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AUSOUG Perth…

Tim... — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:32:04 PST

The Perth event is now done and dusted.

The day before the conference, Chris Muir took Lucas Jellema and myself on a little tour of the city. I slept OK the night before so I felt pretty good. That night I didn’t sleep at all. Not one minute. By the morning I felt OK so I went to the conference as planned. About 30 minutes into the first talk it was game over. I went back to the hotel and slept for about 3 hours.

When I got back I spent the rest of the day in Lucas’ session about “SOA for Database Professionals”. Lucas is a great speaker, which is even more impressive when you consider it’s not his first language. I shall try and catch the bits I missed at the Melbourne event.

The next day I spent the morning at Connor McDonald’s SQL sessions. I guess everyone knows by now Connor is a great presenter. Not surprisingly, he won the Best Speaker prize for this event. Shock Horror!

I had the afternoon session on day 2. I’d presented several elements of this session before, but never as a single block all together. The session was about 1 hour 45 minutes. It went OK, but I wasn’t really happy with it. A few of the demos towards the end failed. I’ve been playing with them since and it seems to be an issue with browser authentication in Firefox and Safari, rather than a fundamental technology issue. It seems that often, once you authenticate through the browser (to XML DB or EPG), subsequent authentications to different users ignore the new credentials and continue to try and authenticate with the old details. Just about the only way to make it consistent is to reboot between demos, which isn’t going to happen. Authentication via WebDAV or FTP works as expected. I’ve got a couple of ideas I’m gonna work on tonight for workarounds.

Anyway, once the talk was over I got a bit of feedback from some of the guys and I think I’m gonna revise a couple of bits of the talk for Melbourne. Emphasize a couple of bits and deemphasize others etc. Hopefully that will give it a little more punch.

This morning was … interesting. I got up early and started to do a bit of work. After a few hours I checked my flight details, even though I was sure my flight was at 17:10. Turns out that was my arrival time at Melbourne. My departure time from Perth was actually 10:50. My first reaction was I had missed my flight. Fortunately I had been up since 04:00, so even though I had been working for ages I was still in time for my flight. As I’ve said before, travel is never easy for me.

I did some frantic packing, threw my rucksack over my back, at which point my laptop flew across the room and landed on the floor. Seems I forgot to zip the pocket. Fortunately MacBooks are pretty solid so there doesn’t seem to be any damage.

Time to get on another plane and change time zone again…

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Content Server 10gR3 Localization Component Update

michelle.huff — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:50:22 PST

Updated localization component added to OTN for Oracle Content Server 10gR3 adds additional language support. Available for download.

The file contains language strings for Content Server 10gR3 and most of the modules (except for Site Studio 10gR4 contributor).

Admin User Interface:
(American) English, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese.

End-user Interface:
(American) English, Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, German.

Visby Declaration is Open

trond-arne.undheim — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:24:17 PST

This week, I spent two days on the wonderful Gotland island in Sweden at the Visby Agenda, a conference on Europe's future IT policy. Well spent, it turns out, since the Visby Declaration, i.e., the Swedish Presidency's conference conclusions, strongly support openness:

"10. EU member states and community institutions should seek to make data freely accessible in open machine-readable formats, for the benefit of entrepreneurship, research and transparency."
"12. Open platforms for innovation and the development of services for public and commercial use should be fostered. This should include commercially neutral promotion of open solutions in public procurement to ensure that interoperability rests on a non-proprietary basis. In this context, standardised interfaces between process steps are one key element."

New Oracle UCM Webcasts

bex — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:35:46 PST

I just got word about two new Oracle UCM webcasts next week, and thought I'd share!

The first one is on Paperless Personnel Processes... try saying that 5 times fast! If you are interested in making you HR processes involve less paper, this webcast should have lots of good tips and tricks for those of you with Peoplesoft, and would like to integrate it with Oracle UCM. Its next Tuesday Nov. 17th, 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET.

The second one is on Enterprise Document Management. It will offer tips and tricks for paperless order management, asset management, and accounts payable. If you are an E-Business Suite customer, I would highly recommend this one. Its next Wednesday, Nov. 18th, 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

These are live webcasts, and I don't know if they will be recorded. So register, watch, and grill the presenters with tough questions ;-)

A Day of Honor

stephen.fox — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:00:56 PST

Oracle Salutes Military Men and Women

Here in the United States, we are observing Veterans Day. In Europe, today is Armistice Day or Remembrance Day. We commemorate the end of major hostilities of World War I by honoring all military veterans. At Oracle OpenWorld 2009, you may have met some servicemen and women participating in Oracle's Injured Veteran Job and Training Program who took the time to share their stories with the Oracle community during the show.

Oracle's Injured Veteran Job and Training Program is specifically designed to help women and men injured in the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars transition to civilian employment. In partnership with the Coalition to Salute America's Heroes, our goal is to provide injured veterans with employment experience that may lead to regular employment.

In our latest issue of Profit magazine, we meet Joshua Lawton-Belous, a vet with a traumatic brain injury who is participating in the program. He explains the difficulty some veterans have finding work when they return home, and points out the opportunities now available through the training program. Oracle's Diversity Director Jane Robertson says, "Our hope is that the folks who do participate will be significantly helped."

All of us working behind-the-scenes on Oracle OpenWorld wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of the veterans—and their families—for their service and sacrifice. If you know someone interested in joining the Injured Veteran Job and Training Program, have them download and complete the application. And, please take some time today to thank the men and women who serve.

The New HR Carnival is here!

Mark Bennett — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:02:52 PST

Ben Eubanks has done a terrific job of collecting and assembling a brand new set of HR blog posts covering a wide range of topics. To top it off, he also enlisted the help of Allen Robinson in the creation of an official HR Carnival logo!

Here’s a excellent opportunity for you to sample a variety of ideas, thinking, and opinions from a diverse set of excellent minds. It will save you time as well as help you discover a blog you might not have known about before.

Be sure to check out the carnival! In addition, take on Ben’s challenge and share what you’ve found with others!

Googlers announced "Go" Programming language

Khanderao — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:24:19 PST

googlers announced a new programming language "Go" w

Go is being advertised as Fast (to compile), Safe(pointers without pointer maths), Concurrent (lightweight process communication) and Cool (dynamic language but has the speed and safety of a static language) and open source... disclaimer: I am yet to validate these claims...

Here is a video clip introducing the Go

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwoWei-GAPo

Googlers:
Robert Griesemer
Kenneth Thompson
Rob Pike
Russ Cox
Ian Lance Taylor

Owner Flag

pushpa.chandrashekaraiah — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:06:19 PST

There is a column called OWNER_FLG in most of the tables in Framework. This column has values such as F1 or B1 or C1 or CM etc. This value defines which product owns the data, whether FW or BI or CCB.

For example, if OWNER_FLG value in F1_BUS_OBJ table is F1, BI users cannot change this value since the owner is Framework. In the application it makes sense, since BI do not need to change business objects created by Framework.

This owner_flg may not be used to its fullest extent in BI right now, since we have not been delivering zones to customers till date. It makes more sense in CCB, which delivers zones and other data. They use FW business objects or any other data in their zones that should not be changed, otherwise, their zones don't work. So, CCB users are not permitted to change this data. They get an error in the front end if they try to change it.

In sum, owner flag is all about security and customer rights to be able to update data.

OMB Plus Connections

pushpa.chandrashekaraiah — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:57:37 PST

Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) comes with its own scripting language, OMB Plus, which can be used to edit objects in the Oracle Utilities Business Intelligence (OUBI) Repository. In development, we use OMB Plus TCL scripts to create and modify the OWB objects for new releases.

To access the OUBI Repository from OMB Plus, using the default BIREPO and BIREPOWN repository users for OWB 10.2, the following OMB Plus connect statement can be used:

OMBCONNECT birepo/birepo@hostname:port:sid USE REPOS 'BIREPOWN'

To access the OUBI Repository from OMB Plus, using the default BIREPO and BIREPOWN repository users for OWB 11.1, the following OMB Plus connect statement can be used:

OMBCONNECT birepown/birepown@hostname:port:sid USE REPOS 'SPLBIREP'

In these two examples, the host name is the name of the host that the OWB database is running on, the Port is the number of the port that the Listener is using for the database, and the SID is the Instance name of the database.

For more information about OMB Plus, refer to the Oracle Warehouse Builder Documentation that can be found here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/warehouse.html

New Oracle IRM Desktop released and supports Windows 7

Simon Thorpe — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:17:12 PST

Released today is the latest version of the client software in the Oracle IRM technology suite, the IRM Desktop. As part of the move of the technology into Oracles Fusion Middleware platform the new release now supports the following 27 languages!

Arabic	German	Portuguese
Chinese - Simplified	Greek	Portuguese - Brazilian
Chinese - Traditional	Hebrew	Romanian
Czech	Hungarian	Russian
Danish	Italian	Slovak
Dutch	Japanese	Spanish
English	Korean	Swedish
Finnish	Norwegian	Thai
French	Polish	Turkish

To ensure compatibility with the latest platforms we have also added support for;

Windows 7 operating system
Adobe Reader 9.2
Lotus Notes 8.5

Other headline features in this new release are;

Right-click Unseal option

If you have the right to save a sealed document as an unsealed copy (that is, to unseal a document), you can now do so by right-clicking the file name or icon and selecting the Unseal command (for example, in Windows Explorer or on the Windows desktop). This feature is available only for individual files: it is not available for multiple files, that is, at folder level.

Choices about what happens to the unprotected originals of sealed files

In previous releases, the original version of a sealed file was always retained in its unsealed state. In this release, the former behavior remains the default, but you can also choose to move the original file to the Recycle Bin or to "not retain" it. These options are available on the Desktop Sealing tab of the Oracle IRM Desktop Options dialog. If you choose the "Do not retain" option, the original file will be removed after a sealed version has been created. This is a normal file system deletion, not a complete destruction of the file, so if you are concerned that this does not provide adequate security, you may want to consider further action.

You can download this version from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). More information can also be found in the release notes.

Oracle takes the My out of My Oracle Support

Shayna Garlick — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:53:28 PST

The topic of support has often been a sore subject for Oracle customers. In the past couple of years we’ve seen Oracle support services get mixed reviews and consultants recommend third-party support for unhappy users.

There have, however, been glimpses of hope. Last year, Oracle received high marks for support in a survey from the UK Oracle Users Group (UKOUG). The software giant also announced the release of My Oracle Support, a new next-generation user support portal to replace Metalink, at last year’s Oracle OpenWorld. And just last week, Oracle upgraded My Oracle Support and officially retired the Classic Metalink allowing even more users to switch over to the new portal.

But it looks like that’s where the good news ends.

Users are calling the new user support portal a fiasco, according to a ComputerWorld article by Chris Kanaracus this week. Complaints from customers about “severe problems” in My Oracle Support include a Flash interface that’s often not compatible, unhelpful tech support and the inability to simply log into the portal.

How has Oracle responded to the complaints?

The vendor has not yet provided a status update. In a blog post Monday, Oracle’s Chris Warticki emphasized that Metalink could no longer be used. “Please register. Change is here. Get in front of this one…seriously,” Warticki wrote about My Oracle Support.

As of Wednesday afternoon 39 users, most of whom could not log in, had commented on the post, writing complaints including:

“This is an unmitigated disaster. MOS is not working for our company. It is not working for DBAs at two other companies I have asked, either. When I get through to support by phone, they tell me that they can’t help me because they can’t use the new system either.”

“Why, with all of Oracle’s software acquisitions, holdings, and developers, was Oracle unable to create a new support site with Oracle software?… If Uncle Larry hears of this fiasco, it sure seems that heads will roll, but hey, at least the interface (that always freezes) is pretty to look at.”

“I am really curious why Oracle thinks anyone wants flash on what is supposed to be a support site? I just want my sr’s resolved in a timely manner, and usable information. Right now we have neither.”

Warticki responded to the comments a few times, apologizing for the frustration and saying that Oracle would fix the issues: “Our apologies for any inconvenience as Support works out any ‘glitches’. Hang on. Remain on hold. We’ll be right with you,” he wrote in his latest comment

But is this just an issue that needs a few days to sort out, or is the future of Oracle support doomed?

JDeveloper or NetBeans - What are the numbers telling us?

shay.shmeltzer — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:48:55 PST

There has been a lot of noise in the blogsphere lately about JDeveloper vs. NetBeans over the last week - especially after the last update to Oracle's Sun FAQ that added a paragraph about Netbeans.

As an Oracle Employee I can't comment about anything that relates to this deal, but I would like to comment about one of the points that some Netbean-bloggers have been raising - and this is their claim that the number of Netbeans users is way bigger than those using JDeveloper.

I'm still trying to figure out how they came to this conclusion.

Some of them claim they haven't encountered many people who use JDeveloper - I guess this all depends on where you are hanging out. I'm guessing the picture they see when hanging at Sun conferences, such as JavaOne, is a little skewed. after all at the Oracle conferences I attend - I seem to meet a lot more JDeveloper users :-).

Hunting down reliable third party statistics on the breakdown of the Java IDE market is no easy task, but here are some numbers that might cast a question mark on those claims:

One independent survey of the Java IDE market was the SD Times Survey which last ran in 2008. It showed NetBeans at 24.4%. and Oracle's JDeveloper at 20.4% usage.
I would hardly call this a huge difference in the size of the community.

Now lets look at some more up-to-date statistics
Indeed job search shows more demand for JDeveloper compared to NetBeans out there

Another way to check the health of a community is to look at the traffic on its forum
Looking at traffic on the Netbeans forums - it seems like they get around 10-15 new threads each day on their user forum and even less than that on the Java EE forum: http://forums.netbeans.org/javaee-users.html

JDeveloper gets around 80 new threads on our forum on an average day.

I won't draw any clear cut conclusions here - I'll let you do that for yourself now that you see some other numbers.

Cloud Services Broker announcement from Vordel

Vikas Jain — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:32:00 PST

Vordel announced "Cloud Service Broker" at their annual VordelWorld user conference last week, in an attempt to bring trust and reliability to Cloud Computing. One of the major concerns customers have in adopting cloud computing is security. Hope this will solve some of those concerns bridging the gap between internal SOA apps and Cloud services, leading to broader adoption of Cloud Computing.

See http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS130253+05-Nov-2009+BW20091105

My Oracle Support Fiasco

oraclenerd — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:58:55 PST

I haven't had access to metalink for about a year now. I certainly don't envy those who do though.

Last week, Oracle deployed My Oracle Support, a new flash based system.

In the post, Classic MetaLink:Na,na,na,Nah,na,na. Hey hey Goodbye, by Chris Warticki, Sr. Customer Support Manager [ Twitter ], says

Goodbye old friend. Thanks for the memories. As old blue eyes crooned..."And now, the end is near". We did it our way with My Oracle Support.

If you've been off the grid, or totally out of the loop and completely clueless (poor word choice, but this in the context of getting customers to the training), Classic MetaLink retired on November 6th. My Oracle Support training sessions can be found here. Please register. Change is here. Get in front of this one...seriously.

Some of you have been very vocal with your therapists, on OTN, Twitter, Linked-In Groups, OracleMix, UserGroups and other channels, including this very blog.

In case you didn't read in the FAQ - there will be an HTML version for anyone unable to use flash. Hint: If your browser allows flash, there isn't an HTML option. You'll have to figure out the rest.

Visit the Information Page for the Latest Details

Oracle announced that Classic MetaLink will retire and My Oracle Support will be upgraded and become the single support interface. Review the Transition Information Page for significant changes, benefits, training, communications and FAQs

According to all reports, this transition has been an unmitigated disaster.

oracle-l

Metalink Fiasco - so far there are about 30 replies. Let's not forget the off-shoot of this one, Metalink Fiasco -- Home many names can we come up with for MOS?

Issues with My Oracle Support - Only about 20 responses to this one.

There there's one advising patience, helping Oracle help us.

And the funny, Quotes from Oracle Support.

Comments that weren't posted (or I didn't see them): Oracle Support Blog

Blogs

Quite frankly warticki, you should apologize! by Nuno Souto

#Fail: My Oracle Support by rnm1978 [ blog | twitter ]

Tech Magazines

From COMPUTERWORLD Users call new Oracle support portal a 'fiasco'

Mr. Warticki did provide an update yesterday:

This weekend we migrated Oracle & BEA customers over to My Oracle Support from Metalink. Yesterday (Nov 9th), some customers experienced problems expressed in the comments that I wrote about in this blog. The issues were mostly around performance and registration, but to our knowledge, we have resolved these issues. If there are problems that we don't know about, please contact us!

I just want to highlight an important step in the migration -- one that we tried to communicate through repeated postings and email blasts. Customers need to validate their MetaLink email address against Oracle's corporate single sign-on prior to conversion (the migration uses Oracle's corporate single sign-on to improve security). For users who may have missed this notice, there is a link to an FAQ on the landing page that will guide you through the registration process.

My Oracle Support is really a terrific platform and this change is going to bring value to customers. But please, if you experience any issue migrating, don't hesitate to contact us -- we want to hear from you so call your local support phone number - hit this link http://www.oracle.com/support/contact.html

Today he apologized for his perceived misinterpretation:

To all Oracle Customers, I do apologize for any misinterpretation I may have caused in that blog entry.

As you have just read, I do accept responsibility and accountability for my actions.

