Oracle BI makes life easier....

In many cases people often question the return on investment or the impact of using business intelligence products in real life situations. Well here is a great example of Oracle's software making life much easier for thousands of travellers, me included, passing through Manchester Airport.

As an Oracle consultant I am a frequent visitor at Manchester Airport. Over the last year travelling has not been easy due to the "one bag" rule. Although I have become quiet skilled at packing a single suitcase with clothes, laptop computer and external hard drives just so I do not have to check in my luggage. Well not any more. Manchester Airport is one of the first UK airports to return to the normal "two pieces of hand luggage" rule and its all thanks to the forecasting capabilities provided by Oracle business intelligence product suite. Our products have allowed senior management at the airport to cope with the extra pressure of screening additional bags by helping identify future trends and to plan accordingly.

The full story is on the ComputerWeekly site and can be viewed directly from here:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/01/07/228771/manchester-airport-lifts-one-bag-rule-with-oracle.htm

Oracle BI makes life easier....

In many cases people often question the return on investment or the impact of using business intelligence products in real life situations. Well here is a great example of Oracle's software making life much easier for thousands of travellers, me included, passing through Manchester Airport.

As an Oracle consultant I am a frequent visitor at Manchester Airport. Over the last year travelling has not been easy due to the "one bag" rule. Although I have become quiet skilled at packing a single suitcase with clothes, laptop computer and external hard drives just so I do not have to check in my luggage. Well not any more. Manchester Airport is one of the first UK airports to return to the normal "two pieces of hand luggage" rule and its all thanks to the forecasting capabilities provided by Oracle business intelligence product suite. Our products have allowed senior management at the airport to cope with the extra pressure of screening additional bags by helping identify future trends and to plan accordingly.

The full story is on the ComputerWeekly site and can be viewed directly from here:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/01/07/228771/manchester-airport-lifts-one-bag-rule-with-oracle.htm

Oracle BI makes life easier....

In many cases people often question the return on investment or the impact of using business intelligence products in real life situations. Well here is a great example of Oracle's software making life much easier for thousands of travellers, me included, passing through Manchester Airport.

As an Oracle consultant I am a frequent visitor at Manchester Airport. Over the last year travelling has not been easy due to the "one bag" rule. Although I have become quiet skilled at packing a single suitcase with clothes, laptop computer and external hard drives just so I do not have to check in my luggage. Well not any more. Manchester Airport is one of the first UK airports to return to the normal "two pieces of hand luggage" rule and its all thanks to the forecasting capabilities provided by Oracle business intelligence product suite. Our products have allowed senior management at the airport to cope with the extra pressure of screening additional bags by helping identify future trends and to plan accordingly.

The full story is on the ComputerWeekly site and can be viewed directly from here:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/01/07/228771/manchester-airport-lifts-one-bag-rule-with-oracle.

Things I faced during installing apps (11.5.10.2) on IBM AIX 5.3

Direct to the point, the issues are
Installation Type was TEST on a Single Node with multi-users.

1- On the check system utilities the error was 'cc' not found.
The Solution was to create a symbolic link from gcc to cc
ln –s /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/cc
2- On the system utilities the following error
VisualAge C++ V6.0 or IBM XL C/C++ Enterprise Edition V7.0 compiler must be installed.
The Solution was based on note (282036.1) is to install the compiler, with no license requirement from:
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24009788

3- RW-50010: Error: - script has returned an error: 1
RW-50004: Error code received when running external process
And on the make.log the following error
(ld: 0706-006 Cannot find or open library file: -l m)
The solution was to install the following packages on the OS
-bos.adt.libm and bos.adt.base

4- RW-20001: Error. Unzip failed insufficient disk space
The Solution was based on note (340403.1) is to Set the soft limit for fsize to unlimited, as shown below:fsize = -1


Fadi Hsweh

My Daily Check list

My daily Check list

Every day at the morning i do tow things
- Oracle applications and database check list.
- Oracle applications community check list.
In the first check list (apps and db) check list I check for the following

Check Apache server is up
Check Discoverer processes
Check Concurrent manager is up
Check forms is up
Clear tmp logs
Check disk space
Check memory usage
Look for new entries on alert log file
Verify success of database backup
Verify archive logs
Verify that all instances are up


In the second check list (apps community) check list I check the following websites and email lists

Oracle Apps Forums
Steven Chan an Oracle insider
Atul Become an Apps DBA
Sam Apps DBA Blog
Anil Apps Techno Functional Blog

I also keep monitoring the oracle-apps-l@Groups.ITtoolbox.com, oracle-db-l@Groups.ITtoolbox.com email lists.

If someone can add more resources please leave your comments

Oracle is not Magic, it just takes years of experience and doing my check lists ;-

Special thanks to some of Oracle teams

I would like to take the opportunity to thank OCP exam teams, both teams (ocpreq and ocpexam) showed high level of support and fast response time on my inquiries regarding the 11i Apps DBA OCP, they supported me step-by-step to submit my hands-on-course.

In the same time I would like to give a special thanks to oracle Customer Knowledge Exchange team a.k.a CKE team for their support and help when I tried to submit an article to be published at metalink, they showed a high level of support. a big thanks goes to (Mary Anne,Debbie Kiaaina) from this team.

So thank you ocp team/cke team and keep up the good work
Fadi

Support forum,

I am thinking of opening a forum here to share support cases with all users, even though I guess oracle forums a great place to post problems and to get answers quickly, I will try to open my own forum for 3 months period if it was successful I will keep it other wise I will stick with oracle forums.
Suggestion are welcomed
Fadi

Thank you apps community

Today is my first day at work after the EPI-LASIK Surgery and my sight is facing haze, glare, ghosts and halos it will need more time before it become stable, I would like to take the chance to thank all apps community who wished me luck during my eye surgery, special thanks goes to hussine sawwan (hsawwan) for his phone call from Kuwait to check on me, and big thanks goes to Steven Chan for taking time to leave comment wishing me luck during the surgery. I would like also to thank marwan shantir, moh'd abu saif and adam shaug for their concerns. During my off days the most I missed was the oracle forums and the oracle blogs, I will need time to keep up with them.


Regards
Fadi

Transition period

Dear all,

I would like to inform you that I am currently at a transition period i moved to a new country and I am trying to explore my options there and that’s why I am not able to post/reply at forums and email list, but every thing will be back to normal within a month.
Wish me luck
Fadi

Sharing is Caring 2

Oracle mix
Is it a new product no its not, it the new site from oracle for social networking, http://mix.oracle.com to make oracle community even smaller. It’s a grate site but still has some small bugs. I encourage you to register there so you will be closer to other oracle guys around the world

See you there
Fadi

Sharing is Caring 3

Oracle wiki
is the new site from oracle where members of the Oracle community (employees and non-employees) collaboratively create and share content about Oracle-related subjects they're passionate about. http://wiki.oracle.com/

See you there
Fadi

I have been tagged

Gareth Roberts tagged me in the current round of OraBlog tag, you can check the rules.

Below are the 8 things you might not know about me:

1- Athens, Greece, Masters: I am currently doing my masters in managing business innovation and technology thurogh a scholarship here in Athens, Greece.
2- Having to change your job is a good thing: I started my oracle career after I had to change my previous job (well my old manager claims that my work was done there and the project i was working on was over, actually it turns out to be a good thing after that I changed my career path from Microsoft to Oracle)
3- Travel: I like to travel a lot and I am welling to take any chance to visit any new country/places.
4- Documentary: I am a T.V documentary addict; I can watch any type of documentary but prefer political ones.
5- Jogging: I jog 3-4 KM every other day I like jogging a lot.
6- Single: well still I am currently single. (Marry to oracle apps I guess ;-).
7- Reading: currently I am trying to get used to reading I have this book called (the management bible by John Wiley and sons) it’s a good book I guess every manager should read it, although I am not a manager yet but be prepared always. You never now what will happen next.
8- Sky is the limit and think big: Sky is the limit is my personal message at MSN messenger, and think big will be my next personal message at MSN.

