Paas Summercamp 2017 in Lisbon

So – another summer camp is over.

What was the outcome of this? Was there more to it than meeting some old friends, dive into some slides, get your hands dirty on new versions and finally talk about it over a glass of Portuguese wine or beer?

So let’s start at the beginning – where are we right now?

In the Process Cloud Service track the global PM Nathan Angstadt kicked of the session by asking how many projects we are on that use PCS and how we get along selling the product.

The outcome was somewhat predictable: about one or two participants were on PCS projects, and selling is still a big issue.

We discussed the various reasons for that. The main essence was that the PCS is often positioned at previous BPM customers who still have to deal with large BPM implementations and are somewhat afraid of the new PCS-style. BPM and PCS are two different things. They target different customer issues. BPM is still useful when it comes to large scale implementations, while PCS is targeted more on the department level.

During the week this came back time and again. Cloud Services give you agility and speed - but are not always a direct replacement for large scale implementations of related on-prem products. This was also visible with the various hands-on exercises. Typically within an hour you had something running that could be shown to a customer.

With some preparation a quick demo in realtime could be created while the customer looks over your shoulder.

Additions like the ABCS (interfaces), ICS (integration), CECS (content) or API can easily be combined with PCS. 

PCS is for a number of cases the magic glue. Certain domain functionality can be done with the products (cloud services) but the real working together part will be done by PCS.

So after a week I am full of ideas, energy and still-to-be finished exercises. Visions of products and solution dance in my head. New people were met with whom I can cooperate and try to get a foothold in the PCS market.

Let's go for it.

Oh yeah - Lisbon is also great due to its good food, sights and excellent weather. My fifth journey into the city brought me to the Gulbenkien Museum https://gulbenkian.pt/museu/  which was very nice. Stories of others made sure that there are still undiscovered places for next years Paas Summercamp.

One last word: a success has many fathers - but there is always one person in charge of it all. Jürgen Kress did again a wonderful job of bringing partners, product managers, content and fun together. Many thanks for that.

Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum in Valencia

Last week the 22nd Fusion Middleware and PaaS Partner Community Forum took place in Valencia, Spain.

For me this was a very valuable experience - again as I have visited a number of #ofmForum before.

Let me recap here the highlights of this meeting.

After a great Welcome-Reception the evening before, where everybody had the chance to catch up with a large number of old (and soon-to-be new) friends, the conference started with a kind of the state of the union by Jürgen Kress.

The community already has more than 8000 people. This - in a fact - is a tremendous achievement. Everybody agrees that this is only possible by the relentless work of Jürgen who puts a big effort into this. It shows that other areas inside the Oracle technology stack do not benefit by equivalent communities. Even other communities, when they exist at all, do not compete in the same league. So a VERY BIG THANK YOU for Jürgen is at its place here.

After the opening a keynote from Alistair Hopkins showed very clearly how the world in the Oracle space has changed. Gone are the days of multi-million dollar deals where large groups of partner consultants works for months at the customer site. Deals now start at 50-100k $/€ but will often expand afterwards. Customers embrace the cloud and project cycles become shorter, more agile and in a certain way also more productive.

Zooming in on different product areas Vikas Anand (SOA,ICS), Cesare Rotundo (BPM/PCS) and Grant Ronald (Mobile) the message was repeated. Cloud is there and the call to action could not be clearer.

The social event was fun as it gave up on the idea to sit at tables for dinner all together. Finger-food, music, drinks and various chats with Oracle PM and other partners gave a good networking experience.

The second day offered a number of break-out sessions in different tracks. I switched between all of them, so I get some insights into the Development Cloud Service, saw the statement of direction of PCS and afterwards SOA/ICS examples of customers.

New in this years OFMForum was the SalesCafe which offered the possibility to align partners business strategy with Oracle Sales. Together with a Swiss colleague of mine we had a meeting and discussed an enlargement of our focus to cover all of EMEA. Also a specific arrangement with another company was discussed.

So all in all this OFMForum was the summit of education, strategy, networking and business.

