Posts Tagged ‘Oracle Database’


Oracle BPM 11g Preview at Oracle Open World 2009

October 13th, 2009 by Mark Peterson • 4 Comments »

I think the wait was worth it. After BEA’s AquaLogic BPM (formerly Fuego) was purchased by Oracle, the product became part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware suite. But instead of being in the lime-light of Fusion, for the past year it was hardly mentioned. The Marketing story focused on SOA, Tuxedo, WebCenter and WebLogic. For BPM pure-plays, BPM has its own story, a good story; one with business centered not IT centered values.

Well there it is! It re-appeared in a General Session at Oracle Open World 2009 with all the other Fusion Middleware products. The product development team must have been busy. They took Aqualogic BPM apart and re-assemble it with more features and benefits for the business than ever before. Eduardo Chiocconi and Mariano Benitez demonstrated the new version of BPM at the Moscone West Exhibit hall. The product has been integrated with JDeveloper and Enterprise Manager. It is part of the Fusion middleware product suite and seems to have more capability than before.

For businesses, the need for a rich user-experience has been achieved. The BPM studio is integrated with the ADF development environment; a JSF-based technology. You can develop UIs from studio or import ADF projects and use them in interactive BPM activities. This segmentation of the business process from the UI should also allow the UI to take advantage of externally developed UIs; something that was lacking before in BPM. This segmentation may make it easier to integrate legacy UI applications, perhaps even UIs not based in ADF.

BPM 11g has also improved on the type of roles available for activities. You can now specify interactive tiers for approval or review activities. For instance, if the CFO needs to approve purchases over $100,000, then the work-item can be escalated without coding specialized escalation processes to route the purchase orders based on these rules. These rules of who and when people need to review or approve work can change. BPM now handles this without the need for re-writing and re-deploying the new processes. An administrator can simple re-configure the user-roles.

BPM 11g has many other features as well. It has a state-of-the-art rules engine. It can handle most business rules and conditional requirements without the need to integrate third-party rules engines. It has a new milestone activity switch to enhance business activity monitoring and instance processing by the workspace. It also has integrated Oracle BAM to enhance the ability to obtain information about the business process.

BPM 11g adds these features on top of the 10g BPM feature set, so the return for implementing BPM is improved. I was only able to get a glimpse of the new Oracle BPM 11g, but from this glimpse I am excited about the possibilities. Oracle 11g will not be available for download until Feb 2010. I am looking forward to getting my hands on the new version and feel at this time, the wait will be worth it.

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Oracle spotlights BPM in Fusion Middleware Story

October 12th, 2009 by Mark Peterson • No Comments »

After hearing the Fusion Middleware story many times now, I am so relieved and happy to see Business Process Management (BPM) in the spot light once again.  During the Oracle Open World 2009 General Session “Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Foundation for Innovation” we heard about SOA, the Enterprise 2.0 Portal and Tuxedo; but what is that? We were given a demo of the new Oracle BPM 11g application development environment. We got to see swim-lanes, process models, simulations and dash-boards. They showed how you can obtain process model metrics and key performance indicators for your process.  They made significant improvements over the way BPM integrates with applications and systems.

I feel this completes the Oracle’s Fusion Middleware Story. BPM spans the entire Fusion product suite and needs to be in the spot-light. No other application takes a holistic view of the enterprise and provides a coherent platform to integrate business application the way the business needs them.  We’ve heard many times that it’s not about IT anymore. That is certainly true. It should be about Business Processes and BPM solutions needs be part of the strategy.

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New Release of the Database 11g R2 Now Available

September 10th, 2009 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

Oracle has just announced availability of a new release of their 11g Database.  This is the second release for 11g and since many customers like to wait for a second release of new products before considering them production-worthy this version is one that many customers will be considering.

Oracle is offering local events around the country where customers can find out more about this new release.  Just follow the links below to register for an event in your area of the country.  Also, if you are going to Open World there will be a number of sessions there on the new release.

Oracle is advertising that this new release will

  • Reduce server costs by a factor of 5
  • Reduce storage requirements by a factor of 12
  • Improve mission critical systems performance by a factor of 10
  • Increase DBA productivity by a factor of 2
  • Eliminate idle redundancy in the data center, and
  • Simplify their overall IT software portfolio.

More overall  information can be found HERE.  The Oracle Technology Network (OTN) information can be found HERE and allows you to download an evaluation version.

The Oracle database continues to be the leading database worldwide.  Gartner’s 2008 Worldwide RDBMS Market Share Report shows Oracle with a 48.9 percent share, and IDC’s 2008 Worldwide Data Warehouse Platform Software 2008 Vendor Shares reports a 40 percent share.

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What Oracle is Doing Right

August 3rd, 2009 by Robert McMillen • No Comments »

For a change of pace I thought it would be good to  mention a few of the things I think that Oracle is doing right.   Over the last several years I continue to be impressed with what I see coming out of Oracle related to their product directions and new products.  Here’s my take on the things I see Oracle doing right.

The first one I’ll note is that Oracle is doing a great job at maintaining a Leadership Role in software innovation.  It’s obvious if you look at various evaluations such as the “Magic Quadrant” by Gartner that Oracle’s products are consistently in the top right quadrant where market leaders are found.  Here are a few Oracle products that I’ve had the opportunity to work with.