My turn in tagging, I will tag.
OCP Advisor
Syed Jaffar Hussain
Lutz hartmann
Mark Rittman
Grant Ronald
Senthil Rajendran
Vikram Das
Famy Rasheed

have a nice tagging

fadi

Questions needed answers

Dears apps dbas,
I hope thing are well with you, I received the following questions from a friend of mine and I promised him to answer them and wanted to share them with you maybe you can help me answer most of them.
Appreciate your help.

(we have some of the answers by dave (thank you) in the comments and all of them under http://www.teachmeoracle.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4102)

1. How do we know that particular instance is cloned or normal installed?
2. How can you know that how many modules are already implemented in this instance?
3. How to enable archive log without shutting down your database?
4. How can we know that whether we already applied latest AUTOCONFIG patch or not at our instance?
5. Is this possible to clone a database from hotbackup? If yes plz tell how?
6. Suppose your database size is 2000GB now you want to clone a particular one datafile or tablespace. Plz tell how co clone a datafile or tablespace?
7. You are applying a patch but suddenly it HANGS but log file didn’t showing any error what should be the reason for that HANG?
8. How to clone from multimode to single node?
9. How to apply patch on forms/reports server?

Thanks again for help
Fadi

Soft-skills (not oracle related post)

Dears,
As a part of my study in my masters program we have to create a blog related to e-business course and it must be evaluated and one of the evaluation criteria is the number of users accessing it and comments so if you have free time can you access it and leave comments the blog has a good and helpful information.
the blog talks about soft skills and how they are important in our life check for example (speed reading post and managing a busy schedule post and many others)
please check and leave comments if you can
Thank you
Fadi

Oracle BI Discoverer 10.1.2.3 Release Details

Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer 10.1.2.3 is released in mid March 2008. This is available on base platforms Windows and Solaris. It is also available primary porting platforms (Unix flavors) as well (Linux, HPUX, HPIA). Discoverer 10.1.2.3 is the third production patch in the series of 10.1.2 release train. And the latest patch can be applied over any 10.1.2.x instances, 10.1.2.0.0, 10.1.2.1.0 and 10.1.2.2 releases.

Highlights of Discoverer 10.1.2.3 release

• Discoverer Integration with Oracle BI Publisher
• D4O Enhancements
• Other enhancements

Discoverer integration with Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher

The integration of Discoverer with Oracle BI Publisher (previously known as XML Publisher) was delivered as a one-off patch in 2007, and is more widely available with 10.1.2.3 release.

Oracle BI Publisher is an enterprise reporting solution to author, manage, and deliver all types of highly formatted documents eliminating the need for costly point solutions.

Discoverer integration with Oracle BI publisher has the following benefits

· Rich formatting capabilities

o Use Oracle BI Publisher template builder for Microsoft® Word to use the formatting features of Microsoft Word to format content.

· Rich layout capabilities

o Use Oracle BI Publisher template builder for Microsoft Word to use the layout features of Microsoft Word.

· Multiple templates per Discoverer worksheet

o Layout templates can be built using familiar desktop applications such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat®. Oracle BI Publisher plugins are provided to help the report designer to build the layout they want in their favored application.

· View as PDF, RTF, XLS, PPT, XML

o Oracle BI Publisher is able to generate multiple output formats from a single data source and template in multiple formats.

· Schedule and distribute to thousands of users

o Schedule frequency (Once, daily, weekly, immediately) and delivery destinations (Email, FTP, WebDAV, FAX, Printer) can be configured in Oracle BI Publisher.

· Analyze and refresh Discoverer data in Microsoft Excel®

o Relational and OLAP data can be pulled into Excel from multiple data sources for analysis

This integration requires Oracle BI Publisher 10.1.3.3.0 or above. Since Oracle BI Publisher is also available with Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, version 10.1.3.3.0 of Oracle BI EE can also be used.

More information about Oracle BI Publisher can be found at:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/xml-publisher/index.html

D4O Enhancements

Advanced Calculated Members in Discoverer OLAP

Building on the introduction of calculated members functionality in the 10.1.2.2 release of Discoverer, advanced calculated members can be created with the new calculated member editor in the 10.1.2.3 release.

