Oracle apps dba 11i pdf

Must We Upgrade? However, you must keep in mind that your database represents the inner workings of your company. Eventually, Oracle must move their attention and support to newer releases of the database, so eventually Oracle stops supporting earlier releases. With Extended Support, you can still log a P1 problem - but there's no guarantee that the resolution will come quickly - it might take months. Even within Premier Support, Oracle supports only the current and previous database releases for 12 months after the current database has been released.

That's a subtle point that could cause big issues for customers - if you are running Oracle Database Version If you are running Oracle Database Version These policies override the E-Business Suite support agreements. There are no plans to add another CU Consolidated Update 3 , so the only way to stay current is to apply Family Packs and additional patches to Release 11i.

E-Business Suite Release That means at the end of November, , Premier Support ended and all customers still on Release 11i Oracle strongly recommends not running production in Extended Support mode unless you have no other choice. You should review MOS Doc. Also, Oracle updates these documents, so you should recheck them periodically. In terms of functionality, Release 12 includes new and improved modules.

In fact, the biggest difference for Release 12 is on the functional side; much more so than on the technical side. Release 12 uses a new user interface called the Swan Interface. If you are planning an upgrade, you should consider upgrading to Release If the software is stable, always upgrade to the latest release if you need the new features and functionality.

Oh for the days when we could linger on an E-Business Suite release for years and years! Those days are over, mostly because Oracle is constantly changing the Applications, as much to add new functionality as to correct issues with existing functionality.

With the need to apply security patches added into the mix, your company will need to consider what your overall patching strategy will be, and then plan to follow that strategy. Stragglers on releases earlier than Release Upgrade Paths There are two upgrade paths for upgrading to Release Two Phase - Unfortunately, if you are running a release prior to Release If you are not already running Oracle 10g or Oracle 11g, then you must upgrade the database before upgrading to Release This upgrade path is called a dual phase upgrade.

The good news is, the two phases do not have to occur during the same critical downtime. Although it is not a requirement as part of the upgrade, all of the new product modules are in the OATM format. For both upgrades, we recommend that you upgrade to the latest certified version of Oracle 11g currently 11gR2 , and that you upgrade to the latest certified version of Release 12 currently Should You Wait for Release The new technical features of Release Upgrade to Upgrade by Request Upgrade by Request is an option that allows you to limit how much data you upgrade during the Release You can come back to the remaining data and upgrade it later.

If you have a narrow upgrade window, Upgrade by Request can help you reduce the scope of the upgrade and then process less essential historical data later, after the upgrade is complete. Currently, Upgrade by Request covers historical data within financials and procurement, projects, supply chain management, and CRM.

The upgrade depends on which module you are upgrading. For some products, only SLA data is upgraded, while for others, both transactions and accounting data will be upgraded. The next chapter will describe how the e-Business Suite Plug-in fits into the picture. And the chapter after that will cover the tools that are still run from the command line. Because the Applications are so complex, they require a number of different tools.

Over the years, many of us have written our own sets of scripts and procedures to deal with the different tasks necessary for managing the Applications. Third party vendors have also offered products to simplify certain tasks. And Oracle provides a number of tools to help. OAM provides a framework to make it simpler to manage your Applications. Notice 44 that OAM is focused on managing one instance. While it does have some summary reporting capabilities, it does not have features for comparing instances, or for applying changes to multiple instances at the same time.

Patches can update or create new file system objects like forms, reports and sql scripts. Patches can also execute code within the database to change seeded data.

The PIB file is updated nightly by Oracle and a current copy of the file should be downloaded before any patch impact analysis.

You can also use the Patch Application Assistant to help track and apply manual patch steps. You then use AutoPatch to apply patches. Note that this file should not be edited. You can create a custom template file by copying the template file and then editing it.

Copy that customized template file into the directory you just created and AutoConfig will recognize that it is a custom template that supersedes the original template file.

When AutoConfig detects a custom template file, it uses it. It turns out you have three options: 1. Manually - Open up a screen pointing to your test environment and a screen pointing to your production environment, and manually copy type everything you want to move.

A thorough and timeconsuming test of each migration would have to be included in your project plan. OAM allows you to use iSetup to make configuration changes. New diagnostics are delivered in a standard Oracle Patch and are applied using AutoPatch.

While Diagnostics were not initially required, Oracle now expects you to have the Diagnostics installed and will often ask you to run a particular Diagnostic to help problem solve a Service Request SR. You should stay current on Diagnostic patches, as the Diagnostic programs are useful in troubleshooting.

To Run Diagnostics: 49 1. Select the "Oracle Diagnostics Tool" responsibility 3. Choose a diagnostic test from the Test Summary list. Enter input parameters if there are any for the test that you have selected 5. Click on the 'Run Test' button 6. Other OAM Tools You can also use OAM to administer concurrent managers and workflow components, including starting and stopping concurrent managers and controlling workflow services.

