I am very happy to say that I will be at DOAG 2014.
In the quest to emphasize the Oracle technology as not just the #1 in technology but also the #1 in afford ability and ease there will be 3 events I shall contribute:
*co-presented with my good friend Philippe Fierens ACEA
Please stay tuned to learn more as we progress towards November 2014.
In these times no household can be without ‘Home IT’ completely with a ‘home data center’. The figures for business data growth are at least equally applicable to the home situation, al least!
As in probably many situations, we started out with just some loose PC’s, which could be hooked up to The Internet, and after some time, also could be hooked up to one another. Gradually a fileserver was introduced because files were always on some other computer than you would need them. This made for a nice status quo, until the introduction of tablet computers and what not…
Now it was no longer so easy to access files or do whatever you wanted or needed, space was becoming scarcer by the day. Plus, our trusted old fileserver was starting to decay. I need to intervene. With a ‘data center’ just existing of a router a WiFi Accespoint, a central printer, some old and some newer workstations and tablets and this trusted old fileserver, an exchange wouldn’t be a daunting task…
A few years back I came across a company called Synology. I met some product guru of them and somehow registered the product name. Lately some of my colleagues started working with Synology in their home IT, so I decided this would be the way to go!
As I was running a fileserver with just a 100 Gigs of storage it was not hard to find
something with a bit more capacity. And the decision finally wasn’t too hard indeed.
A Synology DS (DiskStation) 214play it had to be and I decided upon 2 hard disks of 4 TB (Seagate Barracuda ST4000DM000) in a S.M.A.R.T. mirror setup.
Okay, so decision made, product purchased, product setup (which was just made too easy by all the discovery tooling). Disks setup in RAID 1 and on with the show!
And now the discovery fun begins…
It appears Synology has made 9 apps (for iPad / iPhone) that do all kinds of things!
So, okay, this is a bonus already! Just place files in the correct folder and your in business!
Currently I am migrating data towards the DS having first enabled some of the many apps inside the station, like:
Okay, well, these are just a few, but I fear there are MANY more apps out there!
Actually, from opening the box until being in business it took me 2 hours. Having a first run of customization down took me another 2 hours.
I guess doing the rest of the stuff
will take me some hours still, but hey, this is more or less classifiable as hobby or at least additional functionality!
Some other things I heard / saw a DS was used for:
So, in the end, all is good now, we got plenty of space, a lot of new functionality. I would say, ‘Yay Synology’!
A brief overview of alternatives…
This document focuses on the perception of the Oracle database related to ‘Small and Medium businesses’, European Style.
First we will take a quick look at Enterprise licensing and give a ballpark idea of prizes en possibilities. Next I will put this in perspective with more detail and will highlight possibilities to get ‘high end results’ with what is branded as ‘entry level’ investments. Everywhere I say Oracle, I mean the Oracle database.
Oracle is investment intensive
Oracle Enterprise Edition licenses are price-listed for over € 35.000 per processor. These CPU’s actually are not ‘real CPU’S’ but units which are defined according to Oracle’s Core Factor Table.
An Oracle Enterprise Edition license allows you to a) install and use the Oracle Enterprise Edition software and b) buy additional tooling to complete the Enterprise software stack. In this setting there is Oracle Active Data Guard, Oracle Database Vault, Partitioning, etc. to consider.
With Oracle Enterprise Edition it is possible to create a high performance, high available and ‘disaster resistant’ environment. Where it needs to be remarked that this program-set comes with an according price tag.
Oracle Standard Edition environment
A special exception in the Oracle license politics is the Oracle Standard Edition database. This installation uses the exact same database-software (binary compatible) as the Enterprise Edition edition but comprises a significantly reduced set of features and options that can be found in this global overview. The most important question is if these features and options are really needed to realize a high performance, high available and ‘disaster resistant’ environment.
Let’s first quickly zoom into a practical example the indicate an investment-perspective.
Based on a HP Proliant DL380 Gen8 E5-2690v2 Server with 2 processors with each 10 cores.
— Oracle Enterprise Edition:
2 x 10 cores x 0,5 core factor = 10 licenses x € 37,492 = € 374,920 excluding maintenance.
— Oracle Standard Edition:
2 x 1 processor = 2 licenses x € 13,813 = € 27,626 excluding maintenance.
— Oracle Standard Edition One:
2 x 1 processor = 2 licenses x € 4,578 = € 9,156 excluding maintenance.
