Andreas' Adventures

 In AWS there are a number of gateways within a VPC.  The following types exist: AWS VPC Gateway Types Gateway Type Purpose Internet Gateway (IGW) Enables public internet access for VPC resources (in public subnets). NAT Gateway (NGW) Allows private subnet instances to access the internet outbound only . Virtual Private Gateway (VGW) Enables VPN connectivity to on-premises networks. Transit Gateway (TGW) Connects multiple VPCs and on-premises networks at scale. Egress-only Internet Gateway IPv6-specific gateway for outbound-only internet access from private subnets. PrivateLink / Interface Endpoints Secure, private access to AWS services over AWS network. Gateway Endpoints (S3/DynamoDB) Private access to AWS services without an IGW or NAT. So let's dive in a little deeper. De...

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 implementation...

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 ver...

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 ...

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 cr...

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.

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 Expl...

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.

Interesting issue in a SOA/BPM today. Redeployment of the application (SOA) and restart went through without an issue. However the stresstest came back almost immediately. The AdminServer.out showed the error "A call to flushChanges on the current MDSSession does not specify the correct transaction key". Even more astonishing was the error TNS-12516 when trying to connect to the database. After a little bit of searching we found that the database alert log said it could not extend the SOA_INFRA tablespace. Adapted this and everything went back to normal.

I bounced into the problem of getting the dreaded OVMAPI_4010e error when I was discovering the Oracle VM server in my network. Metalink (MyOracleSupport for the younger ones) told me that this was typically an issue with the password of the OVM Agent. One obscure internet blog told me however that this was due to the difference in versions. Now - it beats me how the connection information and credentials are passed differently when a new version arrives, but eventually I placed the same version of the OVM Manager as the OVM Server on my Virualbox image and it works.

Obviously I do not run a major Oracle-based OVM data center. So for real-life large enterprises this is not an issue. However image the following: you have a machine on which you want to run Oracle VM Server. Installation of the OVM is straightforward and pretty easy. Now you end up with a piece of equipment that does exactly NOTHING. Nothing? Yup. Well you can start it and you get a Linux prompt, and that is pretty much it. In comes the Oracle VM Manager. It dances, it talks, it does the wash and it walks the dog - and it can be yours for 99.99$ ;-) Seriously, in order to get anything useful to be done with the OVM Server you need the manager. Now there is a small design flaw. Setting up the OVM Manager requires an extra machine. This can be a Virtualbox image, another machine in your network or even a guest on your Oracle VM Server. Now the last seems to be appealing. Normally in such an environment I would like to have the controlling software on the box that I control ...

Ok - when you do things the first time you make mistakes. This was my first server I've ever build from scratch. I fiddled around with some equipment before, but buying a number of components and installing them was new for me. Now the motherboard I have does have no video card as the folks who typically buy these extreme motherboards do bring their own video cards with them to render the monsters they are about to slay. With me things were not so bright. Although I also bought a nice 24' screen I was still seeing nothing - basically because there was nothing to plug it in to the server. Well - another trip to the store to buy a simple video card. I did however initially bought a wireless card for the machine as I intend to place the machine in my study room. Historically this is where my DSL connection ended, so there was always a router with a cable present. To my surprise I could not install the Oracle VM Server without a network. Obviously this makes sense when yo...

So - I bought a decently sized system to have my own private cloud on it. The main motivation was the fact that currently it has become pretty difficult to run some Oracle software on your laptop. Although a number of people do this you quickly realize that they just have a simple database installation on it or a plain WebLogic Server. While this is satisfactory for a number of purposes it doesn't come near the things that I encounter in my day to day life. My customers typically have HA or even MAA environments, using RAC and some of the newest Fusion Middleware components. When you simply want to re-enact an environment of that size your laptop will not be sufficient. So - this journey is about the setup and "cloudy" ideas I have. So what I have now is a system that offers me a good CPU, 64 GB of memory (probably the most expensive part nowadays) and 3 TB disk plus 512 SSD. All in all it cost me around 1800 Euro's. And as it was bought by my company the Du...

I had an interesting issue this week. The setup is as follows: WLS with Webcenter. The Datasource point to a database for the metadata. This database sits in the database zone. As we are not allowed to connect directly to the database there is a CMAN in between. After the setup of the CMAN and the database we had a connection using JDBC where the CMAN was our endpoint. So far so good. Now the IT department decided (a long time ago) to move a number of databases from one platform to another. As this meant a change in the IP and name of the database we expected that the only configuration that was needed to change was the CMAN. Database moved, CMAN config adapted and voila: nothing works! First test was to use the console and test the JDBC connection. Error was a ORA-12514 TNS:listener does not currently know of service requested in connect descriptor. This in itself was strange as from the WLS/Webcenter perspective nothing did change. Endpoint was still the CMAN, SID ...

