agreement. The support agreement is linked to a formal 'right to use in production' license and a fee will be involved.

Access to Metalink has it's own contract. Part of that contract says I can not provide you patches. You need your own Metalink account.

4) A 'right to use in production' license is obtained from Oracle, usually from the sales rep or
from the Oracle Store at http://store.oracle.com . You know you need this kind of license if you or your company will face either revenue loss or increased expense should you be asked to remove the Oracle software.

The general licensing rules are fairly well documented at http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/index.html

The two tricks I have noticed with licensing:
1) Don't assume discounts when you budget, unless you know (in writing) that you will get those discount;
2) Don't try to cut license count with "only use the following features'" arguments - they may work for size of discount, but not for number of licenses.

My favorite links (missing a few, I'm sure)

General info:

Oracle TechNet http://otn.oracle.com
OraFAQ http://www.orafaq.com/
Docs http://docs.oracle.com
Tricks http://www.psoug.org
Gurus portal http://www.oaktable.net/main.jsp

Database details from the gurus:

Julian Dyke http://juliandyke.com/
Pete Finnigan http://www.petefinnigan.com
Tom Kyte http://asktom.oracle.com
Jonathan Lewis http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/
Howard Rogers http://www.dizwell.com

Oracle and Linux:

Ivan Kartik http://ivan.kartik.sk/
Werner Puschitz http://www.puschitz.com

The quality and information provided by these sites is the main reasons why I have not published much myself! (Why duplicate good work?)

How to get help with Oracle - Part 1

2007-08-13T21:37:00.000-06:00

I've been using Oracle products for almost 25 years. And been trying to help people use the same products for almost 20 of those years. And I've watched others doing the same thing, in the comp.databases.oracle newsgroups and in the Oracle forums

Some people get help very quickly, whereas others simply don't get help at all.

There are a few very, very consistent things I've observed. I'll probably expand this over the next few blogs as well.

Realize that the people helping are volunteers from all possible industries. That means there is a very good chance they have experience that even Oracle may not have. However, that also means they have jobs, and are probably doing this in their spare time.

Respondents appreciate the little things that make their lives easier and allow us to get at a solution faster. Conversely, a number of us will simply quit or ignore some requests when there is insufficient information.

a) make the title interesting

I see about 250 forum questions a day. I respond to about 30 of them. The decision to respond is often based on the title.

b) use a proper language

I will respond in German, attempt to understand questions posed in French, Spanish or Italian and respond in English - if the post looks like there has been some effort put into the post.

People who use IM-speak often can't be bothered to use a proper keyboard or to type all the keys. That generally leaves me with the impression they would not even be bothered to attempt a solution. (I also wonder how many IM-speakers are keying the question during a test ...) So I simply will not respond.

c) tell them the operating system, in a reasonable amount of detail.

I've had some discussions that have taken up to 10 posts before we've found out that the person is trying to get the Oracle 10g Database Control working on Microsoft Windows XP Home. Unless you can figure out a way to access the security settings behind the scenes to turn on things like 'Log on as batch job', this simply ain't going to happen.

There are times when operating system is not relevant. In which case the operatinig system reference is 'any operating system'

Note the word size (32 bit, 64 bit) as that can make a huge difference, especially if you are looking for performance help. Occasnionally the patch level may be of interest, especially if things appear to work differently after applying the patch.

Windows is not Windows is NOT Windows. Windows XP and Windows Vista are not enough of a description. It's Windows XP Profession Edition SP2, or Windows XP Media Center, or Windows Vista Business Edition.

Linux is not Linux is not Linux. The kernel is the same. The distro is different. And ity's the distro that gets certified. And it's the distro that causes differences and causes difficulties. There are at least 12 different flavours of 'Red Hat', 8 different Fedoras, several different SuSE Linux variants including the OpenSUSE and SLES variants.

(Apparently some people have not caught on that different editions and distros are out there for a reason.)

d) tell them the product, including Edition, version and patch level.

Oracle uses a fairly consistent version numbering scheme, as described in Chapter 1 of the Database Administrator guide. It's very important for respondents to know the version. It may seem silly, but there are a lot of people who have not grasped the idea that things actually change between versions.

e) tell them the exact error message

Paraphrasing simply doesn't work. Cut and paste a console session or the actual error message is the ONLY way.

f) tell them what you have tried

I lose interest very quickly when I find out - in the 7th post - that they have already tried that but did not tell us.

g) tell them WHY

One of the most common mistakes is to assume the solution and then fight tooth and nail to obtain that solution. If you tell us what you are trying to do, and why, we may come up with alternatives. Funny thing is that many of us have already tried and failed at exactly the same thing as you are trying. And then redefined the problem and succeeded.

One of the rewards for helping is getting to tell the world about those hard-fought solutions, and the reason why they work.

and finally (for now)

PLEASE explain why you absolutely must put an unsupported version of Oracle on the absolutely latest version of the operating system. In other words, please help us understand why that operating system had to be upgraded if you are not planning on upgrading the rest of the environment.

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Usual disclaimer - trademarks, such as Oracle, are the property of their respective owners. I own nothing other than ideas, and even some of those are not originally mine. My hat is off to the originators of those ideas - whoever you may be.

First post

2006-01-19T20:45:00.000-07:00

I never thought I'd do this.

For now, I expect there will be nothing relevant here for a while.

Update:

It's a year later. I've decide that, for now, the content will be oriented toward getting new DBAs up to speed.

My plan is to start with a road map of 'what is Oracle', 'how to get help with Oracle', and clarify some of the more confusing basics that I see crop up regularly in the comp.databases.oracle.* newsgroups and in the http://forums.oracle.com forums.