Technical Blog

Organizations face a major challenge securing sensitive data like social security numbers, bank account and routing numbers, and other similar data.

Oracle® Access Manager (OAM) version 12.2.1.3 provides identity management and an access control system that enables users to access all supported applications. To integrate multiple Oracle E-Business Suites (EBS) version R12.2 with OAM for single sign-on (SSO), you need to perform integration steps on each EBS instance.

This blog covers the essentials of how to use the advanced security option to secure sensitive data within an Oracle® database by using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). This feature enables you to encrypt database columns and manage encryption keys.

The Oracle® Exadata® system introduces storage indexes, which improve database performance. A storage index is a structure store in memory that contains key statistics. This storage index enables Exadata to speed up disk I/O operations and queries by checking the index first to find relevant data rather than by reading every row.

Oracle® GoldenGate® supports two architectures: the classic architecture and the Oracle GoldenGate Microservices Architecture (OGG MA).

Classic architecture has standard extract, replicat, pump, and receiver functions and is managed by the GoldenGate Software Command Interpreter (GGSCI).

OGG MA is a restful application program interface (API) microservices-based architecture that enables you to install, configure, monitor, and manage Oracle GoldenGate services through a web-based user interface. OGG MA was introduced in version GoldenGate 12.3 and was designed from the perspective of cloud operations.

Microsoft® introduced a new feature called a hybrid buffer pool in SQL Server® 2019 (Preview) CTP 2.1. This feature enables you to directly access data pages in database files stored in persistent memory (PMEM) devices.

Microsoft® has focused on security in SQL Server®, and almost all releases either have an enhancement to existing features or have introduced new security features. In SQL Server 2016, Microsoft introduced many new security features that help users protect their data, including Row-Level Security, Always Encrypted, and Dynamic Data Masking.

Oracle® OSWatcher is a utility that collects data from commands such as vmstat, iostat, top, ps, netstat, HP-UX® sar, and Linux® meminfo. OSWatcher archives the data files, automatically looks for issues, and helps to determine the root cause of the issues, if possible.

The Oracle® Property Manager is part of the Oracle Real Estate Management solution and is a database that is specifically designed for companies and corporate giants that have large property portfolios. This blog highlights the Oracle Property Manager’s various features and functions.

As IT continues to grow, information systems are becoming more critical in different industries. Service interruptions in information systems can cause economic loss, critical data loss, and impact the brand image in the market, especially for industries such as communication, finance, medical care, e-commerce, logistics, and government. Therefore, service continuity is critical to the construction of information systems. Currently, service continuity is typically improved by building disaster recovery (DR) centers where copies of production data are saved.

If a physical standby database loses or corrupts an archived redo data or has an unresolvable archive gap, which is the result of archive logs getting missed on the primary database or the archives getting corrupted, then no valid backups exists for recovery.

This blog explores a few methods for handling XML data in Oracle® PL/SQL. Learn more about our database services.

To gain access to or to establish a connection with an on-premises, standalone database or Oracle® E-business Suite (EBS) database from the Oracle Integration Cloud Service, you need to install the Oracle Integration Cloud Service connectivity agent on your on-premises host. The Oracle Integration Cloud Service agent installs a WebLogic server with only the AdminServer component.

Oracle® has launched CPADMIN, a concurrent processing command-line utility for E-Business Suite® (EBS) versions R12.1.3 and R12.2.x. CPADMIN is a menu-based utility that wraps multiple existing utilities for concurrent processes and allows you to work on several concurrent process-related tasks under a single menu.

Newly released and user friendly, CPADMIN is the replacement for the cmclean.sql script in EBS Release 12. This blog explores some features of CPADMIN and shows you how to use it to execute multiple tasks with a single command.

This post discusses how to repair multiple or single block corruption of data files, including system data files, in an Oracle® database. Block corruption is a common source of database outages.

