Special Offer for Oracle OpenWorld Attendees

As much as San Francisco has to offer, sometimes it's nice to get out of the city. Especially with world-famous attractions, like Napa Valley, so close by. Andrea Guzman from the Napa Valley Wine Train is reaching out to Oracle OpenWorld attendees with a unique opportunity and a special offer.

By its nature, the Napa Valley Wine Train supports car-free travel, and we've now made it easier than ever for business travelers, like Oracle OpenWorld attendees, to enjoy scenic and historic Napa Valley—one of the premier wine-making regions in the world!

Make reservations for the Napa Valley Wine Train, and let us know that you are an Oracle OpenWorld attendee for a special offer. From the San Francisco Ferry Building, not far from Moscone Center, you'll take a BayLink Ferry to Vallejo. We'll schedule a shuttle with California Wine Tours to then take you to the Napa Valley Wine Train Station. You can choose any of the Wine Train's lunch or winery tour packages. We then suggest you explore downtown Napa, a great place for wine tasting, shopping, or spa treatments. Catch the shuttle back to Vallejo in time for the evening ferry to San Francisco. Leave San Francisco at 8:10 a.m.—be back by 7:00 p.m.— simple.

Hyperion

A handy posting today over at Tim Tow's Hyperion blog on Running Essbase on an Alternate Port.

EBS

This week over at the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog:

Using Transportable Database 11gR1 with E-Business Suite

Database Vault 11.1.0.7 Certified for E-Business Suite on Windows Platforms

Firefox 3.5 Certified with E-Business Suite

AIA

Several valuable postings at the Official AIA Blog, including this one on AIA 2.0.1 and MLR # 18

Forms

Using Forms? There's a link to a webcast on Web cast with Oracle Forms Support Experts coming up on October 7th at OTN over at Grant's Blog.

Performance

Jonathan Lewis has been one of the leading lights of Oracle performance for as long as I've been involved in it. His blog is always worth a look. For instance this posting with links to forum posts on processes. Is it really a good idea to use the overkill approach and allocate lots of processes up front 'just in case'.

Contributions by Linda Corniola, Infogram Contributor

PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 is GA

PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 is now generally available. Customers can start downloading it from the Electronic Product Delivery (EPD) site now. Physical shipment delivery will be available on October 1.

The upgrade scripts are usually available 6 - 8 weeks after GA. A great site to monitor is PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Documentation Home Page on My Oracle Support Just log into My Oracle Support and search in knowledge for document ID 845867.1

The Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) Annual Conference is one of the most important events for treasury and finance. The 2009 AFP Annual Conference is taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from October 4-7, 2009.

The AFP Annual Conference offers a comprehensive program, captivating speakers, and many networking opportunities. Stop by and visit Oracle and Elire at booth 1630 to learn more about Oracle's treasury solutions, Elire's consulting services, or to listen in on following theatre presentations:

• Crystal Ball - Forecasting and Monte Carlo Simulation


• Business Intelligence - Dashboard Analytics


• User Productivity Kit - Procedure Documentation and Training


• Financial Gateway - Centralized Payment Processing

Also, please join us for wine tasting on Monday, October 5, from 3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

For more information, visit the AFP Annual Conference website where you can find information of how to register, a list of featured speakers, and a full schedule of the event.

Good morning, Good Afternoon and Good Night my fellow OTN EA blog readers and writers. I am very excited to join this blog and I look forward to reading yours and sharing my own thoughts about the very exciting area of enterprise architecture.

A special thanks to Bob Rhubart for helping me get up and running on this blog.

 

a happy thursday to you all,

hamza

 

p.s. some of my recent works includes the OEAF Whitepaper and a podcast discussing that framework.

Some quick hits that are worth noting amid all the pre-OpenWorld hubub...

OAUG Board of Director Elections

The annual voting for the OAUG Board of Directors runs through October 7th. There are eight openings this year, and the ballot includes some very familiar names. So if you're an OAUG Key Contact for your organization, please vote. If your organization is an OAUG member but you're not a Key Contact, seek out your key contact and give that person some input on who you'd like to see elected. If your organization is not an OAUG member, ask yourself what's stopping you.

