Mike Swing's latest book, the little r12.1 upgrade guide, is the book to help you with your first salvo into the E-Business Suite upgrade. That's right, one of the first steps you should take is to actually try the upgrade. If you haven't already installed the Release 11.5.10.2 Vision Instance on a test environment, go ahead and do it. And then use Mike's guide to ugprade that instance to Release 12.1. Surprisingly, even the Vision Instance doesn't upgrade flawlessly. Mike includes pointers to additional patches and steps that you'll need to take to make your upgrade a success.

 

This edition is bigger and better than the last, as Mike continues to add information about patches and bugs and features that you need to understand to upgrade to E-Business Suite Release 12.1.

 

Are you looking for a guided tour? Don't worry, Mike uses this book as the basis for  TruTek's Oracle E-Business Suite R11i to R12.1 Technical Upgrade class.  He's also available to chat if you'd like to discuss your upcoming upgrade plans - just give him a call at 801 486-6655 or send him an email at mswing@trutek.com.        

 

Looking for a sneak peek into what you need to know? Check out Mike's presentation "Upgrading to Release 12 is Easy" at the RMOUG Training Days, February 12-13. Or make an appointment to meet with Mike at Collaborate 2010.

In these tight economic times, finding a way to get the training you need can be tough. Perhaps you've got training budget, but not travel dollars? If that's the case, we'd just like you to know that our instructors are willing to pack up their hardware and bring the class to you. And if that doesn't work for you, we're also offering some of our classes as online classes. That's right, relax, sit back in the comfort of your own office, and listen to the not-so-soothing tones of our instructors.

 

 

Dennelle - It's always good to have a skilled financials functional expert in your corner. Dennelle specializes in General Ledger, Fixed Assets, Purchasing, Payables, Receivables, Cash Management, Order Management, ADI, FSGs and UPK.  Dennelle is also a great trainer, so her hand-offs to clients go especially well.

Rick - With 15 years of manufacturing planning, forecasting and inventory management experience, and 10 years of functional Oracle ERP implementation experience, Rick is one of our top manufacturing experts for the E-Business Suite. Rick specializes in supporting the Oracle BOM, CST, EAM, ENG, INV, PO, MRP, MSCA and WIP modules.

Susan - Offering strong technical skills combined with excellent project management and team lead capabilities, Susan is an experienced ERP application designer and developer. Susan is a Certified Oracle Application Developer, and can resolve issues quickly due to her wide variety of experience and technical knowledge.

Fred - Fred has strong experience supporting large, worldwide Oracle E-Business Suite implementations and upgrades as a project manager, lead, and functional consultant. Fred's experience includes both Project Manufacturing and Oracle Financials. 

Joe - Joe is an Oracle developer with over 12 years of experience in designing, building, maintaining and enhancing both ERP and custom applications across a variety of business sectors. 

Bob - Bob is an accomplished Oracle DBA with extensive experience as an Oracle Apps DBA. Bob's E-Business Suite experience includes installing, updating and cloning environments.

Nathan - Nathan has both functional and technical expertise, which makes him a valuable asset in supporting the E-Business Suite. Nathan has worked as both an Oracle Database Analyst and Oracle Financial Applications specialist, responsible for implementing Oracle Accounts Payable, Oracle Purchasing, Order Management, Fixed Assets, Cash Management, Accounts Receivable and Oracle General Ledger. Nathan has performed data conversions as well as Oracle database installation, reorganization, tuning, and instance recovery on various Linux, Unix, NT, and VAX/VMS platforms. Nathan's technical skills include RMAN backup and recovery, RAC on AIX, Oracle Warehouse Builder, Workflow and XML Publisher.

Jim - Jim is one of our best manufacturing consultants. His experience includes full life cycle implementations in manufacturing management, purchasing management, production planning, and materials control. Jim has worked as a Project Manager, Team Leader, and as a Functional Application Implementer.

Craig - Craig's most recent assignment had him multi-tasking as a Unix System Administrator, Oracle Database Administrator, Applications System Administrator and E-Business Suite Developer. Craig's solid technical background makes him an excellent candidate for any E-Business Suite team.

Also, if you're looking for a developer to design custom software or programs for your company, we have a Java team ready to roll!  We have other consultants with E-Business Suite, DBA and developer skills available as well.