A particular SQL query might perform poorly on one database (such as production) but work fine on another database (such as development). This situation might occur if the same query has a different execution plan on each instance. This blog shows how to transfer the execution plan from an instance, where query works fine, to another instance, where query behaves poorly, by using the SQL plan baseline feature that Oracle® Database® first introduced in version 11g.

This blog delves into the details of the Oracle® Exadata® Smart Scan feature, including an explanation of how SQL processing differs with Exadata and usage examples.

Demantra® and advanced Supply Planning Work Area (SPWA) are demand management and supply chain management tools provided by Oracle®. These products are integrated with the Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and Oracle Advanced Planning Suite (APS) (which are part of the Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP)) to best leverage Demantra demand management and supply chain management functionalities.

This blog covers Demantra and SPWA configuration with Oracle EBS and APS Value Chain Planning (VCP) from an Oracle database administrator (DBA) and architecture perspective. It also provides high-level installation steps for Demantra and advanced SPWA.

This blog shows you how to install and configure Oracle® Forms and Reports version 12.2.1.3.0 on Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) version 7.2 server to ensure high availability.

This blog introduces transport layer security (TLS) and explains how it differs from secure socket layer (SSL). It also includes essential step-by-step instructions to enable TLS in Oracle® E-Business Suite® (EBS) R12.

This blog covers the creation and maintenance of disaster recovery (DR) systems for Oracle® Enterprise Business Suites (EBS) applications and describes a generic process to create a version 12.2 applications DR system by using version 12.2.5 systems in the test area.

Doing performance tuning on your database is one of the most common and yet the most important activity that every database administrator (DBA) must perform on an ongoing and regular basis. Experts recommend that you regularly fine-tune databases to optimized performance. Fine-tuning helps users to run their reports and queries faster and get results quicker. This post shares some techniques for troubleshooting and tuning Oracle® databases.

This blog reviews the importance of running an ADOP (Application DBA Online Patching Utility) cycle with fs_clone after any changes or technology patches are made to the Weblogic Server (WLS) or Oracle® Fusion Middleware (FMW) home directories on your patch file system. The blog explores a problem scenario and explains how to handle related issues easily.

This blog covers how to use the Oracle® Data Visualization Desktop (DVD) to analyze data.

This blog covers some of the changes and new features of Oracle® WebLogic Server® version 12c.

This blog discusses setting up Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) column-level encryption in Oracle® E-Business Suite® (EBS) R12 environment. You can set up column-level encryption on single-column or multiple-column tables, depending on the user requirement.

This post discusses the Oracle® Real Application Clusters (RAC) One Node feature in the Database Enterprise Edition, which was introduced with the 11g Release 2, provides enhanced high availability for single instance Oracle Databases, protecting them from both planned and unplanned downtime. The post also provides instructions for installing the Oracle Grid infrastructure, which is required to use One Node.

Originally published by TriCore: October 6, 2017

This blog covers the basic requirements to import journal entries from any third-party tool into Oracle® E-Business Suite (EBS) General Ledger (GL). After you import journals into the system, you need to post them.

Originally published by TriCore: August 29, 2017

Oracle® version 12c offers multitenant database options for host multiple pluggable databases (PDB) with a single container database (CDB). Sometimes, you need to convert a non-CDB database into a CDB pluggable database. This blog describes methods that you can use to convert a non-CDB database into a CDB database.

Originally published by TriCore: February 12, 2017

This blog takes you through Subledger Accounting (SLA), which is one of the most important features of Oracle® version R12. SLA is the most robust feature in R12, providing the power to modify accounting according to business needs. This blog outlines the difference between R12 and earlier versions of the Subledger, along with some of its key features and components of SLA.

Sometimes businesses require a requisition in order to raise a purchase order (PO) and restrict manual PO creation. This blog shows you how to restrict a user from manually creating a PO.

This blog offers suggestions for troubleshooting issues with Oracle® GoldenGate lag.

Originally published by TriCore: Sept 7, 2017

Oracle® Smart View provides a common Microsoft® Office interface designed specifically for Oracle's Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Business Intelligence (BI). By using Smart View, you can view, import, and create reports.

