Real Application Testing Capture Backported to 9i

HOT NEWS!!!!!

Real Application Testing Capture backported to 9i.

Oracle Real Application Testing includes two solutions to test the effect of system changes on real-world applications, Database Replay and SQL Performance Analyzer. Database Replay enables you to effectively test system changes in test environments by replaying a full production workload on the test system to help determine the overall impact of the change.

To assist the customers in upgrading to 11g the ‘Capture’ portion of Database Replay will be backported to 9.2 (and 10.2). The patch will be made available for 9.2.0.8. For 10g patches will be made available for 10.2.0.2 and 3 and is already included in the 10.2.0.4 and subsequent patchsets.

Again!!!!!! For 9i/10g it is the CAPTURE component only, but can help 9i customers upgrade to 10g by capturing your SQL trace. The trace files are then imported into 11g and from there you can send the SQL to 10g (10.2) to execute and collect the stats. You then reload those stats into 11g and compare with the SQL Performance Analyser.

If you want more information call me Barry Matthews 02 9476 4478

Enterprise Information Management

On the 3^rd March 2008, Oracle announced enhancements to the Enterprise Content Management platform at the AIIM conference and expo in Boston. Amongst the new feature and integration capability information was the announcement that the UCM platform integrates with the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher. This is a core part of an organisations Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strategy and it is exciting that Oracle has brought together two acquired technologies with its own to provide this solution for our customers. This is highlighted in the following graphic:


Oracle's BI server provides the ability to abstract, model, cache, calculate, optimise, analyse and report upon data from a wide-variety of information sources – including relational databases and applications. The UCM platform provides four key capabilities to the enterprise include document and records management, collaboration, process management and web-content management – all falling under the ECM umbrella.

ThThis announcement brings these two technologies together by:

1. Providing the ability for information (e.g. reports) generated by the BI server to be stored and managed in Oracle’s UCM repository leveraging this environment’s version management and security features.
2. Providing the capability for the information to be published, under tight content management control, to an intranet or portal environment

Of course, the integration provides for more than a simple repository and publishing mechanism for our BI customers. The UCM platform is able to provide an unstructured repository that itself can be analysed and reported upon by the BI application which leads itself well into the world of eDiscovery. Supporting information can also be published by the UCM platform to support a report or a dashboard view of the enterprise, e.g. a set of scanned invoices can be made available to a report detailing accounts payable transactions from the ERP system.

Paul

Protected Enterprise Workshop

On the 3rd and 4th of March we (Barry Matthews, Martin Lambert) ran two one-day sessions of the Protected Enterprise Workshop. The workshop allowed invited Oracle customers to get their hands dirty and build their own clusters, no viewlets or canned stuff, real environments. HP kindly donated the workshop infrastructure, and although we are not using the highest specification blade servers, the comments were “Geez this is quick”.

The workshop consists of 6 ‘C’ Class Xeon X64 full height quad core servers, and one half-height management server, including two workstations allowing three people to access one set of blades (3) each.

So what is the workshop??? Each team gets to install and configure Oracle clusterware (3 nodes), install and configure ASM (6 Luns on latest HP EVA), install Oracle software across the 3 nodes, Configure Oracle DB (DBCA). Then using the Grid Control Console they dynamically add and remove disks from a disk group with ASM, then de-provision one node from the cluster and re-task that node as a distaster recovery server using cloning, with ASM/Data Guard.

We asked the customers to rate the workshop out of 5 and the mean score was 4.72.

Customer Quotes “Very good to have an hour at the end for customised scenarios”
“This has given me a lot more confidence in manageing a RAC environment”
“I enjoyed this tremendously, and because it was hands on I believe I will retain a lot more details”
“Even though we went wrong, this showed us how to use the tools to troubleshoot problems”

Now you may ask, how do I get a go????? Well we are running another set of workshops in April for the people who couldn’t get a seat. So talk to you friendly Oracle account representative and ask. BUT!!!!!! There is a caveat at the moment. As this is real infrastructure located within the HP demonstartion facilities at Rhodes we are only offering this in Sydney at the moment..

So Melbourne customers, go and beat up HP, go and promise to buy lots of blade servers and we will bring it to Melbourne. No just joking, we will bring this to Melbourne probably June/July and then base it on 11g.

What is Role Management

In today's regulatory compliance environment, organisations need a holistic view of their business users, job functions, and associated entitlements. Attempting this manually often results in chaos, frustration, and failed projects.

Role Management enables enterprises role lifecycle management capabilities, helping strengthen regulatory compliance, and alleviating associated costs. It can act as the authoritative source for the relationships between business users, organisations, and entitlements, thus enabling automation of role based provisioning and access control across the IT infrastructure.

Imagine when you add a new employee to the accounts payable department, instead of creating access for all your application, and then hoping you have aligned users roles with access privileges role management can make this easier with the definition of an accounts payable role being aligned not only to applications access rights, but also the security levels the user needs to complete their role.

Another benefit of Role Management is doing role mining, with role mining it can be usually completed from either a top down or bottom up. The benefit of role mining you organisation is that it will show how you may have not only duplicate roles with similar responsibilities that can result in business process issues but also perhaps security holes.

This also provides enterprise applications rich role information enabling automation of business transactions for approval and routing.

Cheers

Corporate Blogs Are Cool

Since we started this blog, we've received a lot of constructive feedback from you - our readers - about our content, our mission and the strategy behind starting a messaging forum for the GTMi team here in ANZ. Overall, the feedback is positive - we are saying the right things to the right audience, which is great to hear.

Blogging is a cool way of getting a message out to your readers/partners/customers/prospects/industry-peers etc. and if you're thinking about using this initiative yourselves, we would give you every encouragement to do so. However, there are some things that you need to be aware of and take into account (refer to www.corporateblogging.info for more details)....

1. A blog should represent your interest, thoughts and opinions. Your blog will probably be characterized by an informal tone and a discussion centric approach.
2. Although most organisations, Oracle included, have a policy around blogging or social-networking on the web - you should always seek permission from somebody in authority before you start telling the world how you feel and ensure you stick within your corporate guidelines
3. Corporate disclaimers are a must - your own corporate policy will state the wording. Still be aware of your message and how it reflects on your organisation though.
4. Don't alienate your readership - a blog is a great way of improving internal and external relationships.
5. Don't lie, make things up or express an opinion that you wouldn't express face-to-face with your peers.

The team here are looking to deliver you useful and interesting content around our individual focal areas and we hope you enjoy reading our posts.

Paul

oracle's new business social network site Oracle MIX

If you enjoy using social networking sites like facebook or myspace due to their simplicity and openness but wish you could collaborate around business topics why dont you try logging into https://mix.oracle.com/ this is Oracles new business social networking site which allows collaboration around a huge variety of topics or be the leader and create your own topic.

Come and join my IDM networking page or connect to me on Mix.