For anyone as sick as I am of the slow flash interface for My Oracle Support… I have good news. Click here for the url to the non-flash (limited) version of MOS. Thanks to R Roth for the tip on this one.
November 12, 2009
My Oracle Support – Non-Flash Version
November 11, 2009
My Oracle Sucks
Faster Problem Resolution... Slower Site
Well it’s day 3 of the My Oracle Support mandate, and if anything my experience has gotten worse. On the plus side, at least today I can log in. That’s about all I can put in the plus column so far. Instead of making generalized disparaging comments about the new site, I’ve decided to begin citing major flaws in the new version.
The Basics
Everything is slower than Metalink was. That’s largely because of flash. But I stumbled across an even bigger annoyance. You can’t use the “back” button in the browser. This seriously sucks! I noticed this when I typed in a series of patch numbers under patch search and got a million results.. you can’t go back. At least in Firefox 3.5. Hit it, nothing happens. Hit refresh, you get the login spinny circle thing pictured to the left here.
Patches
Easily accounting for 50% of the reason I’m ever in Oracle supports’ site, I spend a lot of time reading about patches and downloading them. Just for fun I checked the ftp site:
ftp updates.oracle.com Connected to updates.oraclegha.com. 421-*********************** Downtime Notice ************************ 421- 421-This service was retired as of November 06, 2009 421-**************************************************************** 421
In administering 11i, I’ll paint a common scenario. Some rollup or family pack is required, and I have to research all the prerequisites and determine which have been applied, which are not applicable, and which I need to download/stage. For a typical family pack, this probably amounts to at least 5-10 patches. With the old ftp site, I could at least log in, have a list of what I needed, change directories to the applicable patches, and “get” what I needed in fairly short order. There appears to be no simple way to do that in the new patches section. I timed it, and waited 26 seconds after clicking download before the dialogue box came up to save it to my PC. Upon completion, I’d have to click back and search for the next patch, apparently. Add to this that upon completion, I’ll have to sftp the files from my PC to the staging server, and I’m betting this new and improved system doubles the amount of time it takes me to stage a family pack.
Another odd thing I found was the “facebook factor”. For example, I’m allowed to make comments about a patch, presumably so others can see it. I don’t know why I would ever do this, but even if I did, what would I say? “Great patch!”? “Smooth, but not as good as 3460000″? “Awesome binaries in this one!”? I don’t get it. Being the eternal cynic, I don’t know why I’d trust the opinion of some anonymous MOS user, though they probably know more than the average level 1 tech support guy. Another facebook feature is “number of times downloaded”. How do I use that information in a vacuum? I have no clue how many customers Oracle has on my products, so what value does this add?
The patches tab has some kind of patchset plan to save. Looks like some kind of logical bundling of patches, interfaced with OCM and EM. Too bad OCM is required; it never has all the right information from all my servers. From their own documentation, any patch can be added to a plan. When I typed in a known patch (and received a result in every language on earth… another step backwards from Metalink) all it let me do was download or rate it:
I see you chose English as your language when you logged in. Would you like your patch in Turkish, Hebrew or Slovak?
Knowledge
Melvil Dewey is rolling over in his grave
Apparently DOC ID’s went the way of the dodo. Now it’s just “ID”. Just an observation. When I click on the knowledge tab, there’s so much irrelevant information on my screen, I can’t decide if I’m going to throw up or have a seizure. After a minute on this page, there’s still a spinny circle trying to render the “recently viewed” pane. I’m not holding out hope it ever comes back. How about the tiny search bar? That’s the #1 most important thing I use in Oracle support, and it’s smaller than the random system error below it!
Community
The only good thing about hitting this tab was that I could see the face of the man responsible for my frustration right now.
The future is here! Be very afraid!
Certify
I truly did save the best for last. Somehow, certify fell under the “More” tab. When I clicked on it, I decided Oracle’s goal in MOS must be to keep people from ever logging in. It’s just awful. I have no idea what to click on, or why certain choices are or are not available. I guess I’ll just call them to confirm certification, because I don’t see how I’ll ever find them in here. Used to be, Certify was hard to navigate, but all the information was in there if you dug around long enough. I just don’t even know what to make of it now. I put in Oracle E-Business Suite for the Product Line, and checked only Application for the Tier. It came back with no certifications.
November 9, 2009
SEOUC 2010
Please don't punish me for swiping your logo!