Easier Sharing of Workbooks

To increase the usability of sharing workbook functionality a share button is provided on the Open workbook catalog dialogue. This benefits from the earlier sharing of workbooks through copying the link in to shared folder.

Support for Offset based calculations

Collpse all , Expand all

Other Enhancements

• Scrolling behavior in Discoverer Plus [5450764]
• To enable selection of Discoverer Viewer data into clipboard
• Defining rows and columns in Discoverer worksheet portlet when called from list of worksheets portlet
• Define amount of databody to show in wide crosstab reports [5117216 ]
• New option to enable page navigation in Discoverer Viewer

Discoverer 10.1.2.3 can be downloaded from metalink

www.metalink.com Patch # 5983622

Important Notes

• Discoverer 10.1.2.3 does not include the cumulative patch releases CP4, CP5 and CP6. Customers are not encouraged to use discoverer 10.1.2.3 if they have applied any of the aforesaid CPs . We are building a combined CP(CP4+CP5+CP6) over 10.1.2.3 and will be released shortly.
• Discoverer for OLAP (D40) is not certified against Oracle 11g database
• Spreadsheet addin not available on Microsoft Windows Vista

OOW Report 2 - Highligh Oracle

Day 3 at OOW, and the last day of Oracle Develop. Today I checked out the following sessions, mostly JDeveloper, with a smattering of left field topics:

Tom Kyte's "How do you know what you know?" - Tom's definitely the feel-good speaker of the conference. His presentations are like the stories you have at the end of the news where "Fireman saves dog from tree", or "Record sized pizza made downtown". Attendees came out of his session smiling, laughing, but more importantly looking like they'd learned something that wasn't necessarily all about Oracle.

Tom's best point for myself, effectively system requirements are mutable. I've been saying this for years of course to justify that what the customer really wants is not a boring asset management system, but instead for me to work on my blog ;)

Peter Henty's "Hands on Lab: A Practical Introduction to Oracle WebCenter" - this was my first play with WebCenter besides some failed attempts at home. I must admit the demos look good, but the performance at the moment is horrible. So much so that I have my doubts about the future of WebCenter if out of the ranks its performance is this bad. The JDev team has announced that performance is the key issue they're looking at for the Tech Previews, and I hope they can prove my doubts wrong.

I'm also very curious about the future of Oracle Portal when Oracle's focus appears to be on WebCenter. The cynical would say that Oracle has a large history of killing off multiple competing products regardless of what Oracle staff say, but I guess time will tell.

Frank Nimphius's "Mind the gap: Building Secure Ajax Web Applications with Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client and Oracle ADF Security" - Frank's knowledge on web security shows no bounds and Frank took time out to explain many of the security issues in the Ajax sphere. These sort of sessions really show the complexities of issues that Oracle has to solve when building products like ADF Faces, and again gave me new found respect for the Oracle products and the teams that work on them. Frank also looked at the new security JPS mechanisms within JDev 11g, and how the binding layer acts as a choke point for all security within our app.

Umm..... then I intended to attend Duncan Mill's "Oracle ADF Binding Internals: Understand what you are building" ..... but unfortunately my jet lag got the better of me, and I went and had an hour nap after a horrible night's sleep. Following my little nap, with a new spring in my step......

Shay Shmeltzer's "Hands on Lab: Developing Ajax-based UIs with JSF" - while I've played with the new ADF Faces RC components, I've not yet had a chance to create a drag and drop web page. The lab had a huge amount of steps to get through, but the drag and drop functionality was achieved in only a very few. I did hear somebody behind me say "I'm a Netbeans expert, and this stuff is impressive - I think we'll seriously need to investigate JDev further".

Frank Nimphius's "Integration ADF & SOA" (title paraphrased) - the last session for the day, and admittedly I'm typing this post up during the presentation, but an interesting demo of combining the 2 technologies for the uninitiated.

I'm off to the annual Blogger's dinner tonight organised by Mark Rittman. Very much looking forward to it; all the bloggers have very interesting opinions and personalities - it's great to talk about Oracle with people who are so passionate.... though we're not allowed to mention the "O" word tonight of course ;)

Disclaimer: I'm at OOW under the invitation of Oracle and the Oracle ACE Director program.