Collaborate 10

Collaborate, the joint conference of the OAUG, IOUG, and Quest user groups for Oracle customers, will be held next year in Las Vegas April 18 through 22nd. The call for papers is open now and runs through October 20th. Registration to attend the conference will open on October 2nd. This is the conference to attend if you're interested in learning about how other Oracle customers are using Oracle products.

PeopleSoft Updates

For those of you concerned about the viability of Applications Unlimited, especially the future of PeopleSoft and PeopleTools, take some notice of the recent PeopleSoft Human Capital Management and PeopleTools updates.

The PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 release includes some very nifty Web 2.0 features, including some of the things I've been spending a great deal of digital space writing about here.

PeopleTools was also recently updated to version 8.5. The emphasis here seems to be on better reporting and integration tools. Funny thing about PeopleTools - folks keep speculating that PeopleTools is sunsetting and Oracle just keeps stuffing that speculation. I wonder how this fits into the overall Fusion Middleware development vision? Anybody have any ideas?

Oracle Buys HyperRoll

Am I alone in my thinking that Oracle's purchase of HyperRoll is a big deal? Haven't heard much rumbling since the acquisition was announced. Do some research with your favorite search engine for a few minutes and let me know what you think.

Well, these are the tidbits running through my pea-sized brain at this particular moment. I'm hoping for some commentary, especially on the last two items. You know what to do...

The Map-Reduce model has become a popular way for programmers to describe and implement parallel programs. These custom map-reduce programs are often used to process a large data set in parallel. This paper shows how to implement Map-Reduce Programs within the Oracle database using Parallel Pipelined Table Functions and parallel operations.

The Theory

Pipelined Table Functions were introduced in Oracle 9i as a way of embedding procedural logic within a data flow. At a logical level, a Table Function is a function that can appear in the FROM clause and thus functions as a table returning a stream of rows. Table Functions can also take a stream of rows as an input. Since Pipelined Table Functions are embedded in the data flow they allow data to be 'streamed' to a SQL statement avoiding intermediate materialization in most cases. Additionally, Pipelined Table Functions can be parallelized.

To parallelize a Table Function the programmer specifies a key to repartition the input data. Table Functions can be implemented natively in PL/SQL, Java, and C. You can find more information and examples about Table Functions and the functionality mentioned above at the following URL:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B10501_01/appdev.920/a96624/08_subs.htm#19677

Pipelined Table Functions have been used by customers for several releases and are a core part of Oracle’s extensibility infrastructure. Both external users and Oracle Development have used Table Functions as an efficient and easy way of extending the database kernel.

Examples of table functions being used within Oracle are the implementation of a number of features in Oracle Spatial and Oracle Warehouse Builder. Oracle Spatial usages include spatial joins and several spatial data mining operations. Oracle Warehouse Builder allows end users to leverage Table Functions to parallelize procedural logic in data flows such as the Match-Merge algorithm and other row-by-row processing algorithms.

Step-by-Step Example

All examples are available in plain text in this file: omr.sql.

To illustrate the usage of parallelism, and Pipelined Table Functions to write a Map-Reduce algorithm inside the Oracle database, we describe how to implement the canonical map-reduce example: a word count. For those unfamiliar with the example, the goal of word count is to return all distinct words within a set of documents as well as a count of how often this word occurs within this set of documents.

The procedural code in this word count example is implemented in PL/SQL but, as said before, Oracle allows you to pick your language of choice to implement said procedural logic.

Step 1 – Setting up the Environment

We will be looking at a set of documents, these documents can be either files outside of the database, or they can be stored as Secure Files/CLOB columns within the database. Within this table our documents are stored, effectively reflecting a file system.

In this case we are going to create an table within the database using the following definition:

CREATE TABLE documents (a CLOB)
  LOB(a) STORE AS SECUREFILE(TABLESPACE sysaux);

Each row in this table corresponds to a single document. We populate this table with a very simple corpus resulting in 3 documents with the text shown here:

INSERT INTO documents VALUES ('abc def');
INSERT INTO documents VALUES ('def ghi');
INSERT INTO documents VALUES ('ghi jkl');
commit;

The end result of both the map function and the reduce table function are going to live in a package, keeping the code nice and tidy. To show the steps to be taken we will take snippets from the overall package and show those in the section to follow. The actual package will contain a set of types, which are required for the code to work. All code was tested on Oracle Database 11g (11.1.0.6).

