Oracle E-Business Suite Technology

It's been a longer road than we anticipated, but our team has completed the highly-anticipated 10gR2 Database (10.2.0.2) certification with the E-Business Suite.  This certification also includes the use of Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Automatic Storage Management (ASM) configurations.

The first certified platforms are Linux x86 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and 9), Microsoft Windows x86, Sun Sparc Solaris, HP-UX PA-RISC, and IBM AIX.  These certifications are available now.

Additional platforms, including HP Tru64, Linux Itanium, Linux x64, HP-UX Itanium, Windows Itanium, and Microsoft Windows x64 are coming very soon.

For complete details about upgrading your E-Business Suite to 10gR2, see:

• Interoperability Notes - Oracle Applications Release 11i
  with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2.0) (Metalink Note 362203.1)
• Configuring Oracle Applications Release 11i with 10g Release 2 Real Application Clusters and Automatic Storage Management (Metalink Note 362135.1)

Related Article:

• E-Business Suite Release 12 to include 10gR2 Database

This one's hot off the presses, also.  One of the major products from our team is AutoConfig, which I plan to devote a few future posts to.  For now, those of you who are already using AutoConfig in your E-Business Suite environments will be pleased to hear that the latest AutoConfig Template Rollup Patch has been released.

The TXK (FND) AutoConfig Template Rollup Patch M (Patch 4709948)  for April 2006 has just been released to Metalink.

This patch contains additional content on top of TXK AutoConfig Template Rollup Patch L (Patch 4489303).  This latest patch contains the latest enhancements and fixes to the actual AutoConfig engine, also.

For complete details about the patch's contents, see the README.

For details about AutoConfig, see, "Using AutoConfig to Manage System Configurations with Oracle Applications 11i" (Metalink Note 165195.1).

Related Article:

• Managing E-Business Suite Configurations with AutoConfig

Discoverer 4i has long been desupported for the general public, but E-Business Suite users have had a special exception for a few years.  That exception is ending this year.

For those of you who haven't upgraded to the latest Discoverer 10g release in your E-Business Suite environments, you should start planning to do so immediately.  Discoverer 4i has entered the final phase in the obsolescence cycle, and will be desupported by the end of October, 2006.

The good news is that there really isn't any reason why you should hesitate to upgrade.  Discoverer 10g is faster, more efficient, and has more analytic features for your end-users. 

For example, Discoverer 4i's automatically-generated SQL statements tended to be very long, and would result in extremely heavy database queries, which in turn would return massive datasets, weighing down your application server.  You probably already know this from reviewing your server logs, and from the number of helpdesk calls from annoyed users whose workbooks are taking hours to run.

The Discoverer 10g release has an automatic SQL trimming feature that intelligently removes unneeded columns.  Depending on the workbook, this can result in significant improvements in the responsiveness of workbook queries, and lighten up your Discoverer and database server load, as well.

For system administrators, there's even more good news:  the upgrade process is extremely straightforward.  When you install Discoverer 10g, it will make a copy of your existing Discoverer 4i End-User Layer and upgrade the copy to 10g.  If you've installed Discoverer 10g on a physically separate server, you can then run both 4i and 10g simultaneously against their respective End-User Layers. 

This means that end-users can compare their workbooks for the two releases side-by-side, which should make User Acceptance Tests a snap.

Here's the official Discoverer 4i Obsolescence Notice (Metalink Note 337576.1).

Here's the documentation on upgrading to Discoverer 10g in your E-Business Suite environment (Metalink Note 313418.1).

Related Article:

• In-Depth: Using Discoverer 10g with the E-Business Suite Release 11i

Since we're on the topic, if you're a Discoverer user, you'll find a wealth of interesting information in the following blogs:

• Michael Armstrong-Smith's Learn Discoverer Blog
  
• Abhinav Agrawal and Keith Laker's Oracle Business Intelligence Blog

Given that the E-Business Suite neighborhood in the blogosphere is sparsely-populated at present, I plan to assemble an annotated blogroll.  If you have a E-Business Suite-related blog, please drop me a line with a pointer to it.

[Editor Update:  My annotated blogroll has since been created and now has several other interesting blogs linked.]

Continuing on our theme of recent E-Business Suite certifications and upcoming desupport notices, here's one with an unusual wrinkle:

Login Server 3.0.9 and Portal 3.0.9 have been desupported for years for general users, but like Discoverer 4i, E-Business Suite users have had a special exception to this.  This situation is changing:  both Login Server 3.0.9 and Portal 3.0.9 will be desupported for E-Business Suite users in July, 2007.

However, there's something on the horizon that may accelerate that desupport schedule.

Sun is tentatively planning a new release of their Java Standard Edition  (SE) 6; the beta is available now.  Sun's official support policy is that they support their latest three Java releases.  Once Java 6 is released, the latest three Java releases will be Java 6, Java 5, and Java 1.4.

This means that Sun will desupport Java 1.3 as soon as Java 6 is released.

Oracle Login Server 3.0.9 and Portal 3.0.9 require Java 1.3 as a prerequisite.  They have not been certified with later Java releases.  The implication is that Login Server 3.0.9 and Portal 3.0.9 will be effectively desupported as soon as Java 6 is released in Autumn, 2006.

In other words, Sun's desupport policy trumps Oracle's desupport policy.

My team is participating in efforts now to validate whether it is even technically feasible to certify Login Server 3.0.9 and Portal 3.0.9 with a later Java release.  This is a non-trivial task and may not be possible at all.

The safest thing for all E-Business Suite customers is to start planning your upgrades to Single Sign-On 10g and Portal 10g.  These products are bundled as part of Oracle Application Server 10g.  Judging from the experiences of our early adopters of this integration (more on that in future posts), some customers may find this to be a challenging upgrade.

I strongly recommend that you start your Oracle Application Server 10g impact assessment and upgrade planning now. 

Critical references for this are:

• Installing Oracle Application Server 10g with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i (Metalink Note 233436.1)
• Using Oracle Portal 10g with Oracle E-Business Suite 11i (Metalink Note 305918.1)