The last few weeks I was busy re-writing of my puppet WLS module so it fully supports the power of Puppet 3 (thanks for more than 4000 downloads on puppet forge and all the github downloads).
With Puppet 3 we now can use Hiera, Iterations and Lambdas expression. This does not sound like a big change but with Hiera and the new Puppet Language features, I can define big WebLogic Domains without losing maintainability ( Got one customer with 5 Clusters, 25 Managed + JMS servers, more than 100 queues & topics).
With Puppet version 2 and my WLS module you need to have a lot of files (site specific classes) with at least more than 2000 a 5000 lines, here is an example of this. In this ORAWLS module I use the default/minimal approach ( declare once in Hiera) so you won't need to declare the same parameters over and over again. Off course you can still define everything like you did in the WLS module.
When you want to know more about Hiera you can take a look at this documentation page. For the new Puppet 3 language features look at this slideshare presentation.
In this post I will show you the new features and how it works with Hiera. Here you can download or take a look at the new orawls github code, or download it from puppetlabs forge. I Also made a vagrant reference implementation ( which you can use to test it yourself ), this reference will create a 3 node WebLogic 10.3.6.0.6 Domain with 2 Clusters together with some JMS modules and Queues.
The first big change is that the puppet install classes does not contain any site specific code, I have now only 2 classes which I can use everywhere

• One for the WebLogic Admin server which contain all the possible WebLogic options
• One for WebLogic nodes which only installs the software, copy domain and configure the nodemanager )

Let's begin with installing the WebLogic software. For this I only need to add this to a class. Read the complete article here.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

BlogTwitterLinkedInMixForumWiki

"Revolutions just spread blood. Evolution - this is something that changes in the long term." (Marjane Satrapi) 

Java SE 8 is scheduled for release next month, i.e. March 2014. From a Java EE point of view, the Java EE 7 specification requires at least Java SE 7. So clearly, nothing prevents you from using Java SE 8 with Java EE 7. A lot of us are in fact using early builds of Java SE 8 with GlassFish on a daily basis without any problem!

Project Avatar, which currently runs on top of GlassFish 4 (and Java SE 8), leverages one of the new Java 8 feature : Project Nashorn, a new lightweight high-performance JavaScript engine. 

The introduction of Lambdas Expressions is another key feature of Java 8. Lambdas basically add Closures support to the Java language, they allows to pass functionality as an argument to another method. Lambdas are seen as one of the most fundamental evolution in the Java platform since Generics (if not more important than Generics!). Lambdas leads to a different way of thinking, a different (and cleaner) way of writing code.

Java EE developers shouldn't wait and need to learn how to use Lambdas Expressions today as they are not incompatible with Java EE 7. Here is, for example, a post from Gerard Davison of the JDeveloper Team that shows Lambdas used with the WebSocket API.

If you are using Lambdas or any other Java SE 8 feature(s) today in Java EE, please let us know!

More in my original post on blog.dejavu.sk →

Seemingly randomly I started having errors trying to deploy an ADF Mobile application to my Nexus 7 tablet.  I was getting

[10:28:07 AM] Shutting down Android Debug Bridge server...
[10:28:07 AM] Deployment cancelled.
[10:28:07 AM] ----  Deployment incomplete  ----.
[10:28:07 AM] Failed to detect a connected Android device.  Make sure the device is connected.  Otherwise, manually restart the ADB server.  The following results were provided by ADB:
List of devices    attached
 (oracle.adfmf.framework.dt.deploy.android.deployers.CheckAttachedDevicesDeployer)

But in addition, I also noted that some software I was using to view the Nexus on my PC was also not finding the tablet.  I also couldn't see the tablet on the Windows Explorer window - so, something somewhere outside of JDeveloper seemed to be the problem.

What I did to fix this was the following

1. From the Windows Start I ran devmgmt.msc and from here I found "Android Composite ADB Device" - I double clicked on this to chose to uninstall AND delete the driver.
2. I then re-connected the Nexus and it started to install the driver.  I got an error here but I pressed on regardless since now at least Windows Explorer could see the device although JDeveloper couldn't
3. I made sure USB Debugging was ON on the tablet AND I also switch off Media Device (MTP) which is a USB connection option.

The combination of the above and the luck of the gods seemed to have got things working.

Every day I track activity on hundreds of blogs looking for interesting content created by those with expertise in Oracle technologies. I then share what I find through the OTN ArchBeat social channels. The list below represents the Top 10 most popular tweets from @OTNArchBeat for the last seven days (January 28 - February 3, 2014).