Seems like I’m always blogging about poor experiences with Oracle these days… thought I’d change gears a little. Received a card in company mail from SEOUC 2010, which I was happy to see. It’s the Southeastern Oracle Users Conference, held in Charlotte, NC this coming February 24th-25th. This notice was just a call for papers (and I really wish I had one ready as I want to do this someday, almost did, but that’s another story) but it got me thinking that I should share what a refreshing resource OAUG and in particular this regional groups is. Last year’s conference was like a mini-OpenWorld. There were vendors, a keynote, and breakout sessions about various topics. All told, you can’t beat the bang for the buck: 1-2 nights accommodations in Charlotte, and a paltry $285 to attend all of the main conference. If your organization is not a member of OAUG, I’d encourage you to look. I can’t honestly say I’ve gotten a lot out of OAUG proper so far (as opposed to the SEOUC conference, a derivative of OAUG), but I am also hoping to attend Collaborate 10 to see how it compares to Open World. I was swapping stories with a non-techie about Open World, and threw out my gripe that Open World seemed like an Oracle cheerleading session at times. She told me that OAUG can seem like an employment conference for consultants. Time will tell..
I thought slow My Oracle Support was bad..
We don't want your uploads. Thank you.
So Oracle made the cutover to My Oracle Support this weekend. Being the cynic that I am, I immediately went out and tried to upload a file to an existing SR. This is something I know has been broken since April but they promised (twice) would be fixed before go live. Result is to the left… sigh.
I will say that the feel of MOS had changed slightly, and now there’s a different category (radio button selection) under Service Requests for technical vs. non-technical support. This is nice, because there were options like media request and problem with site on the menu for the non-technical support cases.
Later this morning, I went to log in to see the status of the non-technical SR I opened and I received this message; probably not a good sign.
All circuits are busy
November 5, 2009
I can’t make this up (dripr)
Time to make fun of support again. In the process of doing setup for iProcurement, I was asked to execute a stored procedure for the functional lead; it errored out as such:
ORACLE error 20000 in FDPSTP
Cause: FDPSTP failed due to ORA-20000: Exception at ICX_POR_INTERMEDIA_INDEX.create_index(200): ORA-20000: Oracle Text error: DRG-10516: failed to perform DDL operation due to an Oracle error DRG-50857: oracle error in dripr
Nothing on Metalink, no idea what it meant, so I opened an SR, and this is the exact except, though the names have been changed to protect the incompetent. The analyst was actually asking me to tell him what the error meant!
30-OCT-09 19:57:57 GMT UPDATE======
Hi Kevin, Acknowledging your last update to this Service Request. Please confirm what “dripr” references?
Thank You,
Global Customer Services STATUS
======
@CUS – Waiting for customer response 30-OCT-09 20:01:16 GMT kkempf: Sorry – do you mean like when it says: DRG-50857: oracle error in dripr? 30-OCT-09 20:33:57 GMT UPDATE
======
Hi Kevin, Acknowledging your last update to this Service Request. Yes Thank You,
Global Customer Services 30-OCT-09 20:37:04 GMT New info : kkempf
You understand that’s an Oracle generated error right?
30-OCT-09 21:00:16 GMT UPDATE
======
Hi Kevin, Acknowledging your last update to this Service Request. This error generally signifies an issue with the database. What I want to know is what on your instance “dripr” references. “dripr” is not an Oracle reference Thank You,
Global Customer Services 30-OCT-09 21:07:03 GMT New info : kkempf
DRG-10516: failed to perform DDL operation due to an Oracle error
DRG-50857: oracle error in dripr I can assure you, that “DRG-50857: oracle error in dripr” is no custom error message. I’d suggest asking someone familiar with the program I’m executing.
October 30, 2009
RIP Classic Metalink
Just in time for Halloween! Received a spam from Oracle today, I guess we all better start liking a buggy flash support interface…
Classic MetaLink Retires November 6, 2009: Important My Oracle Support Upgrade Details
ATTENTION: Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware, E-Business Suite, and BEA Customers and Partners
Oracle Global Customer Support is pleased to announce that My Oracle Support—Oracle’s next-generation support platform—will be upgraded beginning the weekend of November 6-8, 2009, to become the single online support platform for all Oracle products. At that time, Classic MetaLink will retire.
October 28, 2009
That’s so 1980’s….
Nice bytes!
On a lighter note, when I cranked up my 11.2 RDBMS today, it looked like this:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.1.0 - 64bit Production With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options SQL> startup ORACLE instance started. Total System Global Area 1068937216 bytes Fixed Size 2220200 bytes Variable Size 578817880 bytes Database Buffers 482344960 bytes Redo Buffers 5554176 bytes
Seriously, does anyone allocate an Oracle database’s memory settings in bytes anymore? What I really love is when the buffer cache is so large it uses scientific notation to display memory allocation. Time to step into the 21st century, I’d say, and show these startup allocations in MB or GB…
October 23, 2009
New Patch Set Updates (PSU’s) Available
Tuesday when Oracle released its (delayed due to Open World) Fall 2009 Critical Patch Update, it also released an update to Patch Set Updates (PSU’s). This information is obtained from Document ID 854428.1, dated 20 Oct 2009.
As mentioned earlier, I’m a big fan of the PSU concept and am pleased to see that it has been expanded with this Critical Patch Update. The arrival of RDBMS 11.1 PSU’s, clusterware, as well as EM is great news for me, as it makes life simpler. I figure I’m already going to have to apply the CPU, might as well get the benefits of the PSU and a version change (internally) to prove it.
