Tech Blog

Recently we had a couple of projects where we needed to expose data extracted from an Oracle Database through a simple SQL query as a REST service producing JSON. Let’s have a look at how it is possible to control the JSON produced in such a scenario.

Recently, I described that starting with Release 22.2.1, the Oracle E-Business Suite Cloud Manager now supports OCI File Storage Service (FSS) besides block storage. Furthermore, the usage of FSS is mandatory for (new) multi-node environments. Given the advantages of FSS described in my previous blog one of my customers decided to migrate their apps-tier to File Storage Service.

When automating operations of Oracle E-Business Suite using OCI and especially Oracle Cloud Manager – which is now even easier and faster with the latest release 22.1, it is often necessary to modify DNS entries. Let’s see how we can achieve this.

E-Business Suite Cloud manager in the latest version is an even better way to manage your E-Business Suite environment in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Recently I described how a read-only user can be created for Oracle E-Business Suite. This works great, however, when trying to access the pre-built views of E-Business Suite, many of them do not show any data.

In Oracle E-Business Suite environments it is often necessary to query data. Typically, all data can be accessed through the APPS user. However, that user is highly privileged and, when in use, can easily “break things”. This is obviously a big compliance issue.

We recently upgraded a great amount of customer instances, both on the APEX and on the ORDS layer. The general procedure for Oracle APEX is more or less unchanged in comparison to previous versions. On the ORDS layer however, the upgrade to 22.1 contains many changes.

Recently Oracle released the Critical Patch Update for April 2022. We analyzed the security patches published and first of all: There is a lot of highly critical stuff in this quarter's release, especially for E-Business Suite (incl. Cloud Manager -maximum CVSS base score of 9.8), Fusion Middleware (a whole bunch of 9.8 ratings with more Log4J as well).

Together with Enginatics, we recently performed a bunch of performance benchmarks, especially of the CPU performance in the context of an Oracle E-Business Suite on various Oracle Database Releases. This blog will give an overview on the results we measured.

Oracle E-Business Suite Cloud Manager tooling allows for a convenient management of your Oracle E-Business Suite environments on OCI

Last week Oracle released the latest version of E-Business Suite “Cloud Manager” that can be used to conveniently create and manage E-Business Suite 12.1 or 12.2 environments running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

While upgrading one of our customers from 12.1.3 to 12.2.10 I realized (by chance) that Oracle made available the latest E4.Flex (AMD EPYC) shapes in the Frankfurt OCI data center last week.

Oracle released a new release of the E-Business Suite last week (on April 23, to be more exact). While so far there are no official announcements in the Oracle Blog, the My Oracle Support Note describing Cloud manager (2517025.1) gives an overview of the new features - so let’s have a closer (first) look at the new release.

At the beginning of March, Oracle released the OCI “edition” of an Application Performance Monitoring Service (APM). The service is even available free of charge for smaller applications (up to 1,000 Events per hour). In the context of an Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade project and testing associated with this upgrade, I decided to take a closer look at the service.

I recently set up a new “E-Business Suite on OCI” environment for a customer. During the initial setup, the customer was not able to set up a Site-2-Site Tunnel between their on premise Data Center and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Center in Frankfurt. To make my initial setup and testing more convenient, I decided to set up a separate VPN tunnel to my own development network. This was easily done with a Rasperry Pi, as described in a previous blog post. Since my Home Router AVM Fritz!Box (7490 in my case) is able to establish an IPSEC VPN tunnel as well. I wanted to try this device out tool, so let's see how this worked.

I recently set up a new “E-Business Suite on OCI” environment for a customer. During the initial setup, the customer was not able to set up a Site-2-Site Tunnel between their on-premise Data Center and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Center in Frankfurt. To make my initial setup and testing more convenient, I decided to set up a separate VPN tunnel to my own development network. I first tried libreswan on a Raspberry Pi. The following blog post shows the (surprisingly simple) basic setup.

A customer recently told me they would like to get away from having to print, envelope and post mark thousands of invoices manually every month. Even though we have changed their invoicing process to an electronic one for most of their customers years ago by sending out emails through Oracle SOA Suite, they still had a considerable amount of customers insisting on printed invoices delivered by post.

Last week, Oracle released the latest version of E-Business Suite’s Cloud Manager tool. There is a blog post (https://blogs.oracle.com/ebsandoraclecloud/get-ebs-cloud-manager-2021) outlining the new features. I took a quick look at the features and upgraded two Cloud Manager instances to the latest release.

While moving a customer from On-Premises to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we recently conducted some performance testing before the final cutover. For the E-Business Suite database server, a physical box with 16 CPU cores was migrated to a VMStandard E3.Flex VM with 12 OCPU. From a CPU performance perspective, the new VM was much faster than the old box. Unfortunately, this was not the case on the I/O performance side.

While moving a customer from On-Premises to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we recently conducted some performance testing before the final cutover.  For the E-Business Suite database server, a physical box with 16 CPU cores was migrated to a VMStandard E3.Flex VM with 12 OCPU. From a CPU performance perspective, the new VM was much faster than the old box. Unfortunately, this was not the case on the I/O performance side.

While moving a customer from On-Premises to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we recently conducted some performance testing before the final cutover. For the E-Business Suite database server, a physical box with 16 CPU cores was migrated to a VMStandard E3.Flex VM with 12 OCPU. From a CPU performance perspective, the new VM was much faster than the old box. Unfortunately, this was not the case on the I/O performance side. In the first part of this 3 episodes blog series we'll cover what to expect and how to measure performance.

Last week when reading through the latest Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Release Notes I ran into a new Feature named "Private DNS". Since DNS has always been a pain when we were setting up E-Business Suite (EBS) instances on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using Cloud Manager I gave it a closer look. And indeed, this is a great feature making life a lot easier in some situations.

This blog will have a look at typical customer situations and how we brought them onto a new SOA integration platform on OCI from a high level perspective.

When upgrading Oracle E-Business Suite from Release 12.1 (or earlier) to 12.2.X one of the first steps to perform is to make sure that all custom development does not violate Online Patching prerequisites. To achieve this, Oracle provides a range of tools to check both the database objects (Schema registrations and Schema-Objects, especially Packages, (Materialized) Views, Function, …) and for file objects (forms, Reports, BI Publisher data templates, Java, …). Let's have a look on a convenient way to check all your BI Publisher data templates.

Recently Oracle released version 20.1.1.1 of E-Business Suite Cloud Manager. What seems to be a very small step in the version number brings a lot of improvements based on Enhancement Requests I've created in the past years.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is used by many of our customers to run their Oracle E-Business Suite workload. Especially when not just running development and testing systems on OCI obviously this needs a solid concept for backing up (and restoring) the environment in the event of a disaster – be it user or system errors. Let’s take a closer look at the options available.

Configuring a new OCI tenancy to provision and manage Oracle E-Business Suite Instances is quite a complex process. Using Terraform, this can be automated - and with "Infrastructure as Code" there is a Documentation for all the configurations at the same time. This blog post shows more details on how we achieved this in a recent project.

Recently Oracle announced the availability of a new CPU shape E3. Flex in its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The announcement promises an increase in performance of around 50% compared to the current Intel CPU (e.g. in VMStandard2.x) at the same or lower cost. Reason enough for me to take a closer look at this in the area of operating the E-Business Suite on such instances.

When using the Oracle Configurator of Oracle E-Business Suite usually a dedicated “development” environment is used to create and update the configuration models. From this Configurator Development environment the configuration projects (called models) can be published to different E-Business Suite instances – usually first to a testing and then to the production environment.

Oracle very recently released version 20.1.1(.0.1) of the E-Business Suite Cloud Manager - see their blog over there: https://blogs.oracle.com. The main new feature of this release is support for the Oracle Database 19c. This is true both for creating a new instance (be it VISION or an empty one) but also when it comes to Lift&Shift processes or backups and clones within OCI. Here is my first experience with the new release

The business process management tool Horus Business Modeler as well as the new Tool Horus 3.0, which is currently in development by our friends and partners @Horus, are now both certified to run on an Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud instance. This comes in handy if you do not have a spare database instance or if you do not want to perform the management of an ordinary (Oracle) Database. It is even possible to run it with the free tier of the database, within the limits of the instance which include limited storage (20 Gigabyte) and only 1 compute node for the database. The following will describe what was necessary to enable both tools to run on Oracle Autonomous Database as a data storage option.

When doing my OCI Architect Associate certification it came to my mind that I never wrote anything on licensing on my blog – probably since this is a technical blog and I don’t want to deal with legal topics.Nevertheless I think it makes sense to write some basics on licensing E-Business Suite on OCI and cover two aspects a bit more in detail.

The Oracle E-Business Suite Cloud Manager provides only very basic management and no monitoring functions for E-Business Suite environments: essentially for creating, restoring, deleting and backing up the environment. The underlying hosts (including storage and network) can also be conveniently monitored with the OCI console. However, when it comes to the application (and especially database) itself, these tools do not really help. This is where Oracle Cloud Control comes into play - as it was on premise as well. This article describes how easy it is to setup a Cloud Control environment on OCI and to connect all E-Business Suite Apps- and DB-Tiers to it.

Have you ever tried to "inject" another archivelog into a backup residing on OCI? See here how we managed to solve this.

Recently my colleague Yves Chassein and myself setup a small Proof of Concept on how to implement a Progressive Web App (PWA) on top of the Autonomous Database (ATP) and APEX. #oracle #autonomous #database #apex

Have you ever wondered how to provide or call a REST service with the HTTP "PATCH" verb? Here we go...

Oracle recently made the release 19.3.1 available. For one of our customer using E-Business Suite on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) I just upgraded to this latest release. This post gives an overview on the experiences seen.