Oracle E-Business Suite Technology

It's axiomatic that everyone wants to minimize maintenance downtimes for their E-Business Suite environments. This is particularly crucial for environments with users in multiple timezones. I've previously summarized some of the most-effective ways of reducing patching downtimes for E-Business Suite environments. As noted in that article, one of the best ways of minimizing your maintenance downtimes is to use a staged Applications system.

The staged approach allows you to perform as many changes as possible in an offline Apps environment, and defers taking down your production environment only for the final database patches tasks. Using this approach, you apply your new patches to an exact clone of your production E-Business Suite environment. This can be done while your production system is still running. The staged Applications environment is then used to run database updates and APPL_TOP changes into your production environment.

Continue reading "Reducing Patching Downtimes with Staged Applications Systems" »

Continue reading "Developer 6i Patchset 19 Certified with E-Business Suite 11i" »

The weekend is fast approaching and my demon inbox still has not been appeased. Here's a quick announcement from our Applications Platforms Group about a new pair of platform certifications:  Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (12.0.4 and higher) is certified on Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 on the x86 and 86-64 hardware architectures.

Continue reading "OEL and RHEL 5 Certified for E-Business Suite Release 12" »

[Aug 26, 2008 Update: Added Windows x86 and IBM AIX to the list of certified platforms, and more information about pending platform certifications]

Following our recent certification of E-Business Suite Release 11i with the 10gR2 10.2.0.4 Database, I'm very pleased to announce that the E-Business Suite Release 12 is now also certified on 10.2.0.4. For those of you who are planning ahead, this means that you can upgrade your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i environment to the 10gR2 10.2.0.4 Database and then upgrade your environment to E-Business Suite Release 12, without worrying about incompatible target database versions.

Continue reading "10gR2 10.2.0.4 Database Certified with Apps 12" »

Oracle E-Business Suite Application Technology Group (ATG) is pleased to announce the availability of the Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) version 2.0.2 Rollup update.

This pack is available through Oracle Metalink, as patch 6809246.

Continue reading "Application Management Pack for Oracle E-Business Suite 2.0.2 Now Available" »

[Aug 19, 2008 Update: Added time and location for the Middleware Special Interest Group, added the new Meet the Experts session]

OpenWorld 2008 is coming on us a bit earlier this year. It's going to be another big show. If you plan to join us for this year's conference and haven't signed up yet, I hear that hotels are filling up fast. As usual, I will be presenting on several of the popular topics covered on this blog, participating in various Special Interest Group sessions and expert panels, and having personal meetings with you to discuss E-Business Suite architecture topics of your choice. Want to get together to talk at OpenWorld?

Continue reading "Want to Meet at OpenWorld 2008?" »

[Aug 14, 2008 Update: Added an observation from one of our readers who pointed out that the more of the latest patches you've applied on top of your existing 11.5.9 environment, the faster the upgrade to 11.5.10 will be.]

A frequently asked question popped up again in my inbox this morning. Its recurrence is particularly timely with the end of Premier Support for E-Business Suite Release 11.5.9 in June 2008. The question is:

If an EBS 11.5.9 environment has some or all of the EBS 11.5.10 Family Packs installed, is it considered to be an 11.5.10 environment?

Continue reading "Identity Crisis: Are Patches to EBS 11.5.9 Equivalent to 11.5.10?" »

You might have noticed a new byline on our recent article about the latest Rapid Clone updates: Max Arderius. I'm very pleased to add Max to our roster of guest authors, as he rounds out our editorial coverage with development expertise in the Rapid Install and other crucial E-Business Suite tools.

Here's a short bio about Max:

Max Arderius has been in Oracle since 1996. He began his Oracle career in Argentina where he worked for the Support Organization for 5 years providing on-site assistance for E-Business Suite customers. He acted as solutions architect designing and implementing solutions involving Oracle Technology for a broad range of customers across different countries. He also acted as Service Delivery Manager for critical customers in South America.

In 2001, he was relocated to Colorado where he lived for a brief period of time and finally moved to Orlando, Florida where he is currently based.
At present, he works in the Applications Technology Group for E-Business Suite Development managing a team of developers in India and United States. His team is responsible for the design, maintenance and enhancements of Rapid Install, Upgrade, Rapid Clone and the Applications Management Pack for E-Business Suite.

He has been a stable speaker in the Oracle Open World since 2005 and in 2007 he joined the ATG Staff for the Oracle Applications Users Group providing Technical Sessions related with Life Cycle Management of E-Business Suite Applications.

Max Arderius has a B.S degree in Computing Science and he is starting his Masters in Business Administration in 2009.

It's time for a quick reader poll. I just got an iPhone 3G and I am irrationally happy with it. One of the first websites I visited was this blog, naturally. That was a pretty educational experience. It got me reflecting on trends in mobile accessibility for websites, notwithstanding the almost-deafening hype around Apple's latest object of desire.

Obviously, the end-consumer market has increasing momentum around mobile device usage, but what about the corporate market? If the tremendous market response to Oracle's Business Intelligence Applications for the iPhone is any indication, interest in these devices in enterprise settings is growing rapidly.

The RSS feeds for this blog via Google Reader work really well.  The full-feed articles and graphics reformat nicely into the iPhone's smaller display. The actual website, however, is a bit of a different matter. While it's as usable on the iPhone as any other site, it got me to wondering how many of you might be interested in accessing this site from a mobile device.

If accessing this kind of information from a mobile device is important to you while you're on the road, post a comment below. Any information about your mobile device's screen resolution would be helpful, too. If there's sufficient demand, I'll see what I can do about formatting a special homepage just for mobile readers.

The Rapid Clone updates for Release 11i and 12 are released simultaneously twice a year in January and in July. The latest updates to both versions are now available in the following downloads:

• 6718351 : 11i RAPIDCLONE CONSOLIDATED FIXES JUL/2008
• 6776948 : R12 RAPIDCLONE CONSOLIDATED FIXES JUL/2008

These patches include more than 91 and 67 Bug fixes for 11i and R12 respectively. The corresponding Rapid Clone Metalink Notes have been updated accordingly.

The July 2008 updates fix more than 91 cloning-related issues for Release 11i and more than 67 for Release 12; see the respective READMEs for the list of bugs fixed.

• Note 230672.1 : Cloning Oracle Applications Release 11i with Rapid Clone
• Note 406982.1 : Cloning Oracle Applications Release 12 with Rapid Clone

• Fully Automated Cloning for Release 11i and 12
• In-Depth: Cloning OracleAS 10g + E-Business Suite Environments
• Cloning Discoverer End-User Layers

A handy new Note documents the process of migrating an Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 environment from a Linux 32-bit operating system to a Linux 64-bit operating system.  The migration process incorporates portions of existing processes and references steps in existing documentation. For details, see:

• Migrating Oracle E-Business Suite R12 from Linux 32-bit to Linux 64-bit (Metalink Note 471566.1)

Oracle Support recently made some organization changes to handle customer-reported security related issues more efficiently. As I am involved in analyzing security-related Service Requests (SR), I've assembled some notes about Oracle's processes, which may help should you need to report a security issue.

It goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway) that Oracle takes security extremely seriously and strives to be very proactive in this area. Our policy and procedures are designed to protect your data and ensure that issues are dealt with promptly.

Continue reading "Reporting E-Business Suite Security Issues to Oracle Support" »

This article is an updated R12 version of an earlier one written for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i.

Like most of our customers, you probably already have a corporate identity management system in place. And, you've probably not been enjoying the experience of redundantly administering the same user in your corporate identity management system as well as the E-Business Suite. If this describes your environment, this in-depth article about integrating Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, Oracle Single Sign-On and Oracle Internet Directory with third-party identity management systems will show you a better way of managing your EBS users.

Continue reading "In-Depth: Using Third-Party Identity Managers with E-Business Suite Release 12" »

As you saw in yesterday's announcement, E-Business Suite environments running the 10gR2 Database users can now use the Transportable Database (TDB) feature to migrate their database between platforms that share the same "endian" format.  But what if you need to migrate a database between platforms that use different endian formats?  That's the case for using Cross-Platform Transportable Tablespaces (XTTS).  It isn't certified with the E-Business Suite yet, but we're now actively seeking customers who might be interested in participating in a short Early Adopter Program for this feature.

Continue reading "Call for Early Adopter Program Participants: Using Cross-Platform Transportable Tablespaces with Apps 11i" »

[Aug 5, 2008 Update: Clarified the use of Export/Import as a fallback if the Transportable Database option doesn't work for a given source and target platform]

Platform migration is the process of moving a database from one operating system platform to a different operating system platform. You might wish to migrate your E-Business Suite database to create testing instances, experiment with new architectures, perform benchmarks, or prepare for actual platform changes in your production environment. A new method for performing platform migrations is now certified for E-Business Suite databases: Transportable Database (TDB).

Continue reading "Migrating E-Business Suite Databases Between Platforms" »