Blue Gecko» Oracle Applications

Report from Oracle Openworld

Jeremiah Wilton — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:51:16 +0000

Openworld 2010, despite the supposedly lagging economy, had record attendance again this year. No doubt this was the result of Oracle acquiring something like fourteen companies since last year, including Sun in 2009. The crowds were thick, divided about evenly between geeks in badly-fitting vendor t-shirts and slick sales-side hustlers with dress pants and shiny shoes. I landed somewhere in the middle of the two (badly-fitting dress shirt, comfortable jeans and loafers), proudly sporting a long dangling codpiece of ribbons from my attendee badge:

My OOW2010 Codpiece

Oracle made a number of important announcements this year at OpenWorld, including a the Exalogic machine, and support for Amazon EC2, which I blogged about here.

For me, the highlight of the week was meeting a number of top Oracle technical minds at Oracle Closed World, the brainchild of Mogens Nørgaard from Denmark. Members of the Oak Table and other luminaries of our field stood up and spoke candidly about technology, drilling down to the most minute detail. Computerworld Denmark covered the event well here.

I’ll be speaking to a hung over dwindling crowd at noon today, the last day of OOW, and the day after the blowout party on Treasure Island. By telling people about running Oracle on EC2, I hope to make life easier for DBA-kind. Amazon’s IaaS cloud gives us all a cheap way to provision host resources on demand, and get things done in hours that would otherwise take weeks (or be impossible) via normal corporate hardware procurement processes.

This will be the last big conference for me for a while – I am going to focus on Blue Gecko customers, research and sharing my insights here.

A Cloud over San Francisco for OpenWorld 2010

Jeremiah Wilton — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 22:39:01 +0000

Oracle OpenWorld 2010 is just bursting with big cloud-related announcements this week. As I prepare to present on the Amazon cloud at OOW2010 on Thursday (http://bit.ly/aSKdIQ), I thought I would highlight two of the biggest cloud-related announcements of the week.

Exalogic

We all know about Exadata, Oracle’s hardware-based storage-optimized RAC monster capable of over 1 million IOPS. In his keynote, Larry Ellison announced Exalogic, an appliance that is meant to provide cloud-like private internal infrastructure. Oriented towards middleware, Exalogic’s marketing materials emphasize the elasticity of resources and promote middleware consolidation onto a small set of Exalogic nodes.

Certification for Oracle on Oracle VM-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Oracle and Amazon jointly announced this week that they will soon provide Oracle VM (OVM) based EC2 instances certified to run any Oracle software certified on traditional Oracle VM. This includes Oracle Applications, Peoplesoft, Siebel and many other Oracle products. The issue of Oracle supportability and certification on EC2 has been a major sticking point for customers since EC2 and Oracle began collaborating over two years ago. This announcement should allay some of the concerns regarding running Oracle on EC2.

Previously, Oracle supported only the database, middleware and Oracle Enterprise Manager on standard EC2 instances.

With this annoucement, the division of support responsibility remains the same. Oracle issues are handled by Oracle Support, and EC2 issues are handled by Amazon.

Blue Gecko implements Oracle E-Business Suite on EC2

Chuck Edwards — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:25:56 +0000

Earlier this year, Blue Gecko designed and implemented an Oracle EC2 solution for Sage Manufacturing, an Oracle E-Business Suite customer. Download the white paper here, and read how Blue Gecko leveraged the flexible, cost-effective Amazon EC2 platform to improve Sage’s Oracle E-Business Suite infrastructure.

Collaborate 2010 coming in less than a month

Chuck Edwards — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:18:37 +0000

Collaborate 2010 in Las Vegas starts April 17th, and Blue Gecko has 2 speakers presenting. Jeremiah Wilton will present “High Performance Oracle 11g in the Amazon Cloud,” and I will present, “E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud.” More information on the papers and presentations later, but for now, if you haven’t registered for Collaborate 2010, book your reservation asap – there are hundreds of fantastic presentations over 5 days in the Las Vegas sun.

Come on… who’d know if you hit the tables once or twice, or accidentally played 18 holes one of the days?

For more information check out the Collaborate 2010 official web site.

April Seattle Apps Tech Group Networking Event

Chuck Edwards — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:16:35 +0000

We’re going to change it up a little bit and have a networking / social event. No presentation this time – just a chance to meet up with colleagues in the area for some food, drink, and conversation. The location is TBD, but will be somewhere downtown – we’re working on securing a spot.

Please send this out to anyone you think might be interested; we’d like to get as many of the people signed up on this list to attend as possible!

The Meetup RSVP can be found at: http://www.meetup.com/seattle-oracle-apps-tech/calendar/12816702/

April Seattle Apps Tech Group Networking Event

Chuck Edwards — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:11:23 +0000

Hi All,

Please send this out to anyone you think might be interested; we’d like to get as many of the people signed up on this list to attend as possible!

Any vendors who would like to sponsor, please let me know.

Chuck

E-Business Suite CPU patches now cumulative

rharwood — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:30:08 +0000

Many Oracle Apps DBAs don’t feel pressure to apply E-Business Suite CPU until they are asked to expose an application node to the outside world; now there’s no excuse. If you’re an established EBS shop and you’ve never applied the EBS CPU patches for your Release 11i environment, there is quite a bit of work to get caught up on should you need to implement a new module like iStore or iSupplier.