The Dashboard Collection Program collects metrics for many services, web components and other features of an Oracle Applications instance. OAM includes a Dashboard Setup Wizard that can be used to enable or disable the monitoring of individual metrics. The CP Signature Wizard performs many key Concurrent Processing related data collections and gathers important configuration and log files to be saved to the Support cart for more efficient interaction with Support.

Now, imagine how hard it must be for Oracle Support to draw important information out of a person who has logged a Support Request. This toolset gathers the information, and when you log a Service Request, you can either automatically or manually upload the information to Oracle Support.

Version 4. You can read more about Version 4. E, October , for more details. The Plug-in monitors your system for security problems, usage characteristics, configuration changes and performance. Its key capabilities include automated cloning, including cloning of very complex configurations, automatic discovery of E-Business Suite Systems, configuration management, service level management, extended performance metrics, and links from OEM Grid Control to OAM.

The System Management Dashboard can run diagnostics tests, track performance, administer OAM tasks, and track system downtime. Another Plug-in feature is Service Level Monitoring.

You can define Service Models that represent business functions or applications in your enterprise, and then measure the performance and availability of critical business functions. You can set up alerts to notify you when there is a problem, and identify common issues and diagnose causes of failures. For those companies who provide internal Service Level Agreements, the Service Level Monitoring feature can be particularly helpful in determining if you are meeting those agreements.

You can 55 build a watch list of specific concurrent managers and concurrent programs. The Plug-in also allows end to end tracing, including the ability to analyze the E-Business Suite database load. You can also easily trace top database sessions back to the end user. Another unique feature of the Plug-in monitoring is the ability to view and compare E-Business Suite configurations. You can see what products are installed, take advantage of new internal system alerts, review which patches have been applied, see site level profile options that have changed, and see which context files have been edited.

RapidClone is the most commonly used tool for cloning. Oracle continues to refine it and releases new patches periodically. See MOS Doc. MOS Doc. On completion of the clone process, the source and target systems will have the same data and patch set level. The benefit of this procedure is that it creates an identical copy of the production system. The image extracted can be applied to any number of 56 target systems.

The benefit of this procedure is that it facilitates periodic backing up of the source system. The benefit of this procedure is that it allows for rapid deployment of standard pre-configured target systems.

You can add comments to the status of any clone job, and the cloning procedure includes a stepby-step interview process. Smart Clone also supports more complex, advanced E-Business Suite deployments, including configuring a single instance database, a RAC database, cloning a single-node applications tier to a single-node applications tier, creating a scale-down clone of a multi-tier applications tier with a shared file system node to a single-node applications tier, and creating a scale-down clone of a multi-tier applications tier without a shared file system node to a single-node applications tier.

Customization, Patching and Setup Managers The E-Business Suite Plug-in provides a feature that has been sorely needed in the Applications world: a sophisticated tool that manages changes introduced by customizations, patches and functional setups during implementation or maintenance activities. This tool shows that Oracle recognizes that its customers do, in many cases, have to customize the Applications, and that providing a framework to help track and manage those changes will make upgrading to new releases simpler, and easier to accomplish.

The Plug-in also allows DBAs to apply patches simultaneously across 57 multiple instances, and includes a Change Approval mechanism so that both customizations and Oracle-provided patches can be applied using a rigorous approval process. The Plug-in also uses iSetup to migrate changes between Applications environments.

Reporting options include the ability to report on a single package, compare two packages, or compare a package against an instance. Customization Manager integrates with most source control systems, and includes a change approval framework that provides an audit trail which can be particularly useful when preparing to upgrade, and improves user productivity by automating change deployment.

This tool validates customized code against software coding best practices, and packages changes so they can be applied like any other Oracle application patch.

Patch Manager recommends application patches, provides details about what a patch will change, and shows what patches have modified a specific file. Patch Manager also allows scheduling application patch application, and allows you to enter comments in the Patch Run Details, including the Patch Run Name, Description, Justification, Requester, and Notification E-mails. Patch Manager is integrated with Customization Manager as well as with My Oracle Support, which makes downloading patches a simple task.

Setup Manager also allows Offline Transformation — users can download setup data into Excel, edit or add to it, and then upload it. If you have a lot of customizations, or if you are preparing to upgrade and need to migrate your customizations, you may want to look closer at the Plug-in. If you have multiple E-Business Suite instances and need to apply changes to those other instances simultaneously, the Plug-in could be useful.

And if you need a change control process, the Plug-in provides that, including the ability to have specific users sign off on changes and be notified when patches are applied. If you need to migrate setups to multiple instances, the Plug-in could cut down the time to apply those changes with its ability to apply setups simultaneously across multiple instances.

The 59 Plug-in includes even more monitoring metrics, including Service Level Agreement monitoring. The E-Business Suite Plug-in provides an automated framework and packaging methodology that eliminate manual work and make processes more productive and efficient. Outside of the E-Business Suite Plug-in, Metric Collection, Comparison Reporting, and the ability to see all your environments from inside Grid Control does not exist, and does not have the Oracle proprietary information needed to support highly complex E-Business Suite Applications topologies.

