Tag Archives: Weblogic

Hey JAVA-developer, why don’t you love your database


Why this post?

Partly, this blogpost is a result of a promise to Lukas Eder. Basically my vision adheres quite nicely to the “Thick Database” driven by Bryn Llewellyn and Toon Koppelaars who, understandibly, drive this from an Oracle perspective.
It –more than of course- also nicely fits EnterpriseDB or even vanilla PostgreSQL database landscapes.

There is apparently still so much confusion in the world on the how, why and what of good application development and architecture that I decided to chip in my bit. I think I have a bit of an idea on how this aught to work and I also think it is not a half bad idea, plus a couple of people whom I highly regard, seem to agree with it. So here goes…

Traditionally

Traditionally there is no big love between application developers and their persistence-store. I don’t really know why because I never found the opportunity to do a real inquiry, but I think I have a reasonable understanding.

Basically there is constantly the enormous pressure of delivering new features and functionality. So much even that the basic development work, the more “boring” and “time consuming” things -why pay now, if you can also pay later- get postponed. Things like peer-reviews, (integration) testing, technical design… Basically, more people means more features.
If even these things get too little attention, why would something like an overpriced library-box get more attention? Not to mention these DBA’s you need to pass to even get close(r) to this library-box…

Here are my four reasons why I think
it should deserve a chance!

1. Easier

Plain and simple. It is easier. If you take a structured query language like PL/(pg)SQL, it is basically easy. Founded on the programming language ADA, it is easy to understand and one can quite easily build a number of routines, procedures, packages, functions to let the database chop and glue data and just deliver the results for your application to consume.
It saves you the time of having to (re)write some of this more complex stuff in your application or perhaps even over a several applications.

2. Quicker

As said under the first point: build once, use many times. By creating mechanisms in the database, you get the opportunity to think about the separating data manipulation mechanisms from data representation mechanisms and where you want to put which specific function. Of course, this decision process takes a little extra time in the beginning, but will repay many times over as your projects grows and gains meaningful complexity (is there something like “meaningful complexity”, well, yes…).

Quicker also is in operational response times. Querying a stored procedure will bring agility to your application in a sense that this stored procedure will be much quicker in getting you the answer than if you do this in a distributed (middle-ware) environment. These stored procedures can be accessed through REST-endpoints, giving flexibility and the possibile desired disconnect between the database and the application layer.

3. Cheaper

Powerful, because you are and you remain close to the data. No data transportation overhead, no latency. These kinds of slimming down, mean less requirements to infrastructure and distributed capacities (either hardware or (virtual) “cloud infrastructure”. This slimming down frees up budget which can then be spend on the more meaningful bits and pieces of your application.

4. More consistent

Finally, I think this approach brings more consistency. As you do things near the data it lives on, near the processing power you depend on, you also get single access paths to specific bits of your data, to specific constructs that drive the value of the application you are building. Through this, it does not matter from where you call this service, REST-endpoint, stored procedure, or whatever you call it, you always get the same answer, driving a consistent decision process based on that application.

And if ever something changes, there is also just one place for you to ensure these new requirements are added. Voila, consistency throughout your application landscape, as all that depends on this data-set gets this uniquely updated information.

The magic of working together

There is a lot of misunderstanding between DBA’s and Developers. I have been in both roles at some point and I have seen this happen first hand. One of the things, though, in that force field, I have learned, is the power, the joy and, through this, the magic of working together.
In the end, we all have the same goal, which is furthering our business by being the best at what we do. This means, for a developer, meeting feature request, short development cycles, quick delivery and as much as possible, get it right in one go. For a DBA this means making sure the database stays consistent, performant and available. And, in extension of that, for operations it means that the final product must be easily and quickly deployable to enter into an uneventful and dependable life-cycle.

Bringing together these seemingly conflicting disciplines is fun! By investing a little time in exploring the other disciplines, you will find common drivers, in a sense that everyone want the same thing. By getting over nearly religious initial differences, you will find magic in the combination. You will reach your goals earlier with the bonus that your co-workers will also reach their goals earlier and have a better end result than you dreamt possible.

True JAVA-Champion

Coming from another world, I do not know the requirements for becoming a JAVA-Champion. I imagine it to be not too much different from other recognition programs out there… But…
If you create more features and functions and you are able to run your application with greater concurrency on (way) less platform-power. Thus increasing the RIO on your application, this makes you a true Champion of JAVA and your business!! If you are able to combine this with some magic in your cooperation’s…
Believe me, it is more fun in the end too!


Username & password required at Weblogic domain startup

When installing a new WebLogic Domain for any a-specific Oracle (Fusion) Middleware application or any other implementation requiring a WebLogic domain like ORDS for instance, a new ‘home’ is created under [MW-home]/user_domains/. [MW-Home] translates, for instance, to /u01/oracle/product/Middleware.

ordsTo start your brand-new domain, or perhaps and rather, to automate the startup of your domain, you would use the supplied [MW-home]/user_domains/[DomainName]/startWebLogic.sh command-file.
This file will start the Weblogic domain (the Admin Server) and the deployed components. After this start, you will be able to follow through with the administration over the web-console. Typically its URL is: http://[ServerName]:[PortNumber]/console.

