The envelope, please...

The awards for the Top 5 most popular OTN articles written by members of the OTN architect community for the month of February 2014 go to...

1. Cookbook: Installing and Configuring Oracle BI Applications 11.1.1.7.1
   by Mark Rittmanand Kevin McGinley
   A step-by-step guide to installing, configuring, and loading an initial set of tables within Oracle BI Applications 11.1.1.7.1, using data sourced from Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.
2. Enterprise Service Bus
   by Jüergen Kress, Hajo Normann, Danilo Schmiedel, Guido Schmutz, Clemens Utschig-Utschig, Torsten Winterberg, and Bernd Trops
   Answers to some of the most important questions surrounding the use of an enterprise service bus, using concrete examples to clarify correct areas of application. Part of the Industrial SOA article series.
3. Making the Move from Oracle Warehouse Builder to Oracle Data Integrator 12c
   by Stewart Bryson
   Stewart Bryson's detailed guide to a phased migration to Oracle Data Integrator 12c that makes use of the integration and migration capabilities in ODI 12c. [Special Note: Congratulations to Stewart on his recent confirmation as an Oracle ACE Director!]
4. Back Up a Thousand Databases using Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c 
   by Porus Homi Havewala
   Learn how to use Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c as a faster and more efficient alternative to Unix shell scripting and cron jobs for backing up multiple databases.
5. Starting and Stopping a Java EE Environment when using Oracle WebLogic
   by René van Wijk
   Oracle ACE Director and Fusion Middleware specialist René van Wijk explores ways to simplify the life-cycle management of a Java EE environment through the use of scripts developed with WebLogic Scripting Tool and Linux Bash.

NOTE: The articles listed here were among the 38 tech articles written by members of the OTN architect community and published to date in the current fiscal year, which began on June 1, 2013. Winners are determined by the number of page visits.

For a complete list of recent articles written by members of the OTN architect community, click here.

Thought for the Day

"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us."

—Alexander Graham Bell, scientist, inventor, engineer
(March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922)

Source: brainyquote.com

Our blog entry CRM: Payments - ISO Direct Debit Consolidated Patch back in November told you about EPA ISO Direct Debit Patch 17016197:R12.IBY.B.  This patch has been superseded and replaced with SEPA ISO Direct Debit Patch 18053306:R12.IBY.B.  Any customers that have previously applied Patch 17016197:R12.IBY.B should ensure they apply the replacement Patch 18053306:R12.IBY.B.

For details about the patch, including the new and changed features see Doc ID 1600137.1: R12: SEPA White Paper - ISO20022 Direct Debit support in Oracle EBS.

A useful resource an all things SEPA is the SEPA Information Center:  Doc ID 1594441.2: R11i/12: AP/AR/IBY: Setting Up, Using, and Troubleshooting SEPA Payments in Oracle.

By Mike Vilimek

The HCM World event held February 4^th– 6^th featured several Oracle HCM Cloud customers sharing their stories and perspectives. One of them wasMiPro Enterprises who led a session on the company’s decision to move from Workday to Oracle HCM Cloud. Following their session, TechTarget’sSearchFinancialApplications conducted a short video interview with the folks from MiPro. In the video, Jeff Micallef, MiPro co-founder and managing partner, and Anne Meyer, HCM practice director, describe the challenges they had with Workday and what led them to seek out alternatives and eventually choose to go with Oracle HCM Cloud.

The video can be seen on SearchFinancialApplication’s blog post titled, ‘MiPro Enterprises explains move from Workday to Oracle Fusion HCM,’ or you can use the link below.

In the days following SearchFinancialApplications’ initial blog post, a “spirited” discussion developed on the HR Technology Conference discussion group on LinkedIn. The resulting discussion prompted Bernadette Sprawka, Managing Partner and CFO at MiPro Enterprises to reiterate the reasons why MiPro chose to leave Workday for Oracle HCM Cloud. In her comment, Bernadette said,

“…when MiPro Enterprises was experiencing our challenges with Workday's technology, four alternative solutions were evaluated. In the end, Oracle HCM Cloud best met our needs. It gave us more delivered functionality, more flexibility, and better security than our previous solution or any other options we considered.”

Her full comments can be read here.

The HCM software market has been heating up the last few years and is hotter than ever, making for fierce competition. Nothing pleases us more than when a customer like MiPro knows their requirements, does their due diligence, and decides that Oracle HCM Cloud is the best choice to partner with to deliver on their HCM needs.

Show the world your embedded Java + Internet of Things (IoT) application for a chance to win a trip to JavaOne 2014! 12 winners will receive a trip to JavaOne 2014, the #1 place to meet world-renowned Java experts. In addition, six students will receive laptops and certification vouchers. Team up and submit the video and code of your project  by May 30, 2014.

At previous developer challenges, we've had developers:

• Connect a doorbell to a camera, taking a picture and sending it to a cell phone when someone rings the doorbell.
• Help blind people figure out which recycling container to use ("put it in the blue can" doesn't help!)
•  Control a toy monster truck from a phone (Monster Truck As A Service!) 
•  Connect a heart monitor to Google glass so your doctor or trainer can see your heart rate.

This short video shows them in action: 

Entries will be judged based on their implementation, innovation and usefulness:

• Quality: a well-implemented project that uses Oracle Java Embedded with computer boards, devices or IoT Technologies
• Innovation: a new and innovative way of using Java Embedded.
• Usefulness: a project that meets a business need.

Planning to attend Oracle European Value Chain Summit 2014, March 18 and 19 in Amsterdam? 

If so, be sure to check out these two must see sessions featuring AutoVue for Agile Visualization:

PLM for Industrial Manufacturing: Product News and Roadmap Agile e6 & AutoVue
In the presentation you will learn more about recent product releases of Agile e6 and AutoVue. New features and business benefits will be discussed. This presentation will also give you more insight to the upcoming releases and the overall roadmap.
Date: Wed. March 19, 2014
Time: 11:15 - 12:00

Streamline the Design and Manufacturing Process with Agile Visual Decision Making
 This session will focus on how companies can streamline and automate their PLM processes through the use of visual decision making. Design reviews, supplier collaboration, engineering change, new product introduction and quality processes can all be enhanced and simplified through the application of visual decision making. See firsthand process improvements that Agile customers have experienced globally, as well as, new techniques and capabilities to facilitate visual decision making.
Date: Wed. March 19, 2014
Time: 14:15 – 15:00

For more information on the Oracle European Value Chain summit: Click Here!

• Build an app to access the existing enterprise applications like PeopleSoft, Siebel, etc. We can’t afford a rewrite, but the execs want to mobile enable them to the field
• It has to be secure. Enterprise grade. Proven. No compromises here.
• SLAs (service level agreements). It needs to perform, and the apps performance needs to be measured, with reporting so we can see how the app is being used
• Caching.  We don’t want to keep hitting our infrastructure unnecessarily.  For the static data, there’s really no need to keep retrieving the same data over and over again when we can simply cache it, right?

What do you think? Can you do it?

Check out this post by Jeff Davies covering mobile apps and Oracle Service Bus, part of the new Oracle Mobile Suite – and get happy! 

To learn more about Oracle Mobile Platform, click here.

SOURCE: Oracle Hardware Blog

ATOS, a leading international IT services outsourcing provider, has implemented Oracle SuperCluster as a complete, high-availability, multi-tenancy infrastructure, increasing performance, increasing profits, and providing higher services levels to customers.
With Oracle SuperCluster support for multi-tenancy through virtualization, and Oracle Exadata Storage engineered and performance optimized, ATOS significantly increased batch processing with more than 10x more IOPS with Oracle Exadata Storage X3-2.

The optimized Oracle SuperCluster engineered system includes Oracle Exadata, Oracle Solaris 11, ran batch jobs 1.5x faster as compared to the former IBM AIX platform, which was consolidated to Oracle SuperCluster.

With Oracle SuperCluster ECC DRAM providing more memory per processor,  it is ideal for in-memory workloads and large vertically scaled multi-tenancy databases and applications including SAP.

Business benefits are significant, with profit margins are projected to increase through a significant reduction of software license costs by 1.5x due to the higher performance and capacity of Oracle SuperCluster. Rapid provisioning increased ATOS service levels, and requires fewer resources to manage incident services.  

As a single Oracle Engineered System, Oracle SuperCluster is intrinsically high-availability, tested and integrated by Oracle, and was rapidly deployed.

SOURCE: Oracle Hardware Blog

As promised in our "Save the Date: Technical Update M10" announcement recently, here the link to the webinar coordinates.

Find the coordinates here on Oracle Hardware Technical Resource Center. You need to be a registered member on Oracle HW TRC to get access to the page. To get registered you need to be an official Oracle partner.

(If you are not registered on Oracle HW TRC, clickhere ... and follow the instructions..)

UX Direct program continues to provide you tools to help you incorporate user experience best practices when you deploy Oracle applications. If you are a PeopleSoft customer, you will be happy to know we have just released PeopleSoft 8.53/9.2 prototyping toolkit for you to use immediately. This toolkit provides user interface components in MS PowerPoint format that you can use by simply dragging and dropping them into your slides to create user interface designs for your application.

Whether you are tailoring your PeopleSoft applications to fit your business needs or creating new pages, this tool will allow you to conceptualize your designs, iron out the user requirements and get user feedback before you begin coding.

Get early user feedback and refine your designs on the cheap by using this prototyping toolkit. You can use the toolkit along with the PeopleSoft UX Guidelines to produce designs that will delight your users and increase user adoption.

Check out this resource on UX Direct today and send us your feedback.

OK. So you understand what virtualization is, and you sometimes wonder why they don't let humans do that. Walk around with several Virtual Minds (VM's) in a single brain (hardware), and switch from one to the other via Google Glass or some other Heads-Up Display (HUD):

/dev/hud% vmboxmanage startvm most-interesting-man-in-the-world

But you never got around to playing with VirtualBox because you thought it was just for those pesky developers who walked around with laptops and penguin T-shirts. So, when Albert, your smarter than average 10-year old nephew, walks up to you and says, "Uncle Bart, can you show me how to use VirtualBox?" what are you gonna do, tell him to go play in traffic?

Book: Getting Started with Oracle VM VirtualBox

by Pradyumma Dash

Packt Publishing and Pradyumma Dash feel your pain. They gathered the essential info you need to get going, and left out the rest. The book shows you how to install, configure, and manage VirtualBox on your system. And then how to have some fun with it.

Don't confuse Pradyumma's book with a lightweight overview that just regurgitates what you already know. As in, "a carburetor controls the air fuel mixture on an engine." Even my grandmother knows that. Pradyumma focuses on getting you rolling. As in, "The first step to tuning your carburetor is removing it from the engine. Begin by shutting off the petcock and running the engine until it stalls."

(More on Harley carb tuning here.)

Pradyumma shows you how to create and manage the virtual machines (VMs), including how to use snapshots, clones, and groups. There's plenty more, including guest additions, using shared folders, memory management techniques and, best of all, virtual networking. I work at Oracle, so I get to listen to explanations of virtual networking all the time. I would have kept a lot more of my hair if I'd read Pradyumma's explanation, first. Here's how he explains the different virtual networking modes available on VirtualBox:

Not attached: This mode implies that the guest VM has an Ethernet card but no network connection. It's like an Ethernet cable that is not connected to the network card.Network Address Translation (NAT): This is the default networking mode, and it requires no configuration on either the host or the guest VM. This is great if you just want to browse the web within the guest.Host-only: In this mode, the guest VM's can interact with each other as well as with the host, but they cannot talk to the outside world. In this mode, a virtual interface is created on the host, which provides connectivity across the guest VM and the host.Bridged networking: This networking mode helps you to set up routing between the guest and the rest of the network. It does so by using a virtual network interface, which filters data from the physical network adapter, so that the guest and the host can talk to each other, and also with other VMs on the network and in the outside world.Internal networking: This mode is similar to a bridged network mode when it comes to communication with the other VMs on the same host, but it is more secure and does not let you communicate with an external network.