I’ve already installed 10.2.0.4.1 on 4 production and 8 development/test/training 10g databases without incident, and plan to get moving on testing this release. I’d really like it if Oracle would actually show a PSU’d database as 10.2.0.4.1, as it would be a visual queue that the PSU had been applied to the database, but at least on the internal company Wiki I can just tag the RDBMS version as such and not have to separately track CPU’s anymore.
After a little digging, I found that Oracle has mad some “oddball” platforms “By request only”, while most mainstream platforms (Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX) are available as PSU’s. Again, curiously, Windows has been classified “Not applicable” as an OS since “Windows fixes are released in periodic bundle patches which contain all the CPU and PSU content”. Whatever that means.
RDBMS PSU’s available (patch number in parenthesis):
- 11.1.0.7.1 (8833297)
- 11.1.0.7.1 for CRS (Cluster Services) (8287931)
- 10.2.0.4.2 (8833280)
- 10.2.0.4.2 for CRS (Cluster Services) (8705958)
Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control (patch number in parenthesis):
- 10.2.0.5.1 for OMS (8864918)
edit: I ran the PSU against my Enterprise Manager OMS (10.2.0.5.1) and ouch it broke it. Badly. The application was 2 parts; opatch apply and an RDBMS script. The opatch piece was fine. The RDBMS script ended with many errors, and EM wouldn’t start. I rolled back the RDBMS script per the readme… and EM wouldn’t start. For the record, I am running RDBMS 11.2 (uncertified for EM) and not the 10.2 version..
edit 2: I ran the PSU against my regression test ERP database (11.1.0.7) and it applied (seemingly) without incident.
October 21, 2009
Licensing Products in 11i: adlicmgr.sh vs. OAM license manager
We’re looking at implementing an 11i product which we purchased but never implemented, and as I began to look at the setup steps from an administrator standpoint, I became re-acquainted with an license manager. As the cobwebs shook free, it began something like this…
adlicmgr.sh is the command line tool used in the olden days, which requires a X session and command prompt access to the applications server. In order to avoid problems, you first export the classpath, change to the right directory, and then launch it:
$ export CLASSPATH=$AD_TOP/java/adlicmgr.zip:$CLASSPATH
$ cd $AD_TOP/bin
$ ./adlicmgr.sh
Oracle Applications License Manager (Java)
From here, you wander through a few screens and try to find the product you wish to license, or, alternatively, you can review what is already licensed.
License or Report
Good luck finding your product!
I happened to be looking for iProcurement, and it was nowhere to be found on the list. To make things worse, the list isn’t even sortable!
I gave up on this and went into the OAM version of license manager… what an improvement! The URL for OAM is, as a reminder:
https or http://appserverhostname:port/servlets/weboam/oam/oamLogin
OAM Site Map
From here, you get to this screen; I used the Products link under License at this point…
From here, I landed at this screen which had a few options.
Despite my screen shot, the correct selection to simply add 1 product is License Component Application.
List of Components Available to License
From here, it’s just follow the bouncing ball; select the component by checking it, hit next, next and you are told:
Success
That’s all there was to it… if I was using the command line adlicmgr.sh program, I believe I’d still be looking for the product… or it could be that it’s just not as updated with the new product names and abbreviations as OAM is.
I should make one final disclaimer: Just because you’re able to license a product doesn’t mean you’re legally able to use it. In other words, if you bought the 11i ERP for one product, there’s nothing to stop you from illegally licensing the whole suite. Except an army of Oracle lawyers if they ever catch you in an audit…
October 19, 2009
Warning: Your application is making bad assumptions
Low-level logging is currently enabled. Your application will not perform as well while low-level logging is on.
In IT, we often joke about keeping the users in the dark about outages and performance issues….
I recently had a problem where my cost manager would die about every 2 days, and as part of the resolution with Oracle I was told to enable logging via a few profile option values: FND: Log Enabled, FND: Log Module, FND: Log Level = Statement and FND: Log Filename for Middle Tier. I believe that changing the level to Statement is what truly caused the issue I’m about to describe, though I’m not 100% sure. Regardless, after changing these settings (by the way, the Log Module was set to WIP%, and therefore only affecting WIP), the login responsibilities screen looked like this:
... and it's going to rain today, too!
This change immediately caused floods of calls into the help desk, with people concerned about what they needed to do to re-establish the old level of performance on their system. Mind you, nobody could quantify any degradation, but with this warning automatically generated by the ERP, how could you not assume you were working overtime tonight? Seriously, this is the worst idea ever. Why would Oracle ever assume that performance would be impacted, and worse, why tell every single user who may or may not be affected that his or her performance was going to be degraded?
For the record, if you ever get this message, you can clear it by unsetting the profile option values mentioned and bouncing Apache.