In this setting we can save up to € 365,764 by leveraging Standard Edition. The reason is that the Standard Edition software is significantly cheaper but mainly because of the fact that the Standard Edition software is licensed per processor socket in stead of by the units defined by the ‘Core Factor Table’!
The limitation is that Standard Edition has a limit of 4 sockets per server and Standard Edition One is limited to 2 sockets per server. This is an important fact!
Room for investment
In our example it is possible to decide in favor of Standard Edition One. What we can subsequently deduce is that we have a theoretical budget of about € 350,000 available to make sure we have a sufficient high performance, high available and ‘disaster resistant’ installation. Even if we were to consume all of this budget, which is not very likely, the return on this investment remains high because the year-by-year support-cost for this environment is ((10 x € 8,248.19) -/- (2 x € 1,007.15)) € 79,467.60 per year cheaper.
In this calculation possible discounts have not been included. Looking at the volume of the investment differences any discounts will have to terminating influence. The year-by-year support-cost will remain based on the original price of the software.
Virtualization
One of the most significant hurdles with leveraging the Oracle software is virtualization, where technical considerations are not the toughest to deal with; the license consequences are!
As we concluded, Oracle Standard Edition is applicable on max 4 processors. In case of virtualization, it is true that all processors of all hardware, where the Oracle database can migrate to, either automatically or with live migration.
With this rule it is nearly impossible to leverage Standard Edition licenses and will is it be nearly impossible to use virtualization in a ‘small to medium business’ setting… Unless a smart alternative is chosen.
Alternatives
1. The abstraction layer
By leveraging virtualization-software as a abstraction layer, a server installation can be separated from the physical hardware configuration on which it runs. By using this alternative it is possible to recover from hardware failure more efficiently.
2. 2 x 2 sockets
By using a limited virtualization-cluster of 2 nodes with 2 sockets each having the maximum possible number of processor cores, the complete advantage of virtualization can be created using the maximum advantage of Standard Edition. Please note that we would need a Standard Edition license. Alternatively you could create a cluster with 2 x 1 socket to facilitate the usage of a Standard Edition One license.
3. ESL
In the case software from a third party is used, this software development party can agree on using a Embedded Software License; from Oracle. This form of licensing is quite specific and is therefor not further discussed here.
4. What will virtualization not solve
Virtualization is not replacement for Backup and it is no alternative for disaster proofing an Oracle database. These specific tasks are resolved by using backup of standby database tooling.
Tooling
In the beginning of this article it is indicated that the Oracle Enterprise Edition software give you the right to buy additional tooling to complete the Enterprise Software installation.
Alternatives for this tooling are also available for Standard Edition installations. Please consider:
Conclusion
Based on the information above we can conclude there are good possibilities to leverage the Oracle Database in a ‘Small and Medium Business’ environment. The information above is no complete and ultimate description of all possibilities, but this quick overview gives enough to work with to zoom into any specific challenge.
I flew out today to Finland. And I ended up having the opportunity to share my flight with Björn Rost.
The reason this time was to participate in the (meanwhile legendary) Oracle User Group Finland presentation.
After arriving I got picked up by Ann Sjökvist and we travelled to Oracle Finland HQ for a meeting in preparation for the World Premiere of the Oracle Standard Edition Round Table. After this meeting Ann dropped me of at GLO art Hotel, which looks like an ancient castle for her to proceed in the preparations for OUGF14.
A little later I went out on the town with Alex Nuijten to find the rest of the international crew, and we did! We joined forces with some of the biggest names in the Oracle community today like:
we took the legendary Helsinki City Sight Seeing tour by Heli which led us to the Speaker Dinner, where the crew was complete, adding:
and many more!!
Day two, the start of OUGF Harmony 2014, started with a nice stroll down to Helsinki City Center where we met up with all the speakers and participants of the convention to travel down to Haltia Finnish Nature Center.
At this greatest of all venues, you could be for a tech convention, we had breakfast to kickoff the convention by a keynote presentation by Heli Helskyaho.
And this day got to be even better than it started.
The keynote by James Morle made it clear that opinions matter where IT is concerned. Arguably the best keynote seen in many years! Mindless following of Marketing-ized ideas, best practice and Google will turn you into an idiot instead of a genius.
There were a lot of good session, more than anyone could attend…
The sessions I attended (besides the keynotes) were:
At 14:00 I had the opportunity to host my own talk on APEX for Electronic Patients Records (if you are interested in the slides, please drop me a line), having a good attendance. The day ended with a nice musical performance of a band formed by Oracle employees while some preferred the sauna experience and a dive in the lake near the venue.