Contact us if you'd like to see more resumes.

 

Here's the class agenda:

 

Day 1
            Database Upgrade Overview
            Install 9.2.0.6 instance

            Upgrade RDBMS Version 9.2.0.6 to Version 10.2.0.3
Day 2
            Complete the Database Upgrade to 10.2.0.3
            Daylight Savings Time patch 4
            Install 11.1.0.7 Oracle Home
            Upgrade RDBMS Version 10.2.0.3 to Version 11.1.0.7
Day 3  
            Finish RDBMS Version 11.1.0.7 Upgrade

 

Check out our class schedule. We'll offer this class online, onsite and at locations around the country. Also, we cover the 11gR2 upgrade in the little r12.1 upgrade guide.

 

There's another interesting thread going on in Oracle-L, about understanding logical IOs and drilling down into their reasons. Of course sometimes (or rather usually) the excessive logical IOs come from a bad execution plan (when a nested loop loops over lots of datablocks again and again or a wrong index is used for driving a query etc), but sometimes the excessive LIOs are caused by some internal issues, like space management etc.

A convenient tool I use for reporting logical IO reasons is (again) my Snapper! It has  an option "b" for reporting Buffer get reasons or as I use below - option "a" shows All information Snapper can show.

There are couple of gotchas though which make this approach imperfect:

1. The X$ tables Snapper uses for LIO reason reporting contain instance-wide counters, not specific to a single testing session. Thus you either need to be the single user in your database when experimenting and even then the background activity may increment some counters while you are testing too. I have sometimes suspended all other processes (kill -STOP and kill -CONT to resume)  or used Flash Freeze (oradebug ffbegin and ffresumeinst) to hang the whole instance that there would be no other activity going on.
2. These buffer get reason counters are not maintained properly in Oracle 11g, probably due an optimization effort and some changes for faster pinning of buffer cache buffers (there's a parameter called _fastpin_enable which is set to 1 in 11g and it enables so called fastpath buffer gets. If you see v$sesstat statistics such "consistent gets from cache (fastpath) or "db block gets from cache (fastpath)" being inremented, then fastpath buffer gets/pins are used. Note that I do have a script which works also on 11g but I'll write about that one some time in the future :)

Anyway, if you are testing in an environment exclusively used by you, on Oracle 10.2 or lower, then you can run snapper with the gather=a option to report a bunch instance-level statistics in addition to the standard session-level stats:

1. BUFG - Buffer get reasons (both consistent and current mode gets)
2. LATG - Latch gets (both willing to wait and immediate gets)
3. ENQG - Enqueue gets

Here's an example, prepare for long output:

 

 

"Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it." - Anthony Robbins

So, with that quote in mind, I set out on my new venture, installing Oracle 11gR2 RAC on VMWare on MS Vista. Did I mention on 4gb?! I do this hopeful that I can use this configuration for my RMOUG class on creating a RAC cluster on Windows using VMWare.

Already I hear the collective gasp from the crowd. You are right, I must be mad.

I've installed RAC many a time, and in fact, I've successfully installed it on Win XP with 2GB using VMWare and 10GR2. It was slow, it was unusable but it would come up and I could access the SCOTT schema and query the EMP table. Thus, I called it a success and moved on.

Now the target is a much loftier one... This would be my first foray into the new 11gR2 RAC, believe it or not. Since R2 has come out, I've played with the database quite a bit, but not with a clustered version. It just has not been something I needed to do, and I'm also a bit of a manager type now.... so getting my hands dirty is only an occasional thing, I'm afraid.

So, let me first describe to you my environment. I'm running on a dual core Pentium, running Vista and 4GB. Now, already I know I'm in trouble because from all accounts 4GB is the bare bones minimum. But I am a manly DBA, and I face resource constraints and spit in the face of them. I can and will get this working.

Why Win/Vmware/Linux/RAC on a laptop? Many DBAs have not had an opportunity to experience RAC for themselves. This configuration is one way for them to do so with minimal cost.

So, I'm on a quest .... a quest to install RAC on VMs sitting on top of Windows. This isn't, shouldn't be, a quest that involves rabbits, holy hand grenades or needing the services of Tim the Enchanter.... But oh, how wrong I was. It seems that Vista was not the right place to be starting and indeed, I did need the services of Tim the Enchanter to even get VMWare 2 started on Vista.

I bought a brand new Dual core Dell Inspiron laptop with 4GB for the task. I can tell you right now that if you are installing 11gR2 RAC, you need all of that 4GB. I did 10gR2 RAC on 2 successfully (it was slow and painful)... there is no way you are doing that on this install!

I then downloaded the new web-based version of VMWare and installed it. No problem there. However, when I click on the icon for VMWare I run into my first problem. It asks me for a username and password. Well, I have no idea what username and password it is expecting. After some research I find that it wants the username/password for the Windows session I'm logged in as. That's intuitive .... So, I enter the credentials. Next it throws a certificate exception at me which I approve, and then I get an error and it won't start the interface to VMWare. I should have taken a screen print of the error but it was a 404 or something....

Well this is a fine piece of junk!! I start doing some internet research and find that many people have run into the problem. One solution is to use the IP address in the URL that you use to bring up the VMWare console in the browser. I tried that and it worked fine. Still, it wasn't the way it was supposed to work. After reading through some more threads about this problem, I decided to de-install VMWare and re-install it using the administrator account. Of course, you have to enable the administrator account with the net user command first and then you also need to give it a password.

I then re-installed VMWare 2 under the administrator. Everything loaded great this time ... so now, I have my VM set up and I'm ready to move onto the next step - Installing Oracle Unbreakable Linux. In the next installment, I'll show you a little trick to making the install easier from VM. Rather than having to burn the Linux CD's or the DVD you can simply load directly from the ISO images.

Confio builds performance management software that improves the effectiveness of IT systems and the people who run them. The Confio Igniter Suite currently includes products that help Oracle DBAs, managers, and developers continuously monitor the performance of databases and the applications that depend on them, isolate specific problems, and identify solutions in production systems.

 

This script is very useful for finding database blocking locks that are "hanging up" running concurrent requests.   I came up with it in a shop that heavily used General Ledger and ran the Autopost program on a scheduled basis to pick up all manual journal entries. 
 
During month end close, users would frequently save a partially completed journal entry in the Enter Journals form (GLXJEENT), which would create a blocking lock on the GL_JE_BATCHES table, in turn preventing the Autopost program from completing.  This would lead to frantic calls from the GL admins to the DBAs wondering why the autopost requests that normally took a couple of minutes had been running for 45...

After I found the problem and devised the script, I was able to quickly identify the specific session blocking an autopost request, including the specific user (from the ACTION column) and form (from the MODULE) column.  With this info in hand - the GL admins were able to contact the owner of the blocking session and have them save their work (and listen to a lecture on journal entry procedure!)

Here was the script I originally used (for 11.5.8 on 9i) - it will find any session that's blocking any concurrent request in the "Running" phase:

SELECT sid blocking_sid, serial# blocking_serial, action blocking_action, module blocking_module
FROM v$session WHERE SID IN (
SELECT bvl.SID
FROM v$session vs, applsys.fnd_concurrent_requests fcr, v$lock vl, v$lock bvl
WHERE vs.PROCESS = fcr.OS_PROCESS_ID
AND vl.SID = vs.SID
AND vl.id1 = bvl.id1
AND vs.SID <> bvl.SID
AND fcr.phase_code LIKE 'R'
AND bvl.type like 'TX'
AND vl.type like 'TX'
AND vs.LOCKWAIT IS NOT NULL
AND vl.ID2 != 0
AND bvl.block > 0
)

But if you're running database 10g (or greater) - the following simpler script will do the same job more quickly:

SELECT blkr.sid blocking_sid, blkr.serial# blocking_serial, blkr.action blocking_action, blkr.module blocking_module, fcr.request_id blocked_request_id
FROM v$session vs, applsys.fnd_concurrent_requests fcr, v$session blkr
WHERE vs.PROCESS = fcr.OS_PROCESS_ID
AND vs.blocking_session = blkr.sid
AND fcr.phase_code LIKE 'R'
AND vs.lockwait is not null

The same concepts can be used to find forms sessions blocking each other, etc.  Experiment and see what you can come up with!

We're always open to adding new classes, so let us know your interests! We add new classes regularly, so be sure to check the latest version of the schedule on our website. 

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