I posted links to Oracle VirtualBox resources below, including the documentation. You'll get more out of them, not to mention have a lower likelihood of embarrassing yourself in front of your nephew, if you read Pradyumma's book, first.

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About the Author

Oracle VirtualBox Resources

• Download Oracle VM VirtualBox
• Technical Articles About Oracle Virtualization Technologies
• Documentation (pdf)
• VirtualBox page on OTN
• How to Look Smart At Cocktail Parties

About the Photograph

Photograph of 2012 Harley Davidson Softail Heritage taken by Rick Ramsey on the front range of Colorado.

- Rick

Follow me on:
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Public Sector Revenue Management  Self Service architecture includes multiple layers of technical products, such as Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Application Development Framework, Oracle SOA Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), Oracle Content Managment and Oracle Policy Automation. To learn which role each product is playing in overall solution, how they fit and work together listen to this recording.

Be sure to register for the following Advisor Webcast:

Embedding OBIEE Content in WebCenter Portal

March 19, 2014 at 3:00 pm, Europe Time (Berlin, GMT +01:00), 2:00 pm, GMT Time (London, GMT), 10:00 am ET, 9:00 am CT, 8:00 am MT, 7:00 am PT

• Understand what is required in order to integrate OBIEE with WebCenter Portal
• Have an idea of what issues may occur, how to debug them and what log files may be required
  

For more information and to register for this Advisor Webcast, please see Embedding OBIEE Content in WebCenter Portal (Doc ID 1613815.1).

Oracle R Distribution, Oracle's distribution of Open Source R, improves performance by dynamically linking to optimized, multi-threaded BLAS libraries. Unlike open source R, Oracle R Distribution uses all available cores and processors when dynamically linked against optimized BLAS, resulting in increased performance. Thus, the more cores available to Oracle R Distribution, the higher performance for many operations.

How is this possible?  Standard R's internal BLAS library was created when multi-core machines were not widely used, so it is single-threaded, i.e., operates on a single core. However, the BLAS API in R allows linking to different, multi-threaded BLAS libraries that allow linear algebra computations to use all cores and therefore run much faster. Oracle R Distribution simplifies the linking process by loading the high performance math library after it's added to PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH, depending on the Operating System.  Then you are set to use optimized math libraries - The Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL),  AMD Core Math Library (ACML), or Solaris Sun Performance Library on Solaris. 

Oracle R Distribution Performance
Benchmarks

The benchmarks in this section
demonstrate the performance of Oracle R Distribution 3.0.1 with and without
dynamically loaded MKL. The R-25 benchmark script
developed by the R community consists of fifteen tests. They are split into
three groups (matrix calculation, matrix functions and programmation) with
trimmed means for each group, and each test is run three times. For this
comparison, we report the mean for the three test runs. The benchmarks show that
using Oracle R Distribution with dynamically loaded MKL libraries on a 30-core
machine is significantly faster than the single core time.

Oracle R Distribution 3.0.1 Benchmark

This benchmark was executed on a
3-node cluster, with 24 cores at 3.07GHz per CPU and 47 GB RAM, using Linux
5.5.

In-Database Scalability and Parallelism with Oracle R
Enterprise

Oracle R Enterprise, the set of big data analytics R packages provided by Oracle, provides scalable, parallel in-database data manipulation and algorithms for analyzing very large data sets. Oracle R Enterprise functions implement parallel, out-of-core algorithms that overcome R's limitations of being memory-bound and single-threaded by executing requested R calculations on data in Oracle Database, using the database itself as the computational engine. Oracle R Enterprise allows users to further leverage Oracle's engineered systems, like Exadata, Big Data Appliance, and Exalytics, for enterprise-wide analytics, as well as reporting tools like Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition dashboards and BI Publisher documents. The combination of Oracle Database and R delivers an enterprise-ready, integrated environment for advanced analytics. The test system was an Oracle Linux 5.8 5-node cluster with an Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor, 30 available cores at 3.07GHz per CPU, and 50 GB RAM.

At the time of this post, Oracle R Distribution 3.0.1 is certified with Oracle R Enterprise 1.4.  See the Install Guide's Oracle R Enterprise support matrix  for a list of current Oracle R Distribution supported configurations and platforms, and this link for instructions on enabling high performance library support for Oracle R Distribution on a Windows or Linux client.