My OOW Unconference Session Wednesday - Take a load off Oracle

For those readers interested and are attending OOW, I'll be presenting my session "Take a load off! Load and stress testing Oracle Apex and JDeveloper web applications" at the OOW Unconference on Wednesday 4pm. Check out my Oracle Wiki page for more information. I look forward to seeing you there.

OOW - Development tool usability surveys Oracle

I've often been told by other Aussies attending Oracle events in the States that Oracle is a very customer focused organisation. Over the last few years I've been part of a few surveys and phone questionnaires, and certainly have not been shy on lodging enhancement requests on the JDeveloper OTN forums which by-and-by the Oracle PMs are good in a least humoring me (I'm hoping they don't shake their heads too much when I email them each time ;) Yet this has all been at such a distance that I've never really emphasized with the whole customer focused idea.

At my first OOW however, hanging-out in the OTN lounge, it's been very interesting to participate in a number of surveys on the usability of Oracle development tools. Today I met Kristyn Greenwood, a manager for Oracle development tool usability and interface design. Kristyn and her team have been running a number of surveys asking various questions on Oracle development tools and their usability, as well as visual surveys demonstrating potential mockups of future development interfaces, specifically a reworked Help Center for JDeveloper. It's been an interesting experience to be part of the discussion on the IDE design before the products even go beta, and more so to meet some of the team behind the scenes, or more specifically behind the more visible product PMs.

The UI development team has a website that you can visit if you're interested in participating: http://ui.oracle.com, or alternatively you can participate in the same surveys that have been at OOW here (note that if you're at OOW, there appears to be a problem with the wifi and getting to these sites.... however after OOW if you're still having trouble accessing these links, let me know and I'll verify the URLs again). Otherwise you can even contact the team directly at devtools_ux_ww@oracle.com.

Disclaimer: I'm at OOW under the invitation of Oracle and the Oracle ACE Director program.

OTN and Development Licences part 73.2 -- a FAQ!

This is yet another blog post around the issues of Oracle's Development Licenses downloaded from OTN.... this time with some light at the end of the tunnel.

Thought some readers might be interested on Doug Burn's blog, Justin Kestelyn of OTN fame has made the comment "We [sic: Oracle] are in fact working on a plain-English Developer Licensing FAQ".

This is nice to see, particularly with all the confusion based around the OTN development licenses.... and once again shows Oracle is listening.

(And well timed as if I read one more discussion about someone giving their interpretation of the licenses with the disclaimer "but I'm no lawyer" .... I'm going to scream! ;) -- or at least employee a lawyer)

I think many of us will be waiting keenly for this. I hope Justin and Oracle will take suggestions like Doug's on board before publishing the FAQ (not necessarily about licenses conditions but rather what should be in the FAQ).

Other 11g news: The little SQL Developer editor that could

The new 11g release of the RDBMS has brought an interesting array of new features for database administrators and developers, including new tuning features, revisions to SQL and PL/SQL and the inclusion of the latest version of Oracle Application Express (APEX).

One additional inclusion in the 11g release that hasn't received much press is the inclusion of SQL Developer in the default RDBMS install package. As of the 11g release SQL Developer v1.1.3 is now included by default.

This brings up an interesting point. SQL*Plus for many years has been a dominant SQL editor for the Oracle RDBMS for the fact that it's a common dominator on all Oracle installs. Guaranteed between Oracle sites, you can ensure SQL*Plus is installed. I often make this point to students when teaching SQL why SQL*Plus is preferred.

So it's now possible with the inclusion of SQL Developer we may see a gradual change in SQL*Plus's dominance given that SQL Developer will be readily available for use on all installs. You never know, you might even see hardcore DBAs using it ;)

Oh, and before the SQL*Plus lovers jump on my back, I'm not advocating SQL*Plus's replacement, that one tool is better than another, that SQL Developer should be used in a production environment, just the fact above. It's nearly the weekend here. Who needs another flame war?

Thanks to Sue Harper for the heads up & confirmation on this factoid from this OTN Forum post.