TruTek TruTalk July 2010 Newsletter for Oracle Professionals

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July, 2010

Greetings!

Coulda, shoulda, woulda... Did you miss your chance to take the Oracle E-Business Suite R11i-R12.1 Technical Upgrade class? The students worked up a sweat getting those Vision instances upgraded. It's no easy task, but with the help of our books and upgrade project plan, we made it through. The next class is at the end of September - don't miss it! And remember, we only allow 5 students in this class because it is so intensive, so register early.

For those of you who use Oracle's Demantra, check out the article about tuning. We found some really useful ways to optimize Demantra.

Watch out, our very popular Workflow instructor Dan Stober is branching out. He'll be teaching PL/SQL Fundamentals October 11-13 in Salt Lake City.

Don't miss Todd Dearborn's Introduction to E-Business Suite and Oracle Project Management in October. He'll teach two days covering the modules that make up the E-Business Suite and how they fit together. Then he'll teach one day on how to use Oracle's Application Implementation Methodology (AIM) to manage a project. Todd promises to use lots of real world examples and describe best practices. If you've been looking for a class that can help prepare you for the planning stages of an Oracle implementation, this is the class for you.

Don't miss out on our APEX 4.0 classes in October. Scott Spendolini is a leading expert on this technology, and a great teacher as well.

Don't miss the chance to take training from our experts!

Sincerely,

Mike Swing
TruTek

IN THIS ISSUE

What We Do

Demantra Configuration and Tuning

The R12.1.2 Upgrade Trio

E-Business Consolidation Case Study

Thinking About Reimplementing?

Lifetime Support

Patch til There's Nothin' Left to Fix

Confio

Your Claim to Fame!

Upcoming Oracle Training

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What We Do

TruTek is a national leader in technical and functional Oracle training and consulting. We also offer permanent placement services for part-time and full-time employees. We offer Oracle database and E-Business Suite consulting, training and remote services. We have a state of the art training facility in Salt Lake City, Utah.

If you have 5 or more people interested in a class, we can also bring classes to your company if you would like onsite training. And if you've wanted to take a training class, but were intimidated by the crowds, we also offer "Personal Training" for certain classes, as well as online training.

Demantra Configuration and Tuning Case Study by Mike Swing

TruTek recently participated in a tuning exercise for one of our Demantra customers. This paper describes some of our lessons learned.

What is Demantra?

Demantra provides demand management, sales and operations planning, and trade promotions management solutions. Demantra provides powerful analytics for more accurate demand-driven planning, forecasting and modeling.

You can read more about Demantra performance at "Oracle Demantra Performance, An Oracle White Paper, September 2007". This paper describes recommended design considerations, appserver properties, database parameters, and client server attributes for Demantra Worksheets, which are the primary user interface for the Demantra tools. The bottom line is that there are many areas where tuning can improve the overall performance of Demantra worksheets. Our efforts focused on tuning the operating system and database.

The Hardware Configuration

Our client recently implemented new AIX hardware with 64 threads, 128 GB RAM, 1.6 TB of SSD and 2 TB of 15K Raid 10.

In general, when compared to the initial configuration on 6/21/2010, we were able to improve the performance of worksheets from about 300% to 1000% on 7/2/2010. The following table illustrates the worksheet runtimes before and after performance tuning.

TruTek Tunes Demantra

We Call Them the Oracle Upgrade Trio

"Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple." -- Dr. Seuss

"Unfortunately, that is not the case with upgrading to R12." -- Mike Swing

PLAN PREPARE PERFORM

Are you the Mighty Oracle Foot Soldier, ready to tackle the upgrade to Release 12.1.2 for your company? We recommend you start here, with TruTek's 3-part guided tour.

One of the first steps you should take in preparing to upgrade 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 guides to upgrade that instance to Release 12.1.2. 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.

Mike's comprehensive trilogy consists of:

the little r12.1.2 project plan - this is the project plan that Mike's students use when they step through an upgrade.

the little r12.1.2 upgrade essentials for managers and team members - this book describes why you need to upgrade, and includes a discussion of how it should be done.

the little r12.1.2 upgrade guide - sponsored by the Oracle Application Users Group, this 414 page (so far) book provides the detailed steps to upgrading your Vision instance from R11i to R12.1.2. It includes the steps for upgrading your database to Version 11gR2. It includes pointers to more than 175 patches and 150 My Oracle Support notes. That's right, just because you've got this book doesn't mean you get out of downloading patches and reading the Readmes and assorted other explanations. But we tell you, all in one place, which documents to read, how to apply the patches, and "gotchas" that we've discovered along the way.

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. Best of all, Mike has the hands-on experience that you'll need for an upgrade, so consider TruTek for meeting your consulting needs.

eprentise Case Study: Automotive Parts Supplier Consolidates Regional Production Instances of Oracle E-Business Suite by Chris Busbee, eprentise

The automotive industry aftermarket is worth more than $250 billion and growing annually. With a booming market such as this, it is no surprise that many distributors of aftermarket automotive products have expanded their operations in order to reach additional markets and become a truly global operation. Global expansion generally requires additional investments in IT to support the add-on operations. As experienced by one aftermarket auto parts supplier, multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) environments can be difficult to manage due to the shared aspects of the different systems as well as the disparate aspects between them.

The company is headquartered in the US but has extended its network to Canada, an initiative that required additional IT support in the form of an additional instance of its Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) ERP system as that provided the shortest time to a go-live. Both the US and Canadian enterprise-class data centers operated a production instance, a test instance a development instance, a project instance in addition to the backup and DR instances. The deliberate over-allocation of hardware resources to accommodate the sporadic peaks in CPU and RAM usage coupled with the fact that each EBS instance resided on a separate server exacerbated the cost of maintaining multiple instances. IT had waved the flag for many years on the benefits of consolidating (reduce hardware, reduce maintenance / support across all areas, eliminate duplicate effort around upgrades, enhancements, apply patches, etc.).

After years of operating with two disparate instances, the company decided to find a solution to the problems of multiple systems maintenance, high infrastructure costs, tedious consolidated financial reporting, and inconsistent business processes that were hindering the company from operating as a truly global business with consistent data and a single source of truth. Using eprentise Consolidation Software for E-Business Suite, the company consolidated its US and Canadian instances into a single, global instance that is enabling them to reduce infrastructure costs, to reduce IT personnel previously required to support multiple systems, to streamline business processes and leverage suppliers, as well as to grow with agility and embrace new initiatives.

The two main areas of the business involved with the planning and decision making for the consolidation project simultaneously developed their own business cases for going forward:

Thinking About Reimplementing?

Talk to us. We're very impressed by eprentise's solutions, and think you will be too.

Release 11.5.10.2, RDBMS 10gR2, and Discoverer 10g Extended Support and Fees by John Stouffer

It seems John Stouffer, an independent consultant with Just a DBA, has been reading the fine print on Oracle's Lifetime Support Agreement. Check out his summary below.

All,

This is a long one but well worth your time and effort to read and fully understand the ramifications for your organization.

There has been a lot of confusion around Oracle Support and the end of Premier Support and additional Extended Support fees especially as it related to Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) users. I'll try to make it as clear as I can

...

A "Typical" EBS Environment Scenario: The customer is running Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11.5.10.2 on Oracle RDBMS 10gR2. The customer is also running Discoverer 10g for thier Financial Reports. (I'm not sure that there is ever a "typical" EBS environment but this will do for our purposes..:-)).

There are three types of Oracle Support available - Premier, Extended and Sustaining. Premier Support last five years, Extended Support lasts three years and Sustaining Support (not always offered) lasts as long as you license the product.

Premier Support is full support of the product, Extended Support is exactly the same as Premier Support except for third-party products/new Oracle product modules (there is some confusion here as it's stated differently in two lifetime support documents) except for the main difference in that there are additional support fees charged for each of the three years (only) of Extended Support (first year - 10%, second year - 20%, third year - 20%) and Sustaining Support (if offered) which provides support and patches for known issues but any new issues that can not be reproduced by Oracle support will not be addressed. No additional fees are charged for Sustaining Support. Please see the official Oracle Lifetime Support documents for more details (http://www.oracle.com/support/lifetime-support-policy.html).

1 - Premier Support for Oracle E-Business Release 11.5.10.2 ends November 30, 2010. Some (most?) of us will move into the Extended Support window starting December 1, 2010 and can stay on Extended Support for three years (2011, 2012, 2013) assuming that we apply the minimum patches (also referred to as the MANDATORY minimum patch baseline) as required by Oracle support (My Oracle Support document, 883202.1) by November 30, 2010. There are a significant amount of patches to be applied especially if you have not maintained your patch levels. Also, for HRMS customers, there are three My Oracle Support documents that you'll want to closely review (R11.5.10.2 - 11499.1 , R12.0.x - 386434.1 and R12.1.x - 858794.1)

2 - Premier Support for the 10gR2 database ends on July 31, 2010. We will move into the Extended Support window starting August 1, 2010 and can stay on Extended Support for three years (2011, 2012, 2013). However, a fair number of customers will, hopefully, be on RDBMS 11gR1 or 11gR2 by September 30, 2010 and will then move back to the Premier Support window for the 11gR2 RDBMS until January 31, 2015 (The 11gR1 Premier Support window runs until August 31, 2012). This is the Good News section...:-) If you are sticking with 10gR2, you must patch to 10.2.0.5 which is the terminal release for 10gR2 and you will be paying Extended Support for years 2 and 3.

3 - Premier Support for Discoverer 10g ends on November 30, 2011. You will need to upgrade to Discoverer 11g by the end of 2011 to avoid any Extended Support fees for Discoverer 10g.

PAY ATTENTION HERE

The Extended Support window fee waiver for E-Business Suite Release 11.5.10.2 and RDBMS 10gR2 was announced two years ago by Oracle at the Oracle Applications User Group conference for the first year of Extended Support ONLY for Release 11.5.10.2 AND RDBMS 10gR2. This may be a critical cost driver for your environment and for the R12.1.x upgrade.

Patch 'til There's Nothin' Left to Fix

Steven Chan's Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog included a number of interesting articles last month. Note that Steven wrote that JRE 1.6.0_21 still has compatibility issues for EBS.