Oracle Support values your involvement and input, especially on the tools and features that help you use our software or hardware products more effectively.

You can now opt in to the Oracle Support Customer Advisory Program and become part of the feedback process for these Oracle Support tools. Tell us about yourself; let us know that you would like to provide feedback, and which areas of focus that most interest you.

We may ask you to provide input through various forms of engagement: one-on-one session, small group discussion, etc. By contributing your thoughts and ideas, you have the opportunity to help influence new and existing Oracle Support products—and get a first look at new designs and features before general availability. You may also have the chance to join us in testing.

We look forward to collaborating with you.

Team OTN Java Community, Yolande Poirier and Tori Wieldt, are proud to be bringing to you the IoT Developer Challenge.  Read on to learn more (from the Java Source blog). 

Show the world your embedded Java + Internet of Things (IoT) application for a chance to win a trip to JavaOne 2014! 12 winners will receive a trip to JavaOne 2014, the #1 place to meet world-renowned Java experts. In addition, six students will receive laptops and certification vouchers. Team up and submitthe video and code of your project  by May 30, 2014.  Official rules can be found here.

At previous developer challenges, we've had developers:

• Connect a doorbell to a camera, taking a picture and sending it to a cell phone when someone rings the doorbell.
• Help blind people figure out which recycling container to use ("put it in the blue can" doesn't help!)
•  Control a toy monster truck from a phone (Monster Truck As A Service!) 
•  Connect a heart monitor to Google glass so your doctor or trainer can see your heart rate.

This short video shows them in action: 

Entries will be judged based on their implementation, innovation and usefulness:

• Quality: a well-implemented project that uses Oracle Java Embedded with computer boards, devices or IoT Technologies
• Innovation: a new and innovative way of using Java Embedded.
• Usefulness: a project that meets a business need.

Written by: Iain Graham, Director, Process Manufacturing Strategy, Oracle Primavera

In all the years I’ve worked with the energy and utilities sector, it seems that two things remain constant: the need to replace or repair ageing infrastructure and the apparent low level of funds available to many organizations to do so. In many instances, the infrastructure that these organizations rely on is ageing faster than it is being replaced. I suspect those tasked with keeping these assets up and running might recognize the phrases “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and “out of sight, out of mind” when seeking more investment for preventative work. Yet failure to adequately address ageing infrastructure can cause a big headache for many companies, diverting resources and funds to remedial action and possibly impeding growth.

Customers don’t always fully understand the issues energy and utility companies face and expect a reliable yet lowest-cost service. The result is that, pushed to keep costs down, companies continue to sweat their infrastructure assets beyond their original intended life so as to maximize operational value, while even further demands are placed on those assets through growth.This approach brings increased risk of an infrastructure failure and no one wants to be to blame when the lights go out.

A new report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), based on a global survey of executives in the oil & gas, utility, chemical and natural resource industries, examines the impact of ageing infrastructure. A key finding in the report is that one of the biggest perceived obstacles for organizations is meeting infrastructure maintenance schedule and budget goals, resulting in poor project planning, regulatory interference and a lack of resources. In addressing those obstacles, there are things some companies may do to ease the problem of aging infrastructure, without necessarily requiring large-scale additional funding.The report found that many organizations believed they could overcome obstacles, meet budget and expansion goals through better planning processes. Deploying enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) could help to optimize use of key resources, improve planning and project execution, and prioritize the right projects, amongst other benefits.

You can read the full report here.

Today I want to talk about how to version control your Data Modeler designs with Subversion.

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler is free.

Subversion is free.

So for no money, you can design your database objects, and version control them for one or more people.

I’ve put together some slides for your enjoyment:

Psst, slide #16 has the ‘good’ stuff

But Wait Jeff, Why Don’t You Have a Database Repository?

Because then you would have have to have a database, AND install server side objects, just to design your database? We don’t do that. We treat your design just like you treat your application source code – something you can manage in your Subversion system.

Still want a database repository? Read this…