Cloud Control Agent shows SCA as down after redeployment In a lot of environments the development process calls for a daily rebuild of the system. This is typically followed by a (re)deployment of the SCA’s to the Fusion Middleware environment. In one of my customers environments I had to deal with the issue that each morning the SOA SCA’s were depicted in the Cloud Control as down. A quick check on the server showed them up and running. The same happened in the Enterprise Manager of the server. So the redeployment worked as it should. So why were the SCA’s noted as down in the Cloud Control when the EM showed them as up? This has to do with the way the agent of the Cloud Control works. The interactive way is described in the following manual: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24628_01/install.121/e24215/fmw_discovery.htm Now when an agent has found an SCA it does not automatically update the lifecycle status of this deployment. So a redeployment does add a new label to a SCA in a ...

For a customer I am busy to develop a SOA Suite purging strategy. As we expect the system to have a high number of instances we will have to keep the dehydration store and the MDS clean. The last is also essential as the end customer is under some budget constraints, which leads to the fact that the database (and especially the size of the disks) is nothing that will be allowed to grow limitless. Now - one of the important features of the database when it comes to space management is partitioning. Partitioning a table gives you more management capabilities and tools to keep your DB size manageble. There are a number of pointers in the documentation that describe how the database partinioning can be used for the SOA Suite - with one essential part missing: how to set it up. There is a remark that the creation of partitions is a task for a skilled DBA (true) and a second remark that states that the admin guide will not describe it. So when you want to use partitioning for your SOA...

OK - I exaggerated a little bit in the title - but as you may have noticed - it is VERY cold in central Europe. Now this guy here loves the sun. I admit I love the SUN products as well, but normally I refer to the big yellow thing in the sky. Leaving the Netherlands for a long weekend with my wife to travel to Malaga is nice. But to feel the Spanish winter sun with 16 C (+ that is) instead of the Dutch version of it (-10) gave me the feeling that coming to Malaga for the SOA Community Forum is a kind of a life saver. So yes - I combined business with pleasure, but sometimes you just have to. In addition to that - staying abreast of things that go on in the community, in the SOA Suite arena in general and meeting a couple of old friends (and hopefully making some new ones along the line) is a thing that can be compared to a life saver. Although in a project an error does not automatically mean that blood flows through the streets, having a good knowledge of the products you work wit...

Within my current project I ended up in an interesting discussion. As part of the governance or more specifically some government regulations for the systems security we needed a description of the system components. Obviously there are several layers for this topic, but in order to have a complete view of the system a list of installed system components and also of the systems configuration was desired. Well, as you can guess, there was no tangible description of the current configuration, and there was also only a sketchy overview of the Oracle components which were used to build the system. So, the first idea was to ask the various departments which were involved in the setup and configuration of the system to use a variety of tools and approaches to deliver the information. I offered the idea to use "the one ring to rule them all" approach. Oracle offers two tools that provide an overview of the used components, their configuration and even of platform settings. One tool ...

Early February you should convince your boss (and yourself) to come to Malaga in Spain from 07-FEB-2012 to 08-FEB-2012 or even until 10-FEB-2012 to attend the first combined Fusion Middleware Partner Community Forum for the SOA Suite, WebCenter, BPM and WebLogic Partner Communities. Let me give you a number of reasons why you should be there: A number of senior Oracle PM's will be there to share the newest developments in these different themes Meet the creme-de-la-creme of the Oracle Communities See me presenting See presentations of others who are even more exiting then I am ;-) Give your network to the Oracle communities a boost Enjoy the city and social event Participate in excellent trainings More info and how to register can be found here: http://www.oracle.com/partners/secure/news/oracle-events/1400537 Let me know if you are coming so we can plan ahead for some time to grab a beer - cu in Malaga

When you win you need to celebrate. This was the line of thinking when I found out that I was part of a group that won the Oracle SOA Community Country Award. Well - thinking about a party is one thing, preparing it and finally having the small party is something completely different. It starts with finding a date that would be suitable for the majority of invited people. As you can imagine the SOA ACE's and ACE Directors have a busy life, that takes them places. Alongside that they are engaged with customers who want to squeeze every bit of knowledge out of them. So everybody is pretty busy (that's what makes you an ACE). After some deliberation (and checks of international Oracle events, Trip-it, blogs and tweets) a date was chosen. Meeting on a Friday evening for some drinks is probably not a Dutch-only activity. But as some of the ACE's are self-employed they miss the companies around them to organize such events. Come the day a turn-out of almost 50% was grea...