Download the full code here.

The following figures show the package being deployed.

Step 2 – Creating the Mapper and the Reducer

First we need to create a generic function to “map” (as in map-reduce) or tokenize a document. Note that the goal is not to show the best map function, but how this will work in principle in the database. This specific map function is very basic and better implementations may be found elsewhere. 

You can use the aggregation engine to get the results and only use the mapper. A query and a result would look like this:

The aggregation is done in SQL, no reducer required.

Of course, you could write your own aggregation Table Function to count the occurrences of words in a document. That is what you would do if you were writing the map-reduce program without leveraging the Oracle aggregation engine as we did before. This aggregation Table Function is the reducer of the map-reduce program unit.

The Table Function specifies that it’s input be partitioned by word and could (to use the Oracle execution engine’s sort) ask for the data to ordered or clustered by word. We show a sample count program in this post to complete the example.

Step 3 – In-Database Map-Reduce

After you have completed both the mapper and the reducer you are ready to do the full map-reduce in the database. Running a query using this Table Function will give us a parallel workload on external documents, doing what the typical map-reduce programs do.

Summary

Oracle Table Functions are a proven technology, used by many internal and external parties to extend Oracle Database 11g.

Oracle Table Functions are a robust scalable way to implement Map-Reduce within the Oracle database and leverage the scalability of the Oracle Parallel Execution framework. Using this in combination with SQL provides an efficient and simple mechanism for database developers to develop Map-Reduce functionality within the environment they understand and with the languages they know.

Download the code here: omr.sql. For the example, I ran this in OE (as you can see on the SQL screens). No special privileges required.

Contributed by Linda Corniola, Infogram Contributor


General Availability (GA) of PeopleTools 8.50

We are pleased to announce the general availability of PeopleTools 8.50. This release is important to Oracle and PeopleSoft customers since it demonstrates Oracle's commitment to the PeopleSoft product family and continuing to provide significant enhancements to these products. The new PeopleTools features and capabilities have created more customer excitement than we have seen in years. Since this release is available to customers running all of the recent PeopleSoft applications (eg. 8.8, 8.9 and 9.0) and is the foundation to the 9.1 applications, we are sure to see rapid and enthusiastic adoption of PeopleTools 8.50.

PeopleTools 8.50 is now available for download through Oracle Electronic Product Delivery and the Oracle Store. Check EPD for specific platform downloads, which are updated regularly.

Reference Material
To review additional documentation for the 8.50 release, please visit My Oracle Support at https://support.oracle.com/. Search for Doc ID: 847882.1. This document includes all documents related to the 8.50 release: release notes, install guide, cumulative overview, data sheets, links to the 8.50 PeopleBooks, technical certifications, etc.

Sometimes I really miss the old days. Of course, someone my age saying that really doesn't mean much compared to someone that lived through World War II. When I started in IT there was no www, texting, cell phones in your pocket, or USB coffee warmers. My current lament is remembering the Oracle installer when it was all command line, java was another word for coffee, and an uninstall on Unix meant "rm -rf".

Where is this going? As the title of this post suggests, I had to recently uninstall Oracle Clusterware. I am working on a project to bring a new application on board and we are using an active/passive failover model using Oracle Clusterware. This model is something I have worked on several times and did a presentation at Collaborate 08 on the topic. So, I was going along installing away, having installed OCFS2, created voting and OCR disks and then installing Clusterware. The initial install went great until I realized that I had installed into a non-standard location compared to our other clusters. After the initial "Oh Crap" moment, I just figured I would uninstall what I did and install into a new home. This is where the fun began.

Of course, I realized this was not going to be as easy as ./runInstaller and remove the Clusterware install. I did not figure that it would cost me an entire day! After running the installer and removing the Clusterware home, I received an error saying that the directory could not be removed from the other node. No problem, I'll go remove it. So, I thought I was clean. No more Clusterware directory, no more Clusterware home in the inventory because I ran the installer. Boy was I wrong.