1. RT @oracleace: See #ACEDs and Java Champions in action at the OTN Yathra Tour kicking off 18th Feb in Jalandhar…
   Jan 30, 2014 at 07:16 AM
2. Podcast: Taking Charge - Meeting #SOA Governance Challenges - Part 1 w/ @luisw19 @manelrosa et al
   Jan 30, 2014 at 10:14 AM
3. Announcing: Oracle BigDataLite Virtual Machine
   Jan 29, 2014 at 09:42 AM
4. Making the Move from #OWB to #ODI12c | @stewartbryson #oracleace
   Feb 03, 2014 at 08:26 AM
5. Integrating With Fusion Application Using Services (Perl: SOAP::Lite) | @fadevrel
   Feb 03, 2014 at 10:23 AM
6. #WLST script for listing #WebLogic Server memory usage | @TheHeatDK
   Jan 29, 2014 at 08:11 AM
7. RT @simon_haslam: Happy to be presenting "What's so Special about the Oracle Database Appliance" at #oug_ire #ukoug
   Jan 30, 2014 at 11:41 AM
8. RT @simon_haslam: Speaking on my favourite topic - WebLogic on ODA - at OFM Partner Forum in Malta in 3 weeks
   Jan 28, 2014 at 09:32 AM
9. RT @brunoborges: #JavaEE developers writing WebServices, working with #WebLogic, try new Test Client: #NoMoreSoapUI
   Jan 28, 2014 at 09:34 AM
10. Custom Escalation in Oracle #BPM Suite 11g | @va_continuum
    Jan 29, 2014 at 09:41 AM

Thought for the Day

"I can't really make fun of zombies. They're not liars. They're not cheats."

—George A. Romero, film director
(born February 4, 1940)

Source: brainyquote.com

As organizations have moved through their social strategies in fits and starts, it’s likely many have wished there were some sort of handbook for just how to become a social business in the truest, most effective sense of the term. Well, there’s good news about that.

The Altimeter Group, on behalf of Oracle, has put together the clearest, most detailed path yet seen toward achieving just that, “Delivering on the Promise of the Social Business.” And at a cost of free, it’s quite a worthwhile download.

It should come as welcome relief to managers who had control wrested out their hands by the social and customer experience revolutions, and who desire to get some of that control and order back, with sensible social strategies employed both in their external communications and their internal workflows.

The eBook’s authors point out enterprise orgs have an average of 178 social accounts, with some 13 departments actively engaging on social. Yes the concept of the social business is emerging, but with major challenges around all these disparate, non-strategic, ad-hoc, non-integrated social approaches…all being executed in the silos of yesterday’s organizational structures.

If you don’t have the right systems, training, tools, or people to execute social at scale, don’t be overly hard on yourself. You’re hardly alone. New ways of thinking, collaborating, and operating are needed across people, processes, and technology. And this eBook reveals the value of those transformations.

The value of becoming a social business exists across the entire enterprise:

• Marketing and Communications – example: right-time & real-time marketing
• Sales – example: using social signals to prioritize and score leads.
• Customer Care – example: faster response times at potentially lower costs.
• HR and Talent Management: example: social recruiting.
• Product Development – example: opening up internal innovation.
• Internal Collaboration – example: collective expertise to propagate best practices.

You’ll learn the 6 stages of social business maturity, measured by how aligned social is with business goals and how aligned the org is to allow for proper execution. And as a social leader inside your organization, you’ll learn what your priorities should be, from making sure strategy lines up with business goals to showcasing results to the right people.

Will you ever be 100% of the way “there” as a social business? Of course not. Our new reality is that new ways to communicate, collaborate and execute present themselves continuously. This is a journey, not a destination. But if you’re going to go on a journey, a guide sure can come in handy.

Bonus: Join Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li and Oracle Social’sErika Brookes for a webcast on the eBook’s findings and recommendations Feb. 13 at noon EST.

@mikestiles
Photo: Benjamin Earwicker, stock.xchng

This feature supports the business scenario of including mandatory ATO items in PTO Models and Kits in the customer's orders, thereby enriching the Order Fulfillment process with additional functionality.