One nasty thing you can run into, is that starting the server can require you to enter username and password during the run of [MW-home]/user_domains/[DomainName]/startWebLogic.sh. Of course this is rather annoying because it requires interaction which is not good for auto-start. Regular input-tooling you can wrap around this command-file, for example with input redirection, would require you to save your username / password combination in plain text. That is certainly never a good idea!!

Luckily there is a trick to enable your WebLogic domain to start without this interaction. And it also makes sure that username & password are not stored in plain text. Actually it is quite easy to get this facility in place.

This is how:

Go to [MW-home]/user_domains/[DomainName]/Servers/AdminServer/security and create a plain text file called boot.properties.

This file gets two lines:
username: Your WebLogic Username
password: Your WebLogic Password

Basically, this is now a plain-text recording of the username and password on the server, which seems quite scary.

Good thing though, is that when you have successfully run [MW-home]/user_domains/[DomainName]/startWebLogic.sh command file, which will now continuously run through, username and password will be encrypted:

#Thu Mar 10 14:11:38 UTC 2016
password={AES}JoMm+ymJUvbcQld84ofjSR5KhwFVP7mCgTpYBtTS7TA\=
username={AES}vY8NlWXCh156j/uAIpyFY4MVxPt8cdAbUpaTku+sJsU\=

You will now be able to call [MW-home]/user_domains/[DomainName]/startWebLogic.sh from your startup-script without having to worry about the need to interactively entering username / password or have to worry about plain text storage of these to artifacts.

Hope this helps!

Printing directly with APEX

When looking for a print solution with APEX you will find .PDF

You will find a lot of .PDF

And .PDF is good. There is nothing wrong with .PDF. In fact, .PDF looks cool and you can do a lot of neat stuff with it. With toolkits like pl/pdf you can create .PDF’s directly from PL/SQL.

But sometimes there is the need to be able to print directly.
For instance with batch-processing or with nightly print-runs or whatever. And this is where you would find yourself locked out with .PDF and, glancing Google, you would guess you’d be out of luck!
Since we had:

  • created a web based solution
  • the need to print directly
  • print in nightly-runs

plus we had:

  • about 400 reports (.rdf files) which we need to reuse (without having the opportunity to rebuild them in something like pl/pdf)
  • combine different output / distribution mechanisms

we needed to tackle this challenge!

So we did !!

It was fixed by using some old and new technology mixed together:

Oracle reports builder
and
Oracle Fusion Middleware, more specifically, Oracle Reports Server, aka WLS_Reports

By using this combination of products, you can create a printing solutions which is capable of printing directly to your network printer, create HTML or PDF reports.
Schedule them, e-mail them, and all this by URL-control!

http://<your-reports-server-node>:8888/reports/rwservlet?command=argument&command=argument&and-so-on

Use the following (much used, but far from a complete list of) control-commands:

  • report=<name of your .rdf>
  • userid=<userid/password@database>
  • desformat=HTML/PDF
  • destype=type of output of the report
  • desname=name of your output (device, file, whatever)

More commands in the link to the documentation on the bottom of this post!!

Notes:

  • You can post these parameters to the Reports Server without calling them in the original URL!
  • You can set a “local” on your Reports Server for omitting <@database> in ‘userid’ for your default database
  • Actually you can set all environment variables, like TNS_ADMIN, NLS_LANG, REPORTS_PATH, etc.

What we found is we needed to run Oracle Reports Server on Windows, just to take advantage of the Windows Printing System which is quite stable and easy to configure. (So, yes, okay, there you have it, a good thing about Windoze!)

Basically you can create a simple solution, but you can easily expand it quite a bit, making a printing and reporting solutions worthy of and enterprise environment, with distributing reports via e-mail, creating reports in file-systems, embedding reports in websites, and basically anything you want or would need.

And, you get a nice Management Console for free with this installation!

08-forms-em
Oracle Enterprise Manager Console

From this management console you can administer your print-jobs, set all kinds of parameters, which is quite neat!!

But, wait… the catch… It’s gonna cost you!

Or, can you keep it under control?

But of course!

Printing is mostly a half-on-line thing, and for a lot of stuff, it’s not extremely performance / time critical… So what can we do?

Oracle Reports Server is licensed as “Oracle Forms & Reports Server” and it will set you back € 370 per Named User or € 18.200 per CPU (being Oracle CPU’s according to the Core Factor Table!)
It’s still a whole lot of money, but would you really need more than 2 cores? If you give the machine enough memory and fast disks? Probably not.

Is it worth considering taking another node in your environment? Perhaps. This print-solutions could be a viable reason to do so. It brings you quite a bit of functionality straight from the box. But, as always, do your math and make educated choices.

The documentation link promised:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16764_01/bi.1111/b32121/toc.htm

If you would like more info, please just drop me a line!