To make this long story a little shorter, I'll get to the end of what turned out to be four install/uninstall cycles. And, by the way, looking at Metalink, the only document I could find was removing from Windows. I am on Linux and it is not supposed to be this difficult! Okay, enough whining...

1. Make sure the crs and css processes have been stopped. This should have been as easy as going to /etc/init.d and issuing the init.crsd stop and init.cssd stop, but this did not stop all processes. After all the deletions and cleanup, the only way I could really get rid of the processes was to kill them as root.
2. After issuing the stop commands, delete the init.crs, init.crsd, init.cssd, and init.evmd files from the /etc/init.d directory on both nodes.
3. Edit the /etc/inittab file and remove the lines at the bottom that start the init.evmd, init.cssd, and init.crsd
4. Remove the init.crs symbolic link from /etc/rc.d/rc0.d, rc1.d, rc2.d, rc3.d, rc4.d, rc5.d, and rc6.d. This link will start with K## where the ## is a number. Mine looks like K96init.crs and is a symbolic link back to /etc/init.d/init.crs
5. Remove the physical Oracle home directory that Clusterware was installed in.
6. Reboot! I know, it seems very Windowsish, but it was the only way to make sure all the pieces of crs and css were out of memory.

Having done all of that, I was finally able to reinstall into my new Oracle home. So, the moral of my story... make sure you are following your own standards before starting!

See you in 10 days at Oracle OpenWorld. Don't forget about User Group Forum Sunday.

You read the headline and you are sure that this is easy to answer?
I was thinking the same: Just a MD5-hash inside this /etc/shadow file.

But this is not true anymore:
You can use several hash algorithms inside /etc/shadow like

• MD5
• blowfish
• DES
  
• SHA-256
• SHA-512
  

Inside /etc/shadow you can see the following:
schroff:$1$<String1>$<String2>:0:99999:7:::
$1$ stays for MD5, $2a$ for blowfish, $5$ for SHA-256, $6$ for SHA-512. The <String1> contains a salt and <String2> the hashed password.
The other values can be easily interpreted (and changed) with the following command:
schroff@hades:$ chage -l schroff
Letzte Passwortänderung : Feb 01, 2009
Passwort läuft ab : nie
Passwort inaktiv : nie
Benutzerzugang läuft ab : nie
Minimale Anzahl der Tage zwischen Passwortänderungen : 0
Maximale Anzahl der Tage zwischen Passwortänderungen : 99999
Anzahl Tage, an denen vor Passwortablauf gewarnt wird : 7
And where can the hash algorithm be changed? This depends on the linux you are using:

• /etc/pam.d/common-password (Debian)
• /etc/default/password (SUSE/Novell)

Is there a way to generate this passwords via command line? Yes, with debian package makepasswd (but only for MD5):
echo "mypasswd" | makepasswd --crypt-md5
$1$r2elYKyB$vUr/Ph.brKTldM2h2k8J5.

But this will not work via copy and paste inside /etc/shadow ;-(
To change password via script some linux distribution can use:
echo oracle:mypasswd | chpasswd
or
echo -n mypasswd | passwd --stdin oracle

That's right, we're giving away a vintage, new in the never-been-opened package, Palm Zire 21 Handheld device (stylus included).

Leave a comment explaining what you're looking forward to from Oracle Open World and win a piece of technology history.

Suitable for framing.

Our Applications Platforms Group continues to round out our E-Business Suite certification matrix for Oracle Database Vault 11gR1.  Oracle DB Vault 11gR1 11.1.0.7 is now certified with E-Business Suite for the following Windows platforms:

• Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit)
• Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit)

Kris Rice pointed to Eddie Awad’s tweet claiming a bug of group by clause disappearing. Apparently, (due to inherent limitation of twitter medium?) there is no test case, just an assertion. I’m able to reproduce it (sort of). In the query

select deptno, count(*) from dept group by deptno

just remove the deptno column. It is, again, an automatic group by feature: the group by list mirrors that of the select clause. Alternatively, it is possible to preserve the group by clause in case of vanilla aggregation with no grouping. It is technically an aggregation over the empty set:

select count(*) from dept
group by 'bogus col'

However changing group by list by some pseudo column is hardly more intuitive than removing it altogether. For users who don’t like automatic group by there is always an option to disable it from code insight preference page.

