After analyzing my browsing history I denoted that there are some resources that I read often than others. The 5 oracle resources I used most in the past year were:

Oracle Support. Former metalink is a site that I go almost every week. There are tons of information but there’s some problems… The site runs on flash (WTF says Steve Jobs) and the non-flash version is very limited! Also, oracle support should be much social friendly than it is…
http://support.oracle.com

OTN was probably my first oracle resource. Still remember when I received the OTN card few weeks after joining, those marvelous days of the former technet
http://otn.oracle.com

PSOUG is very friendly to google… At least is what google thinks There are plenty of information there and very good and concise information easily found on google.
http://psoug.org

It’s a pity that I didn’t meet Tim Hall at UKOUG 2008 at Birmingham… I like a lot his technical articles.
http://www.oracle-base.com

Last but not least… The semi-god Tom Kyte
http://tkyte.blogspot.com and http://asktom.oracle.com

Happy XMAS for everyone…

Joao

Today Oracle WebLogic Server 12c was announced. 12c is the new release of the number 1 application server for conventional and engineered systems plus cloud environments. Oracle WebLogic Server delivers innovative new capabilities for building, deploying and running Java applications. Part of Fusion Middleware, Weblogic Server is the center piece of the Oracle’s Cloud Application Foundation and it’s now certified for the full Java Enterprise Edition 6 specification and Java 7 SE.

Oracle Traffic Director, aka OTD, integrates with Oracle WebLogic Server 12c to add high performance and high availability routing capabilities, allowing dynamic caching, load balancing plus proxy support for HTTP applications. Oracle Traffic Director seems to replace former Oracle Webcache.

WebLogic Server 12c also works with Oracle Public Cloud, making it easy to deploy in-house or VAB applications to the Oracle Public Cloud.

There’s also integration between WebLogic Server and Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters), allowing the automatic detection and correction of database node failures. WL 12c now supports TLS 1.2 (Transport Layer Security) which is the successor to SSL.

Now there’s a new lightweight version of WebLogic. The developer edition can be downloaded from the OTN and it’s just 168MB zipped. This version is much smaller that the production data-center deployment solutions. So lot’s of developers should be happy today… it was very annoying that we would need to install a cannon when most of the times we just want to kill a fly

Bye,
Joao

If anyone have any doubts about Oracle’s commitment to cloud computing, this move should clear any doubts. RightNow is primarily known for its business model of offering its software as a hosted service in the cloud. The $1.43 billion move will spark more rumors and speculation of bids for other so-called cloud technology companies that deliver software, data and computing power over the Internet. If anyone around still think that cloud computing is not for big businesses, think twice. I bet that in 5 years cloud computing services at businesses will be as common as sand on a beach.

This deal is the biggest since 2010 when Oracle bought Sun for $7.4 billion. This is also the result of a commitment by the software giant to create its Public Cloud for delivering IT services to businesses, which was announced at the beginning of October.

Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c will be released soon. Gerd Volberg told that at DOAG Development Panel the future of Oracle Reports is not bright. To be honest I understand Oracle if they don’t release Oracle Reports 12c. I understand because Oracle is greedy. They have a wonderful piece of software named BI Publisher and it seems they couldn’t sell it as they would expect. And they can’t sell mainly because of its price tag. BI Publisher is several times as expensive as Oracle Forms & Reports.

I think that Oracle Reports died several years ago at age 0f 6i … Every new released version since 6i was the pre-announce of the fall of the Reports empire. Few new really important features were released in the last 10 years. Two years ago I was informed that the Forms and Reports team was really small. For instance compared to JDeveloper at that time it was dozen times smaller.

Oracle Reports nowadays is very limited compared to BIRT for instance. Despite some excellent features as the matrix reports capability, it has an antiquated interface, complicated layout manager and dying skill set.

It’s hard to admit because at my company we have all reports based on Oracle Reports. And they are very reliable. But the technology didn’t evolve… And in the IT world the rule is: EVOLVE or DIE!

RIP Oracle Reports,

Joao

Well, it seems this weekend EM bugs arrived to town to annoy me. Today I’ve waste about an hour trying to find why EXPDP fails to export a schema when running from enterprise manager. I’m running Oracle Database 10.2.0.4. When I try to run EXPD from the Oracle Enterprise Manager I get the following error:

Connect Failed: ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied (DBD ERROR: OCISessionBegin)

I’ve checked alert.log and this was what’s going on there:

Tue Nov 13 10:25:16 2011 The value (30) of MAXTRANS parameter ignored.
kupprdp: master process DM00 started with pid=76, OS id=347304 to execute - SYS.KUPM$MCP.MAIN('EFDPROD_EXPORT', 'SYSTEM', 'KUPC$ C_1_20111113102514', 'KUPC$S_1_20111113102514', 0);

When running EXPDP from command line I had no problems exporting data and all goes fine. After searching on oracle support I found that this is a bug related to password content. My password contains a dollar sign ($) and that’s the problem! This is an old bug that’s only fixed on 10.2.0.5 patchset or by applying PATCH:5631628.

