• Verification of 11i Extended Support readiness

    It’s not a secret that 11i extended support starts November 2010 and the cost has been waived for the 1st year of the extended support. A month ago Oracle released the mandatory requirements for 11i systems to qualify for the extended support in Note 883202.1. The note contains a huge list of required patches for each module. As I still work with quite many 11i systems I transformed the note into several SQL queries that help identify the requirements that are not present, otherwise it’s a huge pain to walk through the note each time.

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  • Can we trust AUTOTRACE?

    In short the answer is NO. I mean it is likely to be accurate in most of the cases, but there are situations when it dissplays different execution plan, not the one that’s really used to execute the SQL.

    Take a look at this sample. First I create a table that contains skew data (few “0”s and lots of “1”s) in column y and then I gather the statistics without histograms on column y. After that’s done a test query is executed counting rows where y=0.

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  • Tracing concurrent requests (2)

    I’ve already blogged about tracing concurrent requests here: Tracing a single concurrent request, but I found myself using a bit different approach when needed. The thing is that concurrent managers are setting Module (which usually /not allways/ contains the short name of the concurrent program) and Action (which contains value “Concurrent Request”) information for database sessions executing concurrent requests, therefore it’s easy to switch on tracing from the very begining of execution of the requests for a particular concurrent program using DBMS_MONITOR.SERV_MOD_ACT_TRACE_ENABLE (works on DB 10g+).

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  • R12 cross-platform migration of ApplTier from HP-UX PA-RISC to HP-UX Itanium

    I’ve been working on a proof of concept migration of 11.5.10.2 on HP-UX v11.11 PA-RISC to R12.1.2 on HP-UX v11.31 Itanium for past couple of weeks. This is not a complete reference on how to make that happen, but still, there are some gotchas I had to workaround in cross-platform migration phase. Here is the list of issues and solutions to the problems spotted during application of the customer-specific update patch (provided by uploading manifest file created with perl adgenpsf.pl to http://updates.oracle.com/PlatformMigrating )

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  • Notification Mailer troubleshooting (Part 2)

    In Part 1 we described the main steps involved in the Notification/Email sending process in an EBS environment. Today I will give you some practical hints on how to troubleshoot the notification sending process.

    Let’s say some of your EBS users report that they do not receive the emails they are supposed to receive from the system. Typically a functional maintenance team claims that the problem has nothing to do with an application/functional area and most probably it is related to the technical stack and Apps DBA should be called. In many cases at the end of the day it appears that either a workflow definition has been changed during the last delivery, or a wrong recipient for the vacation rule was specified, or this is some special case in a business process everybody forgot about etc. In any case everybody applies to an Apps DBA and would like him to fix the problem immediately. You should have a reliable way to show quickly to everybody around (including yourself) what directions the troubleshooting process has to be focused on.

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