I hope to attend many more of these meetings.

PS: Valencia is also a great city - especially during the Fallas festival period as I could experience this with my wife the weekend before the conference.

USB2 for Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse

I have bought an Acer E17 laptop. Also I redecorated my study room - so I wanted to get rid of all the clutter, plus sharing the desk with my wife and use the big screen I have - which sat idle on my old desk.

So I thought to get a docking station. Just a brief check on the underside of the Acer's (I have three now) showed me that they are not in the league of grown-ups when it comes to the point of supplying docking station slots.

So I tried to use a wireless keyboard and mouse from Logitech which I bought a year ago.

However there was sometime a big lag in the keyboard and also the mouse did not react that well.

Looking on the internet I found a number of folks who complained about this but only little help in solving the problem.

Finally I stumbled over a posting that stated that USB2 would be a better choice than USB3, as this scans more devices on more frequencies. So I put the receiver in the USB2 port and since then I am a happy computer user again, not wishing to throw everything away ;-)

Copy and Paste

I bounced into a funny thing when I setup a Data Guard Physical Standby Database.

First I prepared some database init parameters in a document (actually I reused some old documentation I had done in a previous project).

log_archive_dest_1

location=use_db_recovery_file_dest valid_for=(all_logfiles,all_roles) db_unique_name=osbsoadb

The "alter system ..." command worked like a charm.

During the preparations I needed to restart the database instance. To my surprise I received an error that there was an issue with an init parameter.

ORA-16024: parameter LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST_1 cannot be parsed

Google did not really help me. So I decided to create a pfile from the spfile and had a look into it.

There it became evident what the error was. Somehow during the copy & paste the end-of-lines were copied as well - leaving my init parameter with some newlines in it.

Made one line from it in the pfile, started the db and created a new spfile. Now it worked like a charm.

Strange data in Fusion Middleware Console regarding OHS

I have an OHS cluster in my environment. Due to a change I needed to bounce the servers one by one.


As this is a production environment I wanted to make sure that everything is working - so I decided to restart them one after another.


I was then looking at the performance page of the OHS and saw the following:

However in the Home section of the OHS the processes came back after a couple of minutes:

Obviously everything was running o the first host. The access_log showed the typical requests.

So I decided to restart the second server as well (proceed - fingers crossed).

When I evr find out what caused this I will update this posting.

Oracle Streams Explorer

At the recent Oracle SOA Suite community forum in Budapest I had a hands-on experience with the Oracle Streams Explorer. Having worked with the Oracle Complex Event Processing and also some hands-on exercises with the new
Oracle Event Processing, the Oracle Streams Explorer is a very easy to handle and useful addition to the area of near-real-time data insight and analysis.

The user interface comes along in the new Oracle look-and-feel. You can select a number of areas like IOT, Risk and Fraud Management, Transportation and Logistics, Customer Experience and Analysis and Telecommunications.
Within that you get a number of predefined patterns and resources. Defining your own solution can therefore be based on an existing solution in your catalog or simply by combining input streams and defining filters on them.

Now plenty of examples can (and will) be named.

The essence for me - and this is a message that I will convey to customers - is the fact that by using Oracle Streams Explorer you can get a very tangible feeling of SOA environments.
A lot of data comes along, and you might want to be alerted when a certain event occurs. For example a RFID tag of a valuable item leaving the warehouse is something you want to know right away.
Put this into an HTTP Publisher or call a REST service that in effect sends out a notification to your smartphone will be a nice goodie for any logistics company. The beauty of the Oracle Streams Explorer
is the ease with which you can build such an application.

Now I need to find more time to build such an example and document it.

I should play more lotto

Just my luck: Friday afternoon and I hit an error in the Oracle VM.
OVMRU_001020E does not show on Google or inside Oracle Support ;-)

Am I really the first to hit that problem? Seems to be an issue with the network cards in my virtual machine. I guess I will do some more reading before I can continue installing my virtual machines.

Update:
Solved it. In the view I went to the Network Ports and selected additional ports, added them to the machine and off we go.