This blog discusses Oracle® load testing, also known as performance testing, which is used to test a database under various representative load conditions.

Originally published by TriCore: Sept 12, 2017

Oracle® Smart View provides a common Microsoft® Office interface designed specifically for Oracle's Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Business Intelligence (BI). By using Smart View, you can view, import, and create reports.

Originally published by TriCore: April 12, 2017

This two-part blog post series covers new performance-tuning features in Oracle® Database. Part 1 discussed Oracle Database version 12.1.0.1. This follow-up post covers version 12.1.0.2.

Originally published by TriCore: April 11, 2017

This two-part blog post series covers new performance-tuning features of Oracle® Database versions 12.1.0.1 and 12.1.0.2. Part 1 discusses the earlier version.

This blog post reviews how to use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), as storage for an Oracle® Database backup. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first cloud vendor that Oracle partnered with to enable database backup in the cloud. S3 is the main storage offering of AWS.

Originally published by TriCore: December 14, 2017

Introduced in Oracle8i™, Oracle® Virtual Private Database (VPD) is the most popular security feature of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. You can use this feature when the standard object privileges and associated database roles are insufficient to meet your application security requirements.

This post shows you how to integrate Oracle® Discoverer 11g with the single sign-on (SSO) solution delivered by Oracle Access Manager (OAM) 11g. It helps anyone who is looking for a one-stop login solution across different applications.

Originally published by TriCore: June 6, 2017

Oracle® Data Pump (expdp, impdp) is a utility for exporting and importing database objects in and across databases. Part 1 of this two-part blog post series discussed the introduction of multitenant architecture in Oracle Database 12c and how to use Data Pump to export and import data. Part 2 covers how to take an export of only pluggable databases (PDBs) and the restrictions that Data Pump places on PDBs.

Originally published by TriCore: June 6, 2017

Oracle® Data Pump (expdp, impdp) is a utility for exporting and importing database objects in and across databases. While most database administrators are aware of Data Pump, support for multitenant architecture in Oracle Database 12c introduced changes to how Data Pump exports and imports data.

Originally published by TriCore: May 17, 2017

Oracle® Business Intelligence Discoverer is a tool for ad hoc querying, reporting, data analysis, and web publishing for the Oracle database environment.

Oracle® Enterprise Manager (OEM) 12c and 13c includes many performance analysis tools, including a support tool, called OEM Real-Time Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (Real-Time ADDM), for the Oracle DBA to use for troubleshooting or tuning real-time, ongoing performance issues. This blog shares knowledge about practical use of Real-Time ADDM to identify and survive an emergency due to any type of database health problems, such as 100% session, process utilization, or exceeding the predefined critical limits setup for input/output (I/O), memory, or interconnect limits. In such cases, Real-Time ADDM is a very handy tool, and provides the capability to do deeper real-time and realistic ADDM analysis of database health, so let's compare RADDM vs. ADDM.

This blog post explores the basics of Oracle® GoldenGate® and its functions. Because it's decoupled from the database architecture, GoldenGate facilitates heterogeneous and homogeneous real-time capture of transactional change data capture and integration.

Online table redefinition allows you to restructure your Oracle® table in production without making the data unavailable. You might be comfortable using temp tables to move data around, but there is a better solution.

Originally published by Tricore: May 5, 2017

This blog covers some basic concepts of Edition Based Redefinition (EBR) and how to use it to support an applications upgrade, which can reduce downtime.

Originally published by Tricore: May 17, 2017

Oracle® Business Intelligence Discoverer is a toolset for ad hoc querying, reporting, data analysis, and web publishing for the Oracle database environment.

This blog covers the process for converting a version 11i database to an Oracle® Applications Tablespace Model (OATM) by using an OATM migration utility that has 12 locally managed tablespaces for all products.

Starting with Oracle® 10g, you can partition tables online without any application downtime by using the DBMS_REDEFINITION package.