Most of the participants returned to Helsinki while a small group of heroes stayed on site for a camp close to the venue.
Day three, the second day of the convention started with a keynote by Graham Wood of the Real World Performance Group while the twitter-stream on #ougf14 was revived showing camping and jumping pictures (a tradition initiated by Yuri Velikanov) from the day before!
In preparation of the Oracle Standard Edition awareness campaign I followed the well attended session from Ann Sjökvist talking about the Standard Edition DBA, a different approach to the trade.
At 12:00 we kicked off the first ever Oracle Standard Edition Round Table which was quite a succes! In a very lively discussion we got to discuss CPU’s, sockets, tooling, investments, bridging gaps and creating awareness to leverage the #1 database in the world for even many more situations and projects as we are all used to!! We even got to launch a brand new three letter IT acronym “TCL” which represents the Total Cost of (data) Loss for an organization.
With many unique get togethers this day also slowly drawn to a close. On request of Björn Rost the entire remaining gathering of Oracle enthusiasts made The Jump which, for me, was a unique experience, captured by Philippe (we had to jump a few times, yes :-))
As often, the best is kept for last! By ways of being the cherry on the cake, during the “hunt for food” by The Pragmas, downtown Helsinki, we stumbled on the Helskyaho-company at Yume (or even Twitter), possibly the best restaurant of Helsinki and they were so good to invite us to join them. This way we got to spend a dinner in the company of the legendary Chris Date which will possibly be a once in a lifetime experience.
With OUGF Harmony 2014, the standards for Oracle Usergroup conferences again was raised by a magnitude! A great job by our Finnish friends and a promise for next year.
It was the 31st of August 2009 at exactly 1 PM that I sent out my first tweet and it read “hmmm… Twitter…”
Today we are nearly 5 years on and we are 7,303* tweets along. I have 417 people who are willing to more or less read what I send out, which is just amazing to me!
* As per April 10, 2014 10:54 AM
I just wanted to step back for a second and reflect on what Twitter did for me, and share this reflection with you.
I remember being very hesitant about starting to tweet. The usual arguments like; “Who ever would wanna know that I was taking a coffee” or “Why would anyone want to know what I saw or did”… I decided to give it a little bit of a go, inspired and with a little peer-pressure by @Tom_Schepers.
The beginning was rusty with not much tweeting going on. Finding my way, looking for inspiration on what to communicate.
Somehow it really took off with my visit to the Norwegian Oracle User Group #ougn13. During this event I took it upon me to share a little something of every session I visited or inspiring meetings I encountered.
From that point on, I gradually started tweeting some more, staying in touch with the people that inspired me personally, and somehow, most of them appeared to be in the field of #Oracle.
From here one, I started to “TKnow” a number of people, rather than really know them. This means that there are folks out there I have talked with before I have ever met them in real life. Nice examples include @oraclebase, @ultan or even @pfierens, my partner in crime in many events and fellow member of the #Pragmas.
There are even people I value highly whom I have never even met, like for instance @MathijsBruggink or @annsjokvist.
Getting to the point… how #Twitter influenced my life.
Twitter has given me a way to communicate and stay in touch with friends and peers all over the world. Share serious contemplations, joke around or just socialize.
It has played a part in enabling me to startup an international career, in connecting people and visions in and around IT in general and #Oracle specifically.
Such a simple tool, and for any non believers, please give it a try, it could also change your life.
To create and distribute, since long, we have had the power of Oracle Reports at our fingertips. These same report definitions can still be used successfully nowadays.
With all the technical changes over the years, we’ve come to a point where Oracle Reports Server, is now part of Oracle Fusion Middleware proposition. It is a (small) container, application or component of this software stack, where it is loaded in an application server and thus deployed.
Although this takes Oracle Reports Server into the modern age, it adds a lot of complexity for smaller implementations, a lot of tweaking and tuning to get it all running smoothly. One of these examples I would like to address here…
We were faced with a situation where we were running a report, an e-mail distribution report, sending out specific information to a multitude of e-mail addresses. And there was this situation where this report was run on a system, which was somewhat overloaded. This is not good, but not always completely predictable or avoidable.
For this report to run very long, actually was not a big issue as these individual e-mails were just informational and not time-bound on a minute-scale.