Currently, while ATO items are supported as optional/non-mandatory items in PTO models, they are not supported as included/mandatory items in PTO Models or Kits. In Release 12.2, ATO items are supported as included/mandatory items in PTO Models as well as Kits. Thus, for the ATO items that are identified as included/mandatory items in the Bill of Materials of the PTO Model or Kit, the application selects the ATO flag and populates the corresponding ATO attributes at the time of sales order line creation.

To enable this functionality, you must set the value of the profile options, OM: Allow Standard ATO Items as PTO/Kit Included Components and BOM: Allow ATO item in a KIT or as mandatory in a PTO Model to Yes at the site level. 

For more information regarding this new ATO in PTO Models and Kits functionality in Release 12.2, please refer to the Oracle Order Management Release Notes for Release 12.2.2, Doc ID 1377743.1.

This section describes how to get a secure connection to a remote MySQL server with SSH.
If you have any questions regarding the following post, please share them with us at: MySQL For Excel Forum

Creating a SSH tunnel to MySQL using PuTTY

This is the second part of the complete Guide to install and configure SSH in a MySQL server on Windows tutorial, we will cover how to create the tunnel from the client using putty. For the first part of this tutorial, please refer to How to: Guide to install and configure SSH in a MySQL server on Windows.

Tunneling is a technique that consist on creating a connection between your PC and a server and make it appear as if the remote MySQL database you’re accessing through the tunnel is locally running from your machine. We will use Putty which is a free tool that will help us to accomplish our goals in this tutorial. It can be downloaded from here.

1. Create a new session.

Open PuTTY and fill out the "Host Name" box with your server and the SSH port to connect to it. Don’t forget to give a name to the session and save it:

2. Port Forwarding

With the session that you just created selected, click the "Tunnels" option under the "SSH" tab to the left. Type the source port you want to reference locally and Destination values make sure to also check the boxes as the following image shows before clicking the “Add” button:

Source port - this is the local port the tunnel will connect to, this box should be filled in with an unused port on your system. For this example we used ‘3356’ but it could be other number as well.

Destination - this is the address and port of your actual remote MySQL server.

Here is how the screen will look like once you had clicked the Add button:

3. Open the connection

Once again, press the "Save" button to save the changes to the current session. Next press "Open" to start your session:

The last thing to do is login in the remote server with the credentials you created for the SSH server on the second part of the first tutorial:

If you succeeded the window may look like:

Now that the tunnel is created, you can create a connection to make queries and updates to your remote database, but pointing to your local port like if you had the db running locally:

Wrapping up what we have seen here today, we first installed Putty on our local machine, then configure the connection information, create the forwarding port, save all settings and open the connection.  In this posts we have learn how to create a SSH tunnel to reference a remote MySQL database as if it were running locally (on Windows). 

For more information related to SSH please visit the following sources in below:
Amazon -  http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/putty.html
Rackspace - http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/rackspace-cloud-essentials-3-going-from-windows-to-linux-using-putty
Azure - http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/articles/linux-use-ssh-key/

The February issue of the Database Insider newsletter is now available. (Full newsletter here)

NEWS

IOUG President Michelle Malcher: Sneak Peak of COLLABORATE 14 COLLABORATE 14, the Independent Oracle Users Group conference, will take place April 7 to 11 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Michelle Malcher, IOUG president and DBA team lead at DRW Holdings, offers a sneak preview of the conference's 1,250 panels and sessions covering the full spectrum of Oracle technology. Read More 2014 Meetings Kick Off with Oracle-Hosted BIWA Summit Find out what transpired at the recent BIWA Summit, where attendees enjoyed a portfolio of content spanning data management, data mining, analytics, business intelligence, visualization, and more. And find out where to be for this year's hottest upcoming special interest and user group meetings. Read More New E-Book: Technical Primer for Securing Oracle Database 12c Oracle security experts have written a new book for database administrators and security professionals who want to learn how to secure Oracle Databases. Written by Oracle's Paul Needham and Scott Rotondo, along with Independent Oracle Users Group President Michelle Malcher, Securing Oracle Database 12c: A Technical Primer, is available as a free download. Read More

byJim Lein | Sr. Principal Product Marketing Director | Oracle Midsize Programs |@JimLein

The fifth annual Oracle JD Edwards Partner Summit was held last week in Broomfield CO. I've been to them all but this was the best one yet. I learned a lot and made some great new connections. I caught up with my friend Lyle Ekdahl, SVP in charge of JD Edwards. My boss Steve Cox flew over from England for the event (I see him about once a year). And I finally got to meet our social selling evangelist Jill Rowley in person and pick her brain on social media strategy.