The following is the list of patches per my count:

Quarter	Patches
April 2007	5893391, 5900224, 5352601, 5720979, 5738134, 5909233, 5873313, 5904576, 5967405
July 2007	3904641, 5021981, 5973659, 6045931, 6045983, 5973898, 5973629, 6185758, 6082483, 6110945, 6111066, 6111008, 6188705, 5973651
October 2007	4897479, 4514856, 6181762, 6204551, 5889600, 6112590, 6112601
January 2008	6643087, 6142917, 6530949, 6640163
April 2008	6831988, 6858005, 6858550, 6802774, 6810748
July 2008	6520998, 6845529, 6884665, 6627387
October 2008	6823842, 6642209
January 2009	7582702 , 7327712, 7567354, 7610955
April 2009	7836886, 7582828
July 2009	7758943, 8528340, 8488738, 8225016
October 2009	8280420, 8721703, 8872433, 8674360, 8767305
January 2010	9017637, 7293090, 8995162

This is a pretty tedious assignment … that is until now. Oracle recently made their Release 11i EBS CPU Patching cumulative. (woot!) Now, you simply start with this single CPU patch, assuming you’re on ATG 6 or 7. It’s probable this may drive a little additional patching depending on your patch level, but it’s certainly a lot less than before.

Per metalink note 985520.1:

Oracle E-Business Suite Release

Patch to Apply

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i10 CU2 with 11i.ATG_PF.H.delta.7 (RUP7) installed.

9077775

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i10 CU2 with 11i.ATG_PF.H.delta.6 (RUP6) installed.

9075075

Metalink wget download script

Chuck Edwards — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:24:33 +0000

Looking for a simpler way to download from the new Metalink? Oracle has replaced the ftp site with http downloads using wget. If you’re looking for a simple way to use wget without all of that cutting-and-pasting from the web site, you can use a simple script like this:

#!/bin/bash
# Program:  download.sh
# Description:  Download Oracle patches from Metalink

PROGRAM=`basename $0`
USAGE="Usage:  $PROGRAM [ patch file ]"

[ $# -lt 1 ] && echo $USAGE && exit 1

patch=$1
username=$METAUSER
password=$METAPASS
URL="http://updates.oracle.com/Orion/Download/download_patch/$patch"

while [ -z $username ]; do
   echo -n "Enter metalink username: "
   read username
done

while [ -z $password ]; do
   echo -n "Enter metalink password: "
   stty -echo
   read password
   stty echo
done

wget --http-user=$username \
--http-password=$password \
--no-check-certificate  \
--output-document=$patch $URL

exit

It’s pretty basic, so you can add error checking or more sophisticated wget options as you like. The only thing you need is the full name of the patch zip file and your Metalink credentials:

$ download.sh ;

You can export your Metalink username and password to the variables $METAUSER and $METAPASS, respectively, or the script will prompt you for both.

Let me know how this works for you, or if you have a better option – I’m sure there are plenty out there.

Blue Gecko named Amazon Web Services partner

Chuck Edwards — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:29:53 +0000

Blue Gecko has been officially recognized as an Amazon Web Services partner! Blue Gecko was an early adopter of the AWS platform for databases and database-backed applications. By deploying Oracle, Oracle E-Business Suite and MySQL infrastructures in the cloud, Blue Gecko leverages AWS to substantially improve customer IT flexibility and reduce costs. Blue Gecko can provide a variety of cloud-related services:

Oracle Databases

Deploy Data Guard on AWS for disaster recovery of conventionally-hosted infrastructure
Design end-to-end AWS-based Oracle solutions
Rapidly deploy test environments in the AWS cloud

Oracle E-Business Suite

Instant On AWS-based Vision Demo environments
Deploy Data Guard on AWS for disaster recovery of conventionally-hosted infrastructure
Quickly scale E-Business Suite application components by deploying additional resources in the cloud

MySQL Databases

Deploy standby databases on AWS for disaster recovery of conventionally-hosted infrastructure
Design end-to-end AWS-based MySQL and LAMP solutions
Rapidly deploy test environments in the AWS cloud

Jeremiah Wilton and Chuck Edwards will be presenting on Oracle Database and Oracle E-Business Suite on EC2 in the upcoming Rocky Mountain Oracle User Group conferences in Denver, and Collaborate 2010 in Las Vegas. Give us a call, drop us an email, or come see us in Denver or Vegas to learn about some of our great AWS projects!

Blue Gecko» Oracle Applications

Report from Oracle Openworld

A Cloud over San Francisco for OpenWorld 2010

Exalogic

Certification for Oracle on Oracle VM-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Blue Gecko implements Oracle E-Business Suite on EC2

Oracle E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud

Collaborate 2010 coming in less than a month

April Seattle Apps Tech Group Networking Event

April Seattle Apps Tech Group Networking Event

E-Business Suite CPU patches now cumulative

Metalink wget download script

Blue Gecko named Amazon Web Services partner