Andreas' Adventures

Yesterday I received a farewell email from my dear colleague David Calcano. After years with Accenture he is moving into a total different area, leaving us with all the mess of Oracle and SOA. I always admired folks who know more than I do, and the more they know more than me the more I dream of becoming like them. And then they turn out to be brave enough and do something completely different. I will keep www.nosecodeproductions.com on my radar - and I know that with people like David on board they can only succeed! And now back to the scared and meek folks who just keep on doing the same - me ;-)

Although I am busy moving to Oracle VM I needed to access one of my systems on VMWare on my laptop which I had not used for a while. The console of VMWare did not load. Ok - I though his might be due to some networks which I had disabled on Windows. Enabled them - no result. Checking the VMWare services I found out that the VMWare Host Agent was not running. So I restarted it. Crashed again. Obviously the next step is to check the Windows event viewer. To my surprise the System Log could not be displayed. Needless to say I had to fix this first. Clear the Log typically solves this and I was lucky this time. Back to the VMWare Host Agent. Started it agian - still crashes. I found the following error: The VMware Host Agent service terminated with service-specific error 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF). Checking the VMWare log. Log for VMware Server, pid=7444, version=2.0.2, build=build-203138, option=Release, section=2 [2010-04-24 12:20:34.264 'App' 2600 info] Current working directory: C...

I was worried as I ran into a problem with the Database Vault security. I configured a new realm in a database where the Oracle E-Business Suite is running. The main idea was to have a user for the OBIEE that should have only limited access. Together with some colleagues we made sure that the OBIEE user had the correct grants on some tables and views inside the EBS schema (APPS, AR, GMS, PA). I created the realm and added the OBIEE user as a participant. Everything seemed to work. Then I disabled the realm and even removed the OBIEE user from the realm, but still Oracle Answers was capable of accessing the APPS schema objects. Took me a day and finally I reread the manual. I understood my error. The purpose of the DBV is to lockout users with system privileges, such as the SYS or SYSTEM user. Now the account of the OBIEE user does not have these system privileges except CREATE SESSION. In order to access any object the OBIEE user relies on discretionary grants (e.g. the AR user grants ...