Catching Up

Has it really been that long since I caught up with the Market?

There loads of great stuff going on in the OBIEE world but I have been preparing for the Sailing world – UK Championships, European Championships and World Championships all happening within a 4 week window. So, for now, here is th OBIEE stuff….

Blogs of the week

1. Weblogic Admin Server Fails to Start

Kathryn Watson blogs about ‘How to Escape the Nightmare and Get Back up and Running’.

She goes through,

Text Files are Your Friends
The Text File Treasure Hunt
Back That File Up
Change is Good

2. Commenting with BITeamwork

Christian Screen writes, “If you’ve been keeping up with us, you know that our BITeamwork system works really well for communicating and collaborating within your enterprise analytics system. When your users don’t feel like they can participate, they start using the product less. This can cost your organization valuable investment dollars. One of the ways our product, BITeamwork, helps to combat this issue and make users really enjoy using OBIEE is by allowing them to comment within the OBIEE environment. Today I’m going to show you how you can add more rich context on your comments.”

3. ORACLE CRITICAL PATCH UPDATE – JULY 2015

This blog says: Oracle released its quarterly Critical Patch Update last week. The following Hyperion and BI products are affected by security vulnerabilities:

Hyperion Essbase
Hyperion Shared Services
Hyperion EPMA
OBIEE

More patch update information is available here.

4. Oracle Process Cloud Application Player

Andrejus writes, “With Oracle Process Cloud you can forget these days when you was waiting long to deploy BPM process and test Human Task UI. No need to wait anymore, in Oracle Process Cloud you could use Application Player feature, this allows to run the process and test Human Task UI almost instantly.”

He also includes this video in his blog:

5. 12C Downgrade

Jonathan Lewis gives an example where 11.2.0.4 recognised (with a few hints) the case for a nested loop semi-join and 12c went a bit further and recognised the opportunity for doing a cunning “semi_to_inner” transformation … which just happened to do more work than the 11g plan.

6. Protect Your APEX Application PL/SQL Source Code

Pete Finnigan blogs, “Oracle Application Express is a great rapid application development tool where you can write your applications functionality in PL/SQL and create the interface easily in the APEX UI using all of the tools available to create forms and reports and much more directly with a point and click tool. You can style your apps with CSS and also use JQuery to add front end functionality. All of the point and click, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery and more are about styling and look but the business functionality is ideally written in PL/SQL and ideally interfaced in separate packages.”

7. Oracle on 4096 (4k) sector disks don’t work (ish)

Neil Chandler says that he “recently came across 4K (4096 byte) sector drives. They are a fairly new thing and have come about so drives can exceed the 2TB limit imposed by having 512byte sectors. The details behind this can be found here, in much greater detail than I need to understand. What I do understand is that Oracle doesn’t deal with 4K sectors (4Kn) very well and it shows up in a couple of ways. Don’t get me wrong, from Oracle 11.2, 4Kn database are supported, albeit with some features.”

Read his full blog for more details.

8. Snap Cloning Databases on Exadata using Enterprise Manager

Subhadeep Sengupta writes, “Historically, Exadata has mostly been deployed for heavy, production workloads, leaving cheap commodity hardware and third-party storage to perform as infrastructure for Development and Testing. From the viewpoint of Enterprise Manager, we have seen customers clone production databases running on Exadata to secondary storage such as ZFS Storage Appliance or even third-party NAS or SAN for the purpose of testing. Customers mainly used RMAN (with or without Enterprise Manager) to clone the databases. While the master clones (often referred to as Test Master) could be further cloned via storage efficient snapshots, there were significant limitations to the approach.”

He also suggests further reading, and links to the following video: