This is the first article in series of articles dedicated to a “Notification Mailer” or in other words to an email sending functionality in EBS. We will talk about what steps involved in the email sending process and what tools and methods Apps DBAs have to troubleshoot each of these steps. From my 8 years (since 2001) experience working with EBS as Apps DBA it looks like “Notification Mailer” is one of the grey areas for Apps DBAs which aren’t described well enough and on the other hand we are asked to troubleshoot it on regular basis. As it is my very first personal article I would appreciate any feedback from your side. Please do not hesitate to leave comments, proposals or recommendations at the bottom of the page or dropping an email to me.

On May 4th Oracle announced that the 1st year extended support fee for several products had been waived, which practically means that almost-premium support is extended by one year this way 11i is supported till November 2011 and 10gR2 - till July 2011.

I wrote a small select that helps me troubleshoot the concurrent processing. The goal is to quickly understand which concurrent requests are executing at the moment and which ones are still in the queue. It’s also very important to get some basic information about running requests to start troubleshooting quickly after a problem is spotted, so the important information is: which concurrent node and which DB node are the request processes running on, what are the process IDs and what is the DB session doing.

Just a few days ago I started using Windows Vista x64 on my PC and today I found that there are serious problems running eBS forms using Jinitiator on this OS. Installation of Jinitiator 1.8.1.x fails with “Unsupported 16-Bit Application” error.

Unsupported 16-Bit Application

The installation of Jinitiator 1.3.1.x completes normally, but Internet Explorer crashes when I try to open eBS forms. Quick googling didn’t give me the solution for these problems, so I decided to try forcing browsers using Sun Java plugin to open eBS forms (It should be possible as it’s the way how forms open on Linux workstations). It took some time, but I found a way.

There is a lot of Oracle e-Business Suite installations that use workflow mailer to communicate messages to users and many of these environments have clones for development and testing purposes. It’s obvious in most cases people that actually use the system will not be the same that develop customizations or do testing, therefore we need to reconfigure the workflow mailer to avoid sending misleading messages to business users from development or test environments.