I started my IT career with JD Edwards in 1999 so I saw dozens of people I've known for a very long time. Lots of heartfelt handshakes, plenty of hugs, and here and there a bus on the cheek. I joined JD Edwards when it was a young public company that still acted like a private company. The very first day you learned the company's 7 guiding principles, including # 5, "Respect and Value Each Other", and #6, "Build Strong Customer Partnerships". They weren't hollow phrases. You lived those principles or you didn't last long.

We extended those principles to our relationships with partners. The strength of those relationships was clearly evident at the Summit. I met with many partners, some of whom I've worked with for a long time and some I met for the first time. Denovo. Corning Data. Brij. Terillium. CSS International. Capscient. Syntax. ERA Consulting.

Let me tell you...the Oracle JD Edwards partner community is busy, busy, busy.  Plenty of net new customers. Lots of upgrades. Lots of projects for add-ons products like HCM, Talent Management, Marketing Automation, and Project Portfolio Management.

 And, of course, Cloud was on everyone's mind. The partners shared stories of how many of their net new and upgrading customers are choosing to deploy their JD Edwards footprint in the Cloud and are increasingly taking advantage of managed services. It's all about reducing costs and simplifying IT.

Even though I live just an hour up the hill, I felt like was out of town on a business trip. One of those fun and interesting business trips. A reunion, of sorts. I'm proud to be a part of the Oracle JD Edwards community. And even though I don't commute down to the JD Edwards headquarters in the Denver Tech Center anymore, I'm not "ex-JDE". There's no such thing.

The views expressed on this blog are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle

"As the leading telecommunication company in the world, we want to provide our customers with the best possible quality of service. By deploying Oracle Engineered Systems we wanted to not only improve our network services but also increase our ability to predict potential failures and maximize workload efficiency," said Tetsuya Funabashi, Senior Vice President, NTT Communications Corporation. "We were pleasantly surprised at how quickly the deployment happened. Because the Oracle Engineered Systems are designed to work together they are high performance, scalable and very efficient. Our new system also provides our customers with security according to inform their condition quickly. We're trying to create more new value and features to our customers with Oracle products."

This is applicable to any service using privileged ports (< 1024), for instance to run a HTTP server on port 80 or a LDAP directory server on port 1024.

• Running the server as root is not a recommended option for security reasons.
• Using iptables to map privileged port (e.g. 389) to non-privileged port is a well-know method.
• Updating the Linux config to put 389 on the non-privileged port list is another option.
  

There is another option that I use frequently, based on setcap to run OUD on port 389 in my labs:

This solution requires install and modification of a java 7 JVM specifically for OUD use.

Such configuration has security implications, as anyone running that JVM has the right to bind on privileged ports (settings are JVM wide, not restricted to a specific jar file/application), so the jvm access should be restricted to the appropriate user only (the one allowed to start OUD)

Here is the procedure:

1. download patchelf sources from here and compile them on target Linux.
2. install setcap package on Linux if needed
3. install a java 7 SDK on target system e.g. /space/java/jdk1.7.0_45
4. restrict access to that jvm (java and jre) to the appropriate user only (the one used to start OUD).
   Put in place additional security if needed.
5. as root, run the following commands to allow java to bind as priviledged ports
   
   setcap cap_net_bind_service=+epi <JAVA_HOME>/bin/java
   setcap cap_net_bind_service=+epi <JAVA_HOME>/jre/bin/java
   
   
6. - change java dynamic library loading strategy as default strategy is not compatible with setcap
   
   patchelf --set-rpath <JAVA_HOME>/jre/lib/amd64/jli <JAVA_HOME>/jre/bin/java
   patchelf --set-rpath <JAVA_HOME>/lib/amd64/jli <JAVA_HOME>/bin/java
   
   
7. - Modify jvm used by oud
   
   edit java.properties and modify property e.g default.java-home
   run dsjavaproperties
   
   
8. - start OUD with standard start-ds command.

What do you get when you combine the advantages of Oracle Database Appliance with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne? You get an ERP solution-in-a-box running on a complete Oracle technology stack that is simple, low-cost, and performs well.

Customers benefit from a fully integrated system that delivers high availability database and application services, efficiently utilizes system resources, provides performance advantages associated with Oracle’s Engineered Systems, and takes advantage of capacity-on-demand licensing for multiple workloads by leveraging Oracle VM hard partitioning.

This best practice white paper outlines the process of setting up Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform.