Month: July 2017

Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) 3.0.11 Released

If you’ve been following the right people on Twitter (Kris Rice, Jeff Smith, Colm Divilly, OracleREST) recently you will have seen ORDS 3.0.11 has been released.

This is a really neat release for us as we run ORDS on Tomcat. ORDS version 3.0.10 introduced a bug which broke it on Tomcat 8.5.x, so we had to switch to the Tomcat 8.0.x branch to use it. With ORDS 3.0.11 we have been able to switch back to Tomcat 8.5.x. Happy days! 🙂

Thanks to Colm for fixing this on the plane. 🙂

If you’ve not had a play with ORDS yet, you really should! I’ve written a bunch of stuff about it here.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. It also works on Tomcat 9. 🙂

VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition

A few weeks ago I was invited to take part in an event called “VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition”. It’s part of the “VMware’s Experts Program, Oracle Edition”. They do similar things for other software, like SQL Server. This EMEA event is being presented by VMware and sponsored by Pure Storage.

Next week a group of Oracle types will be off to VMware in Cork to spend a few days being given information and doing labs etc. The agenda looks full and interesting. It’s not aimed at teaching us to become VMware administrators. It’s more focused on the issues that affect Oracle on VMware…

I’ve been working with Oracle on VMware for a long time. My first encounter was using the VMware GSX Server running on a Red Hat Linux 7.1 host. For the younger folks out there, Red Hat Linux 7.1 was the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, so we are talking some time in the early 2000’s. 🙂 We used that to run a whole bunch of VMs holding Dev/Test Oracle databases.

My current employer is a big VMware user. With the exception of a few old projects that haven’t moved yet, we virtualize all our Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL databases. We also virtualise all the middle tier stuff like WebLogic, Tomcat, Apache, IIS etc. That ORDS stuff I’ve been talking about recently is all on VMware VMs. When you hear me talking about my recent OBIEE, ODI and OBIA installations, I’m doing all that on VMware VMs running Oracle Linux. Don’t even get me started on all the Windows VMs we have… You get the picture. 🙂

We have to sign NDAs at the start, so I’m not sure what I’ll be able to post about. Time will tell…

Fun, fun, fun!

Cheers

Tim…

OBIEE, ODI, OBIA Semi-Silent Installations

I’ve written recently about doing OBIEE, ODI and OBIA installations here. A couple of days ago I tweeted about doing some more in a semi-silent manner, which saved loads of time. It took 1 day for the semi-silent approach compared to 3 days doing it the GUI way. I can’t talk about the process in detail, as I explained here, but I thought I would post an overview of the steps for those whose curiosity was peaked by my tweet.

  • DB Installation : Silent software-only installation of 12.1.0.2, as described here.
  • Database Creation : DBCA in silent mode to create a non-CDB instance, as described here.
  • WebLogic Installation : Silent installation of WebLogic 11g (10.3.6), including Java 7, as described here.
  • RCU : The first of two RCU install and runs. This one is similar to the silent install and run described in the OBIEE silent installation here.
  • OBIEE Installation : Silent installation of OBIEE 11g, as described here, but without the configuration stage, which is done later by OBIA.
  • ODI Installation : Silent installation of ODI 11g, as described here, but without the configuration stage, which is done later by OBIA.
  • OBIA RCU : We did this using the GUI because I’ve not had time to figure out the parameters to do it silently. It’s probably quite simple.
  • OBIA Installation : Silent installation of OBIA 11g using a response file we saved from the previous GUI installation.
  • OBIA Tech Patch : The command line instructions are with the patch, so we scripted it.
  • Patch Set Assistant : Three separate runs of this. We did it in GUI mode.
  • OBIA Configuration : Silent configuration of OBIA using a response file saved from a previous configuration.
  • BI Application Configuration : Silent configuration of OBIA using a response file saved from a previous configuration.
  • ODI Studio Configuration : We did this using the GUI.
  • Bundle Patch plus Extra Patches : On our version “opatch napply” wouldn’t work because of some version issues and conflicts, but we were able to apply the 8 patches in the bundle, plus an extra 3-4 patches. This was all scripted.
  • Additional Config : There were a bunch of manual fixes to files and admin console config, related known bugs.
  • That’s the end of the infrastructure part of the installation. At this point we handed it over to the functional folks to do their bit, which I know nothing about. 🙂

As you can see, we used a mix of scripted and manual steps. We are only doing 4 of these installations, so that approach seemed a reasonable compromise, rather than spending hours making it 100% silent. It’s a return on investment thing. 🙂

I’ve linked to examples on my website for the database, OBIEE and ODI stuff. I can’t say too much about the OBIA stuff, as I explained here, but most of that stuff is pretty straight forward if you use response files.

This stuff is all to support the link between Oracle Cloud Apps and our internal data warehouse. I’ll also be doing some OBIEE 12c and ODI 12c silent installations for our internal development, but these are simple and they are already on the website. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Don’t ask me for help with this stuff. I’m a noob and I just know enough to get my bit done. If what I’ve put on my website helps that’s great. If not, ask someone who knows more about this than me! 🙂

OAUX Latest News

Here’s the latest OAUX News posted by Vikki Lira in the OAUX Newsletter. If you take a look at the OAUX Twitter account you will see they are having too much fun! 🙂

OAUX STRATEGY – OPTIMAL UX DESIGN: Jeremy Ashley, group vice president for the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) team, talks about people and their patterns, and how that’s important when designing the Oracle user experience (UX), in a new post on Forbes.com’s OracleVoice blog.

WHAT CUSTOMERS NEED TO KNOW: Read about Rightside, an Internet company, in this new post I’ve written on the OAUX Blog. They describe their Oracle ERP Cloud implementation and a user experience they call “modern” and “easy to use.”

THE INTERSECTION OF WORK AND PLAY: Sometimes work can also be play – and guess what, that’s good for the worker and for the work. Read this new article about how work and play intersect in the research conducted by our emerging technologies team, the AppsLab. I recommend visiting their blog to read up on recent posts on the developer experience and fun with Facebook.

NOW AVAILABLE- Oracle MAF Mobile UX RDK: We’re excited to announce the availability of the Oracle Mobile Application Framework (MAF) Mobile UX Rapid Development Kit (RDK).  This latest RDK is for anyone who wants to innovate fast in the SaaS cloud and to design and build mobile apps with a great UX using Oracle MAF.

CREATIVE COLLABORATION: Check our new blog, the OAUX Blog, for two new posts on where we’ve been engaging and collaborating and just generally being creative:

Cheers

Tim…