Please understand that my intent was not to insult anyone. The purpose was to draw attention, call to action for the training and to add some humor to what most view as bland blogging.

I'm happy that everyone is getting their frustrations out, even if I need to wear kevlar. I have thick skin. I can take it. I know that you're upset at the portal not the person, the UI and not the individual, and the portal performance not the personal performance. I know that Oracle's leadership is reading, listening and responding.

I have always been FOR the customer. Many of you know that.

Sincerely, Respectfully and Apologetically,

I certainly don't envy him right now.

I do hope this gets resolved either by rolling back to the Classic Metalink or all the problems solved in the new system. I'm certainly glad that I am not dependent on MOS at this point.

Happy Veterans Day

nestor.reyes@oracle.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:24:21 PST

What a great way to start off my first blog entry than to say thanks to all the Veterans out there. I encourage everyone to thank a Veteran for their service and commitment to their country. Without them, we would not have the freedoms we have today. I wish a safe return home for all those men and women serving overseas right now.

Oracle IRM 10.1.3.5.2 Desktop supports Windows 7

andy.peet — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:42:59 PST

This desktop will add support for:

Windows 7 operating system

Adobe Reader 9.2

Lotus Notes 8.5

Other key features include:

Oracle IRM Desktop now comes in 27 different languages including Japanese, Chinese and Korean

Right click unseal option in Windows Explorer

Choose to delete uprotected versions of files after sealing

Windows Start menu option

There have also been some minor changes in the layout of the control panel

It is now available for download from Oracle Technology Network and eDelivery.

For more information and before distributing this desktop within your organization please see the release notes

Whilst in the IRM frame of mind, why not check out some of the recent posting on the IRM blog

Thomas Kurian on Oracle CRM On Demand

steve.diamond — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:34:00 PST

Oracle CRM On Demand customers get the best of both worlds: a commitment to developing new versions of their existing software AND a commitment to developing new generations of software their organizations can use to drive customer effectiveness in new and compelling ways.

Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President of Product Development, spoke with a global team of our Oracle CRM On Demand sales representatives about this very point recently.

Here is a brief audio excerpt.

Git presentation JFall 2009

akoelewijn — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:46:49 PST

Just uploaded my Jfall presentation on Git:

Version Control with Git

View more documents from andrejk.

Share and Enjoy:

Free 10-day trial of Safari Books Online

Sheeri Cabral — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:01:41 PST

That’s right — get your free 10-day trial! All the information I know is here:

http://bit.ly/37E9ld

But the basics are: No access to Rough Cuts or Downloads, for new subscribers only. It’s one of those “sign up and if you do not cancel after 10 days, we bill you” — and at $42.99 a month, that’s not a mistake you want to make. Must sign up by Nov. 24th.

To sign up now: https://ssl.safaribooksonline.com/tryitfree

I was asked to send this information along, so I am…Now’s your chance to skim High Performance MySQL, among other high quality books!

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR1 PS1 (Patchset 1) released

Vikas Jain — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:12:09 PST

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR1 PS1 (Patchset 1) aka 11.1.1.2 was released on Nov 10, 2009, and generally available now.
Many enhancements and bug fixes for OWSM went into this patchset.
Some notable ones are listed below. For a complete set of enhancements visit product documentation here.

What's new in OWSM 11gR1 PS1 (11.1.1.2)?

Common Policy Store across multiple Weblogic domains (11gR1 policy store was restricted to be one per domain)
One policy accepting multiple types of tokens such as username, SAML, X.509 through the policy alternatives feature
Ability to set up different sign/encryption keys for different services instead of all services having to use the common sign/encryption keys set at the domain level - This has been implemented using configuration overrides feature for service policies (11gR1 allowed only client side config overrides)
Ability to configure operation level authorization using Permission based authorization policies
Ease of Use features

Publishing service certificate in the WSDL - client policies can directly lookup service certificate from WSDL instead of looking up from client keystore
Policy attachment through WLST scripting - useful for creating automation scripts
Enhanced support for asynchronous services and policies for it

Certifications and Interoperability

OWSM Interoperability certified against Axis 1.4 and WSS4J 1.58 security stacks
Documentation on Interoperability with other security stacks moved to a new guide Oracle Fusion Middleware Interoperability Guide for Oracle Web Services Manager
WS-I BSP compliance
Policies can be stored in Microsoft SQL Server based MDS repository

Additionally, for a list of important OWSM bug fixes, known issues and workarounds associated with 11gR1 PS1 release, please refer to the release notes.