Use the following steps to change a non-partition table to a partition table by using DBMS_REDEFINITION. This example changes the non-partition table, TABLEA, to a range interval partition table.

Originally published by Tricore: March 15, 2017

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we introduced License Plate Numbers (LPNs) in the Oracle® Warehouse Management System (WMS). In this follow-up post we describe the various types of inventory transactions that you can perform with LPNs.

This post describes the Oracle® In-Memory Advisor (IMA), a feature of Database 12c, and describes its benefits. This feature is available in Oracle Database version 12.1.0.2 and later.

Originally published by Tricore: July 11, 2017

In Part 1 of this two-part series on Apache™ Hadoop®, we introduced the Hadoop ecosystem and the Hadoop framework. In Part 2, we cover more core components of the Hadoop framework, including those for querying, external integration, data exchange, coordination, and management. We also introduce a module that monitors Hadoop clusters.

Originally published by Tricore: July 10, 2017

Apache™ Hadoop® is an open source, Java-based framework that's designed to process huge amounts of data in a distributed computing environment. Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella developed Hadoop, which was released in 2005.

Built on commodity hardware, Hadoop works on the basic assumption that hardware failures are common. The Hadoop framework addresses these failures.

In Part 1 of this two-part blog series, we'll cover big data, the Hadoop ecosystem, and some key components of the Hadoop framework.

Minimizing downtime and increasing the database availability are essential objectives that every business aspires to achieve. Database Adminstrators (DBAs) are always looking for new ways to provide a faster recovery solution in case of any data file or complete database corruption failure. Starting with version 10g, the Oracle® Recovery Manager (RMAN) offers a feature called Incremental Merge Backups (IMB), which provides a solution to minimize the recovery time, especially for very large databases (VLDB).

This blog introduces Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) bonding and provides step-by-step configuration of LACP bonding on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS operating systems versions 6 and 7.

Originally published by Tricore: Dec 21, 2017

Row chaining is a bottleneck that causes disruption in database performance. We should avoid row chaining as much possible. In this blog, we'll discuss row chaining, how to identify it, and how to remove or avoid it completely.

Originally published by Tricore: March 14, 2017

In this two-part series, we'll discuss License Plate Numbers (LPN) in Oracle® Warehouse Management System (WMS), why and how to use them, as well as shortcut keys for Mobile Telnet, which is commonly known as PuTTy.

This blog describes the Oracle ® AD Online Patching (adop) utility phases, the patch process cycle steps, and some useful adop commands and tips.

Originally published by Tricore: Aug 14, 2017

This blog describes the following common issues and solutions for the Oracle ® AD Online Patching (adop) utility:

• Data dictionary corruption error
• adop prepare failure
• Forms object generation failure
• adop cutover hang-up
• Patch abort

Originally published by Tricore: May 25, 2017

Agent Gold Image is a recent feature of Oracle® Enterprise Manager (OEM) that simplifies how you manage hosts and targets. This blog post provides an overview of Agent Gold Images and walks you through the process of using one to install an agent.

Every time an Oracle ® Database reads or writes data to a disk, the database generates disk input and output (I/O) operations. The performance of many software applications is limited by disk I/O, and applications that spend the majority of central processing unit (CPU) time waiting for I/O activity to complete are I/O bound. I/O calibration helps to address this issue.

Parallel Replicat is one of the new features introduced in Oracle ® GoldenGate 12c Release 3 (12.3.0.1). Parallel Replicat is designed to help users to quickly load data into their environments by using multiple parallel mappers and threads.

This blog discusses the Oracle Exadata Smart Flash Cache feature and its architecture, including the write-back flash cache feature.

In an Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) environment, all the instances or servers communicate with each other using high-speed interconnects on the private network. If the instance members in a RAC fail to ping or to connect to one other via this private interconnect, all the servers that are physically up and running (and the database instances on those servers) might end up in a condition known as split-brain.