  • E-Business Suite R12 – R12 is more evolutionary than revolutionary but it significantly improves on what was a solid release in 11i by expanding the international capabilities of this massive applications suite.  With over 224 separate modules, R12 is mind-boggling in it’s scope of capabilities.  Oracle gets some dings for the bugs that were found in the first year  but they’ve quickly addressed the core issues in the releases leading up to release 12.1.  While there is an improved user interface the real changes are beneath the surface and which improve the productivity of everyday users.
  • 11g Database – there are many people who are better qualified to speak on this product than I but as one who has been working with the Oracle database since the last legs of version 6 I’m amazed that  Oracle continues to add useful and valuable capabilities to this workhorse of a database system.  In the areas of performance, operating systems supported, scalability and reliability the Oracle database keeps most of the world’s business working smoothly.  Yes the management interfaces are not as slick as they could be but the newer versions of Oracle Enterprise Manager tend to overwhelm me with information.  The power of PL/SQL remains a constant in the middle of all of the changes we have seen over the years.  Each new release allows more parameters to be changed on the fly rather than requiring downtime.  Recently introduced capabilities that I think will change the future of data management include Real Applications Testing, Active Data Guard, Database Vault and Total Recall.  There’s much more and I’ll probably get dinged in my comments for leaving it out but enough said.
  • Fusion Middleware 11g – Just released and while most of us are still trying to digest it all let me summarize it as a significant statement of Oracle’s capabilities to innovate dozens of products and continually integrate them in ways that architects, developers and management can better deliver business solutions that evolve more and more quickly.  The introduction of better technologies from the BEA acquisition has positioned Oracle to be the dominant player in this market.
  • JDeveloper 11g – This IDE has to compete with dozens of other great Java IDE’s like Eclipse and Aptana but still is a stand out.  This product offers all the bells and whistles including the ability to interact with all areas of the database and middleware environments that Oracle offers.  Additionally the capabilities of the Application Development Framework simplify the development of very robust user interfaces incorporating the best Web 2.0 goodies.  Using JDeveloper I can do Use Case design, write code, test, develop a database design and still not delve all of its capabilities.
  • Fusion Applications – Though not yet  released this coming Applications Suite will introduce an innovative User Interface that is a mash-up of the best of Web 2.0 and what Oracle has learned from it’s product acquisitions (such as PeopleSoft).  Built on Oracle Fusion Middleware capabilities this application will bring Service Oriented Architecture and more industry-standards to the underlying technology stack.    The focus on improving user productivity already seen in the UI will be much appreciated by those who do the real daily work of running the details of a business.
  • Miscellaneous - Kudos to Oracle for supporting the Open Source community by releasing versions of products that they have developed (see here).

Ok, it’s time to take a rest from this area of adulation and move to the second item I think Oracle has done well.  I’ll cover that in the next post.

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Cleaning up Tablespaces after OATM has Completed

December 29th, 2008 by Robert McMillen • 1 Comment »

Often after running Oracle Application Tablespace Migration (OATM) you will find that there are still indexes, tables and objects left in some of the old tablespaces.  You want to clean them up so you can delete the old tablespaces and recover the space used by the datafiles.  In the OATM documentation there’s no clear instructions on how to do this since it assumes that OATM will handle it for you.

I recently had this situation and here’s some steps I took to resolve my problem.  This example assumes that I have some tables, indexes and objects left in the old FNDD and FNDX tablespaces.  I wanted to move everything over to one of the new APPS_TS_* tablespaces so I could drop these two old tablespaces and recover the disk space.

Before I got started I found this nice article that outlines options with working on Large Objects (which I had).  The syntax examples are nice.

First I wanted to list all objects left in FNDD so I knew what to move.  I used this script and modifed the Tablespace Name to list all objects (including “free space” segments).

Next I wanted to list any tables left in FNDD so I did this.

select table_name from dba_tables where tablespace_name = ‘FNDD’;

Before you move the table (and any associated LOB segments), you may want to verify you have enough space in the destination tablespace.  You can query dba_segments to find out how many bytes are currently being used for the segments that you are planning to move.  Then verify you have enough free space at the destination.

I found that I had a table with a LOB column and the two associated LOB and LOB Index segments.  I wanted to move the table and both LOB segments to APPS_TS_MEDIA in one group.  The command to move these three objects was:

alter table OWNER.TABLENAME

move tablespace NEWTABLESPACENAME

lob(COLUMNNAME)

store as (tablespace NEWTABLESPACENAME);

The COLUMNNAME is the column name in the table that contains the Large Object.

After the move I verified that there were no other objects left in FNDD using the same script above.  I also did a:

select owner, table_name from dba_tables where tablespace_name = ‘OLDTABLESPACENAME’; to ensure that the table was gone as well.

Now it was time to check FNDX to ensure that any indexes were moved as well.  I modified the script from above to reference FNDX instead of FNDD.  I also ran a select index_name from dba_indexes where tablespace_name = ‘FNDX’;

Once I identifed the indexes I used this command to move them to the new tablespace.

alter index OWNER.INDEXNAME rebuild NEWTABLESPACENAME;

After verifying that everything was gone from FNDX and now in the new tablespaces I was able to drop the FNDD and FNDX tablespaces freeing up lots of needed space.

Several documents on Metalink were also helpful so I’ve listed them here.

  • Summary Note to LOB’s/BLOB’s/CLOB’s/NCLOB’s and BFILEs DOC ID 198160.1
  • How to move LOB Data to another Tablespace  DOC ID 130814.1

Finally, though I didn’t have to use this syntax, here is the command to move just the Large Object (LOBs) segments to a new tablespace while NOT moving the actual table that uses them.

alter table TABLENAME move lob(LOBCOLUMNNAME) store as (tablespace NEWTABLESPACENAME);

And here’s the syntax to just move a Table which doesn’t have any LOB columns.

alter table TABLENAME move tablespace NEWTABLESPACENAME;

That about wraps it up, so good luck on your tablespace cleaning!

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