The problems started when we were getting word that some recipients of these e-mails were getting multitudes of copies of these e-mails! Which was sloppy at best…
Wait… multitudes of e-mail from a job which is running slow… That’s odd, they should be getting either a late e-mail or perhaps no e-mail at all! Not a lot of e-mails, that is contradictory!
This called for an investigation.
Finally we stumbled across a technology designed to do no harm, I would like to call your attention to idempotence!
Funny thing is, this setting is not part of Oracle Reports Server, but of another component used in this complexity, Oracle HTTP Server (OHS).
Obviously, this was not the case with our situation! This idempotent operation was applied multiple times and it did change the result far beyond the initial application. Up to 40 e-mails per recipients on one specific occasion.
In effect, what happened, was that the Oracle Report, which was called through a URL, did not complete within WLIOTimeoutSecs, was just restarted. The URL, as it was called to start the process, was called again from withing the Oracle Fusion Middleware Stack, starting a new run of e-mail distribution… over and over again.
We resolved the situation by two completely different actions.
Number two was fixed by the adding of the following instruction to the installation guide (and actually doing this too):
Toggle parameter IdemPotent to ‘off’ in reports_ohs.conf in: <drive>\oracle\middleware\asinst_1\config\OHS\ohs1\moduleconf\reports_ohs.conf This can be accomplished through the Enterprise Manager Webtier -> Ohs1 -> Oracle http Server -> Administration -> Advanced Configuration -> Choose a file -> reports_ohs.conf Add the following line to the body: ## Added <name> <date> IdemPotent off
Our problems are gone now!
There is always a lot to do when you run your page. And, somehow, these days there are some default limits to the amount of work you are supposed to do.
Okay, but what does this mean…
In an application, we have a screen to create some appointment between a bunch of people. This bunch can become quite substantial indeed.
In those days we were running Oracle HTTP Server 9i to lift mod_plsql up in the IP, and we never had any issue creating these somewhat larger appointments in our application.
Recently we got a call on our service desk, which said there were some issues in creating an appointment with a greater number of participants. The message read, somewhere in the error-text:
“HTTP-400 Too many arguments passed in. Got 2009 parameters. Upper limit is 2000”
Okay, somehow this application function is not going to work!
On research we identified the parameter PlsqlMaxParameters to be the problem. This parameter was introduced with the first version of Oracle HTTP Server right after 9i. If unset, PlsqlMaxParameters defaults to a value of 2000.
I am guessing here, but my bet would be this to be a restriction to prevent a buffer-overrun of some kind.
To resolve the issue the PlsqlMaxParameter needed to be added to plsql.conf. (We tried to do this in dads.conf to keep most of Oracle HTTP Server unaffected, but got errored out).
We chose the value of 4000, meaning a 100% increase while maintaining a fair and safe limit.
For Oracle HTTP Server, the parameter is set in plsql.conf which can be found in either:
For Oracle EPG, the parameter can be set as follows:
And this is where it gets tricky!
Currently we are leveraging Oracle 11g Standalone HTTP Server (11.1.1.7), so without this bulky and difficult WebLogic overhead and we thought we’d aught to test this installation with these big appointments.
As expected, we received an error-message, so the behavior is consistent for this part. The scary bit though was that the error-message is no longer an error-message but a hint to go in the woods…
“The request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax.”
Which could virtually mean anything, and if we hadn’t run into the previous error, we’d have a helluvatime trying to resolve this.
Luckily the theater was set and we knew what we were searching for and testing, so we quickly resolved this also by adding PlsqlMaxParameters.
I hope this post will help you troubleshooting this catch-all message too!
Update on July 25th 2014
As we’re running into problems a new, I decided to call upon Oracle Support too… Raise and SR and see what comes floating to the top.
Well, a confirmation of what we already concluded, there is no conclusion…
I'm not able to determine what the maximum value is that you can set this to as it does not appear to have been documented in the bug, and the parameter has not been documented at all in the product documentation. I don't have access to the source code, so I'm not able to see if a hard limit has been set or not.
Raising the number of MaxPlsqlParameters is not considered to be a definite solution. Which kinda sounds logical since where you need a page-call with more than four thousand !! parameters (or even 2,000 when you think of it), you would think something could be optimized.
And the suggestions of MOS, which I will support:
Today I had the privilege to visit the Oracle UX team from the USA. This special event was hosted by Amis Services (@AMIS_Services) and my visit was with Michel Koolwaaij, my esteemed colleague from VIR e-Care Solutions.