On September 3, 2009, Oracle completed the acquisition of GoldenGate Software, a leading provider of real-time data integration solutions, making GoldenGate a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle.

We're especially excited to welcome Oracle GoldenGate. We invite you to learn more about GoldenGate and Oracle through dedicated sessions at Oracle OpenWorld.

See the latest product offerings at Oracle OpenWorld: Visit the GoldenGate booth at 3709 Moscone West.

Find Oracle OpenWorld events and content especially relevant to customers of Oracle's GoldenGate products: Download the document "Focus on Data Integration and GoldenGate."

To find out more about Oracle GoldenGate visit Oracle's website

Part three of the Arch2Arch podcast program “Cloud Computing and the Politics of Enterprise Architecture” is now available. In this segment, panelists Basheer Khan of Innowave Technology (ACE Profile / Oracle Mix / Blog / Twitter), Jordan Braunstein of Rolta TUSC (ACE Profile / Oracle Mix / Blog / Twitter), and Ralf Dossmann of Oracle's Enterprise Solutions Group (Oracle Mix / LinkedIn) wrap up their conversation about how Cloud computing might reshape the battleground between Business and IT.

• Part 1: Compared to the Business/IT gap, the whole Red State/Blue State thing is a picnic. Will Cloud change the picture? (Listen) 
• Part 2 :  Does cloud computing favor one side over the other in the tug of war between business and IT?  (Listen)
• Part 3: Moving enterprise IT assets into the Cloud means giving up some control of those assets. Can your organization handle it? (Listen)
  

Also on OTN’s Arch2Arch Podcast

Enterprise Architects Bob Covington and Hamza Jahangir introduce the Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework. (Listen)

Stay tuned.

 

Technorati Tags: oracle,otn,arch2arch,podcast,oracle ace,software architect,enterprise architecture,soa,business alignment

Firstly, I have to thank my co-workers Singer Wang and Gerry Narvaja for doing a lot of the work that resulted in this comparison.

After running both InnoDB Hot Backup and Xtrabackup, we have found that there is a measurable but not large difference between the resources that Xtrabackup and InnoDB Hot Backup consume.

Xtrabackup:

• Free


• takes 1.1% longer (2 min during a 3 hour backup)


• uses 1.4% more space (1G more in a 70G backup — this was for uncompressed backups)


• uses 1.115% more cpu overall


• split as 0.12% user, 0.66% nice, 0.025% system, 0.31% more iowait, 0% more steal


InnoDB Hot Backup:


• Commercial


• slightly fewer resources (see xtrabackup)

The server has 32G of RAM, 8 Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8220, with a speed of 2800 Mhz (2.734 Ghz) and a cache size of 1024 Kb, and is also used as a reporting server. We ran Xtrabackup on odd days, and InnoDB hot backup on even days. Both are stable and have responsive developers, and both projects have developers that know the internals of MySQL.

The clients of ours that use InnoDB Hot Backup (including the client this test was run on) already have purchased indefinite licenses for it. For those clients, there is not a big reason to switch to Xtrabackup.

For companies that are not using a hot backup solution yet, we recommend both InnoDB Hot Backup and Xtrabackup, and they end up choosing what best fits their environment. Some companies shun InnoDB Hot Backup because of its price tag. Some companies are wary of Xtrabackup because it has been less than a year since the release was announced, and feel better paying money to a company for their backup solution. I did not put the “feelings” in the lists above, because they are dependent on the environment — I have the same trust in the skill and commitment of the developers of Xtrabackup and the developers of InnoDB Hot Backup. Other such feelings might be “supporting open source” or “using the backup software that is developed by a partner organization.”

We felt it was easier to set up InnoDB Hot Backup than Xtrabackup, but that may be because we have been using InnoDB Hot Backup for years. However, neither setup is too complex — it is not necessary to have a senior-level DBA set up the backups, no matter which software you choose.

PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

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Oracle isn't going to give up on its acquisition of MySQL because MySQL is a strategic wedge for it against Microsoft.
PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

So you want to populate a new column in MySQL with fake dates? Here's how to add a new datetime column in SQL. alter table city_new add column mytime datetime;. Here's how to populate it with fake timestamps data ...