SOA

Clemens Utschig puts his focus on SOA for the java developer.

EBS

New this week at the Oracle E-Business Suite Technology blog:

OCFS2 for Linux Certified for E-Business Suite Release 12 Application Tiers

Performing Better: Improving Skills and Knowledge of EBS Tools and Technology

E-Business Suite Release 12.1.1 Consolidated Upgrade Patch 1 Now Available

Patching

Also in the realm of EBS this week is this excellent summary of patch types prepared by Renee Van Dusen of Oracle:

Patch Types & Reasons to Patch

Oracle consolidates and releases the following patch types. Patches include bug fixes as well as new functionality.

• Version Maintenance Pack – This would be a large consolidation of patches including all versions up to the latest for all products in the Oracle eBusiness Suite. For example, 11.5.10 would include all version changes prior to 11.5.10 such as 11.5.8, 11.5.9, etc. These patches are cumulative. Maintenance packs include all the relevant Family packs.
• Family Pack – This would be a consolidation of patches for a particular family of products such as Financials which includes General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Cash Management, etc. or CRM which includes Sales, Marketing, Service, etc. These patches are cumulative. Family packs include all the relevant Mini-Packs.
• Product Mini-Pack – This would be a consolidation of patches for a particular product such as General Ledger or Enterprise Budgeting and Planning. These patches are cumulative. For example, General Ledger Mini-Pack C includes mini-packs A, B, and C.
• Consolidated Rollups – These are rollup releases of patches as add-ons or fixes to Mini-packs, Family packs, Maintenance packs, or specific areas within a Mini-pack. Typically these don’t increase the version level of the Maintenance, Family, or Mini pack.
• Quarterly Security Patches – Oracle now releases on a quarterly basis a compilation of High Priority security patches for all tiers of the Oracle Applications: Database, Application Server, or Application. Some patches are cumulative, some aren’t.
• One-offs – One off patches are released to fix specific issues. They are generally smaller patches and usually at some point in time get rolled up into the other patch types described above.

Typically one would apply a patch type to fix a bug, keep current on the latest versions, implement new functionality, or implement a new product of the eBusiness Suite.

EBS Patching

And now the combination of the two articles above, EBS and Patching. There are alerts out this week for our HP users running Oracle EBS 11i and 12i. Please look up the following doc IDs in My Oracle Support:

ADRELINK utility for E-Business Suite Release 12.0 and 12.1.1 result in large executables which may lead to out-of-memory issues (Doc ID 1060979.1) (effects both PA-RISC and Itanium)

and

New E-Business Suite Release 12.0 and 12.1 Operating System Patch Requirements on the HP-UX Itanium platform (Doc ID 1066323.1) (effecting Itanium users).

Optimizer

There will be member of the Oracle optimizer team presenting at ODTUG Kaleidoscope in July in Washington, DC, (who chose that location, the heat and humidity committee?). You can read all about it on their blog: Inside the Oracle Optimizer - Removing the black magic

PeopleSoft and the Optimizer

Speaking of the optimizer, this time from the PeopleSoft side of the equation, there's a handy technique described over at the PeopleSoft DBA blog on: Hinting Dynamic Generated SQL in Application Engine.