Anything you can do to automate tasks and leave an audit trail is well worth considering. With these tools in place, your next DBA or SA will have a better view of the history of changes and setups and may not have to recreate or invent tools to handle tasks that should be automated already. Typical tasks include generating applications files, maintaining applications files, compiling and reloading applications database entities, and enabling or disabling Maintenance Mode.

Many are SQL scripts. The output includes a button for each of the results that shows the SQL code that was used, which makes it easy to write your own customized versions if you want to see the data in a different way.

Best of all, the managers over these tools keep improving them; they appreciate feedback, so the tools continue to evolve. Both programs report on areas that are unusual and then point to information about what makes them unusual, as well as MOS documents that provide additional information.

You can see where there may be issues with your Workflow tables or configuration, why they may be problematic, and which My Oracle Support notes have more information that may be helpful. You can use that code as the basis for additional querying.

For example, in the following example, instead of sorting based on the number of executions, you might sort by AVG MINUTES so that you can find the Concurrent Programs that run, on average, the longest in your environment. Similarly, you could easily modify the code from this query to get a list of all tables, sorted by Empty Blocks, to help decide which tables could be reorganized during a quarterly database reorganization effort.

Or, you could change the query to list all tables and sort by Total Blocks and use that information to search for large tables that might have purge programs available on My Oracle Support.

Oracle continues to add more Get Proactive tools, including ones for the database. You can learn more about them at MOS Doc. Oracle has a new manual called Oracle Applications Patching Procedures.

In fact, major new functionality is now reserved for point releases. Oracle creates a new maintenance branch for each point release of the Applications. New feature introduction into maintenance branches is limited and requires executive approval by Oracle executives.

To provide better change control, Release 12 introduced some new terminology for patching called codelines and codelevels that should make checking for prerequisites easier. Codelines and Codelevels Patches are grouped into codelines. A codeline begins with a point release and progresses to include all patches required to maintain that point release. So Release The unique set of product features for a point release or a product family are a codelevel.

In Release 11i, patches could require other individual patches as prerequisites, making it difficult to determine if a new patch included all the functionality of an older patch.

In Release 12, patches can only require a codelevel as a prerequisite. Read 67 MOS Doc. Oracle has muddied their list of acronyms with the Release Update Pack, because for years they have been releasing Release Update Patches, also called RUPs, which are an entirely different animal. For Release 12, the point releases for Release Just a little.

For those of you who were in the trenches with Releases Like the Release 11i CU2, also called Release To find the RCDs and other Release 12 documentation, click on the Knowledge Tab at the top of the screen when you first log into My Oracle Support, then the Tools and Training tab, toward the bottom left, then E-Business Suite, and then the release that you are researching in the example below, we chose Release You still have to check, though — Release The Release Because Oracle currently has no plans to implement a CU3 for Release 11i, you need to apply each new CPU as it is released to remain current on security patches on your Release 11i environments.

Oracle also now releases PSU patches, which minimize the number of individual patches that need to be applied. Note that once you start applying PSU patches, you must stay with that approach indefinitely.

For dependency reasons the 11i CPUs may require a higher number of files in order to bring them up to a consistent, stable, and well tested level. If Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is important to your company, can you afford to fall behind on security updates? Oracle Database Vault Version So if you are running Release To stay current on security, you must stay relatively current on ATG RUPs, which means you must stay relatively current on which release of the Applications 72 you are running.

This guide covers patching considerations in much more detail later on, but you can already see how important staying current on the E-Business Suite will be for your company. As the DBA, it is your job to understand and mitigate, if possible, the risks your company is taking if your management chooses not to stay current. One of the things we like to say about Release 12 is that it is constantly changing.

As the Applications DBA, we must warn you that it is your job to be constantly alert for important patches — and changes to existing patches - that may affect your E-Business Suite environment. Users who had already completed the upgrade, or were upgrading to Release Tracking not only which CPU version you are running, but also when you downloaded it increases the complexity for DBAs. Then in , JRE 1. New JRE versions are released several times a year, so you should watch for new ones and be prepared to upgrade several times a year.

Also, Oracle has released JRE 1. Our conclusion? CUs can be released after a Release 11i point release like Sorry for the late reply. Want to Read saving…. Open Preview See baneruee Problem? Please drop your mail id to me at meet. I cannot findd it on Amazon.

Sridevi Koduru rated it liked it Mar 07, It covers upgrading, cloning, patching, maintenance and troubleshooting of the application system.

Posted by Suresh Lakshmanan at May 15, Sandy added it. Active Data guard 11g: Jul 06, Glasspixie Pixie rated it really liked it Shelves: Chinna Reddy rated it it was amazing Apr 05, Embellished with over screenshots and illustrations, it helps in administrating complex Oracle Database in an easy-to-navigate format.

Return to Book Page. Concurrent Manager Status R Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Please let me know the cost also. Newer Post Older Post Home. Regards Suresh mail excerpt It looks like this book is out of stock in US at this moment. For your information, I got this book from my boss 2 years ago.

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Oracle Applications DBA covers all the pertinent aspects of administrating Oracle Applications—from installation to day-to-day maintenance. Thanks for telling us about the problem.