As a  workaround you may run EXPDP command line or by schedule a dbms_datapump job that runs a PL/SQL procedure to export you data… or just by changing your password

Joao

I’ve installed Oracle Database 11gr2 Oracle_Home (11.2.0.3) on an Oracle Linux EC2 instance and then moved that home to a new server. Database was running, listener too, but Enterprise Manager crashed after login and the log file shows that there a problem with the agent timezone:

cat /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1/myhost.com_apex/sysman/log/emdctl.trc
2011-11-12 11:03:11,376 Thread-1708107488 ERROR main: nmectl.c: nmectl_validateTZRegion, agentTZoffset =0,and testTZoffset for US/Eastern:-300 do not match
2011-11-12 11:03:14,703 Thread-330168032 WARN  http: nmehl_connect_internal: connect failed to (myhost.com:1158): Connection refused (error = 111)

The problem is that my instance now runs on Europe/Lisbon timezone (while the AMI i’ve used was running on US/Eastern) and this crash the EM agent and the EM daemon running on port 1158.

cat /etc/sysconfig/clock
# The ZONE parameter is only evaluated by system-config-date.
# The timezone of the system is defined by the contents of /etc/localtime.
ZONE="Europe/Lisbon"
UTC=true
ARC=false

1. Set the desired time zone at the OS level (system-config-date on OEL or you-know-where-on-windows)

2. Open a terminal window and set the oracle_home and oracle_sid and other environment variables:

export ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle
export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1
export ORACLE_SID=apex
export NLS_LANG=PORTUGUESE;
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib:/lib:/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib
export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH

3. Stop the dbconsole

emctl stop dbconsole

4. Run the following commands to check the current timezone and update to the new timezone (it will update the $ORACLE_HOME\sysman\config\emd.properties file with the correct timezone)

emctl config agent getTZ
emctl config agent updateTZ

5. Start the dbconsole

emctl start dbconsole

Bye, Joao

Neoface will start selling Better.Biz (an ERP for SMBs) as a service. We call it Better.Biz Cloud Edition. This is our new promotion video with portuguese voice-over. Hope you like it… and share it on social networks! Watch it in full screen for HD quality

Hi folks,

I’m moving from my former Dreamhost hosting service to Bluehost. In the next days you may see some instability and some error that i’ll try to solve as soon as I can. Some images aren’t yet available and I still don’t know why. Bluehosts support says that’s related with domain transfer… which, to be honest, I doubt.

So, sorry for any inconvenience…

Joao

What are the differences between Oracle Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Oracle Database software? This question is heard very often from people that want to go for a trial on Oracle for Amazon RDS. For instance, most of them ask if Enterprise Manager is available on Oracle RDS. And I’ll answer that…

To provide a very stable and secure service, Amazon RDS doesn’t allow shell access to database instances, and forbids access to some system procedures and tables that need advanced privileges. Amazon RDS provides wrapper procedures for several DBA tasks that require those privileges.

Despite some features aren’t available on Oracle engine for Amazon RDS, most of them are. The following features are the ones that are available:

• Automatic Memory Management
• Automatic Undo Management
• Advanced Compression
• Advanced Queuing
• Comprehensive support for Microsoft .NET, OLE DB, and ODBC
• Distributed Queries/Transactions
• Flashback Table, Query and Transaction Query
• Fine-Grained Auditing
• Import/Export and sqlldr Support
• Materialized Views
• Partitioning
• Star Query Optimization
• Summary Management – Materialized View Query Rewrite
• Text
• Virtual Private Database

And the following features, aren’t supported:

• Automated Storage Management
• Data Guard / Active Data Guard
• Data Pump
• Oracle Enterprise Manager
• Real Application Clusters (RAC)
• Streams

Beside these features limitations, there are some restricted DBA priviledges. Oracle uses role-based security. A role is a group of privileges that can be granted or revoked. The DBA role allows users, granted with this role, all administrative privileges on an Oracle database. The following privileges are not available for the DBA role whe running Oracle on Amazon RDS:

• Alter database
• Alter system
• Create any directory
• Drop any directory
• Grant any object privilege
• Grant any privilege
• Grant any role
• Restricted session

You should think that Amazon RDS with Oracle Engine is a service, imagine no server or OS running, and by making this kind of abstraction, you’ll understand the unavailability of the features and priviledges I wrote about. So Enterprise Manager is not available for Oracle on Amazon RDS!

Peace, Joao

If you attempt to run an RPM command  and receive an error message that the RPM database is in use, or if you have multiple zombie cron processes probably you’ll need to rebuild the rpm database. Take a look:

[root@db2 root]# ps -ef 
root     31366 31019  0 04:02 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh /etc/cron.daily/rpm
root     31367 31019  0 04:02 ?        00:00:00 awk -v progname=/etc/cron.daily/rpm progname {?????   print progname ":\n"?????   prog
root     31369 31366  0 04:02 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/rpm/rpmq -q --all --qf %{name}-%{version}-%{release}.%{arch}.rpm\n

This means that the nightly jobs started by cron are zombie or sleeping, probably because someone aborted an rpm usage before. To solve this kill all those zombie processes and clean the rpm temporary database files located at /var/lib/rpm.

[root@db2 root]# kill -9 31366
[root@db2 root]# cd /var/lib/rpm
[root@db2 rpm]# ls -lht
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  24K Jun 27 04:02 __db.001
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1,3M Jun 27 04:02 __db.002
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 440K Jun 27 04:02 __db.003
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 Mai 27 14:43 __db.000
(...)

So let’s delete those temporary rpm database files and recreate the rpm database from the installed package headers.

[root@db2 rpm]# rm -f __db*
[root@db2 rpm]# rpm --rebuilddb

Done…