The event was super-well attended by a lot of enthusiastic people, comprised of students, novel developers and experienced seniors alike. I also got to meet a whole bunch of super interesting people (again) like:
Through this post I would like to share some of what I picked up from the presentations and demos I went to and key learning points I figured out for myself.
Demo of Oracle voice (by Mark Vilrokx)
Oracle voice is a solutions based on Siri powered by Nuance which in fact now comprises a super lightweight front-end interface for voice-controlling Oracle Fusion Apps. The actual voice recognition and lexicon integration is done on the Nuance back-end.
A personal fun thing to find out is that actually the technology is again based on the work of the Belgian speech-specialists of Lernout & Hauspie, which I got to meet over 10 years ago!
Demo of Oracle mobilitics
Basically this is a demonstration of one of my key-take-aways for today.
These days you, as a classical developer, are challenged to step back, forget “grabbing data and throwing it into a grid or master-detail” and think about how you would “interact” with the data you have in your system.
If you think about it, you would not really want to scroll through master-detail… You want to visualize your data, so it becomes something more tangible and give you an overview with the ability to drill down or zoom in.
The “Designing for Mobility & Simplicity” talk of Aylin Uysal dove deeper into this.
Presentation UX directions with HTML5 by Mark Vilrokx
For me this was somewhat of a confirmation, strangely enough. Basically HTML5 is used as a rapid application development framework for Oracle ADF applications. In effect meaning that an Oracle APEX development environment supersedes Oracle ADF in both speed and diversity of application development (J) End of sentence
Presentation Designing for simplicity by Aylin Uysal
Stressing that person to person collaboration is still super important also (and perhaps even especially) for UX design. Organize several sesison consisting of different stakeholder groups, since UI design differs by user (or stakeholder) category.
Information abundance in classical UIs is to be replaced by minimal data UI design. Having less data, better (more visually represented) strongly increases UX!
Presentation Wireframing 101 by Ultan Ó Broin
Wireframing, in this context was new to me. Create a low fidelity “sketch” of what you want, don’t prototype anything yet! Create difference wireframes of applications and application flows to prevent “Squeak and poop” behavior of management or customers when presenting UX designs in wireframe format. A wireframe is no nicely worked out app, making it difficult to judge for outsiders.
A nice example of such rapid prototyping is the way Google Glasses is developed.
A good tool for digital wireframing (but also just for that) is Balsamiq which is used by the Oracle UX team as the preferred wireframing tool.
Presentation One picture worth a thousand words by Lucas Jellema
In this presentation of more pictures that words, Lucas gave some very cool examples of how pictures are able to, indeed, transfer much more information that words. An inspiration to use when you are UX-ing.
Visit to the Chamber of Secrets
I am so sorry, I had to sign quite an NDA before being let in… Please visit your local Oracle UX-session!
So, what are the key learning points:
A special “Thank you” to Wieteke Gaykema from AMIS who worked like crazy and still got me in at the Chamer of Secerts, even though I was shamefully late with my NDA!
We have this application where we just store some specific content in an XDB-schema.
After a quick move of the Oracle database from a legacy system to a new environment we found that the XDB-schema and it’s contents were not moved. Okay, this is what happens when you use “good-ole” imp/exp instead of some “newer” technologies like RMAN or expdp.
What now? We can start the entire move again (but that would mean downtime for recreating the database, amongst others) or we could do a specific move for the XDB-schema (but meanwhile new content was being added to the system already). Actually all of these are not the nicest scenario’s and seemingly adding too much complexity. Not what we want…
What about a a smart alternative here too! We could simply use ftp after all.
From the EPG (Embedded PL/SQL Gateway) functionality of the database, we can just enable ftp through the Oracle database listener. With this functionality we can access the application database on the legacy system through ftp and easily copy the content to a local directory, especially since there is just a few hundered Megabytes of data.
Enable this access by:
execute dbms_xdb.setFtpPort(2100);
With a tool like Filezilla, the contents were copied to a local directory.
After the action is complete, ftp-access to the database is closed, you can never be too careful!
execute dbms_xdb.setFtpPort(0);
Loading this contents in the new location is a repetition of the actions. Enable the EPG-ftp-port on the new database, use an ftp-tool to upload the data and don’t forget to disable the EPG-ftp-port afterwards.
One tricky thing is that you should mind the data-ownership. This is easiest done by connecting to the ftp-account with the same user that owned the database in the source database!
When you run into errors, probably there could be something wrong with your XDB-installation. Please look at this post for some more on that!!
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