Andreas' Adventures

Although Oracle Open World is behind us I still need to put some content about this on the site. Let me start with the fun part - the Oracle ACE Dinner. Here is a picture of Lillian Buziak, Steven Feuerstein and me at the ACE Dinner: I had a lot of fun but found out too late that the barkeepers were putting alcohol in the cocktails :#)

It is Friday, the OOW 2009 is over and as almost everybody I feel that it was a good conference, but also am happy that it is over. The event is of course perfect for networking and learning. But you have very long days and need to be careful that all the parties will not leave you drunk all the time. I will post my sessions as soon as possible on the net - especially the Lego presentation had some good feedback and was very funny. And I have to say that staying in a house in San Francisco (thank you Anjo) made this trip very worthwhile. Sitting in the hot tub after a long day is very very cool.

While wandering around at Moscone, I bounced into Ronald Rood. Ronald and I had worked together and we had a very good time back then. Apparently without me he has too much spare time so he found the time to write a book on the Oracle Scheduler (http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Oracle-Scheduler-11g-Databases/dp/1847195989) . Tuesday he will be at Moscone signing his book. Meanwhile I have bought another book - on SOA Suite 11gR1. With the current exchange rate of the dollar and an extra 20% discount this was a steal. Hmmmm, maybe I should write a book myself and become famous.

Sunday 08:30 - and the fun starts!!! It is always a tremendous feeling to be at OOW. So many colleagues and people genuinely interested in Oracle. I'm taking my morning fix first with Alex Gorbachev on RAC Workload Management and then I will head from Moscone to the Hilton to see a session on Oracle Service Bus 11g Deep Dive. Stay tuned for more.

After the Oracle Mix voting process was finished two of my five presentations were selected to be presented. I am looking forward to present: The great ESB - OSB - BPEL cook-off and Combining the two coolest things on the world Weblogic and Lego Mindstorms See you all at the Oracle Open World in SF ;-)

I have written a short how-to document that demonstrates the usage of Grid Control to monitor the performance of web services. Check it out on: http://www.foxglove-it.nl/documents/MonitorWebServicesinGridControl.pdf

I had two sessions at Oracle Netherlands yesterday in the evening and today the whole day. Yesterday Rob Zoeteweij gave a presentation about the Provisioning within Grid Control. Today was the technical briefing of the Oracle Partners about FMW11g. Both events gave me a pile of new ideas - both business wise as well as technical. So I guess I will spend a part of the upcoming weekend with another deep-dive of the new FMW11g products and also prepare some input for my management on "How to make money with FMW11g". I expect that I will take my laptop with me on my vacation - which is just a week away. I only need to find a way to smuggle this machine into my car without my wife finding this out :-) The funny thing of being in the same place (Oracle office) twice was that I started to look for my car this afternoon where I had put it yesterday in the evening. I guess I need a little bit of vacation anyway.

I am sitting in my garden, enjoying the good weather (26 C/79 F) and build a new Virtual Machine in order to install the new Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. For me this is a perfect afternoon ;-)

If you go to http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12839_01/index.htm you will see the following: So with the new version of the software a new look and feel of the documentation is available. It takes a minute to find your way around, but it looks a little bit better than the old tabbed version of the documentation.

Yesterday the new version of Fusion Middleware was released. Thomas Kurian and a group of senior Oracle people talked about the new version, showed some demos and included customers for some testimonials. The software is already available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/middleware/htdocs/111110_fmw.html I have downloaded almost everything already and will start to install this piece by piece on my machine. I am particularly interested in the IDM Analytics and the new features of the Web Center Suite. Also the integration of the Oracle Service Bus with BPEL and their management inside the Enterprise Manager seem to be more than worthwhile to investigate.

Could you do me a favor and vote for my sessions for the Oracle Open World 2009? Go to these URL's (short registration) and click on vote: https://mix.oracle.com/oow/proposals/10412-combining-the-two-coolest-things-on-the-world-weblogic-and-lego-mindstorms https://mix.oracle.com/oow/proposals/10471-the-big-esb-osb-bpel-cook-off Thanks in advance! cu Andreas

I'm taking some steps to work on my ECM 2.0 skills. One of the things to do was the tutorial which comes with the software. At a certain point you are asked to use the "Administration Server". Clicking on it revealed the following text: Unable to retrieve root IdcAdmin page. Permission denied. Address '127.0.0.1' is not an allowable remote socket address. Ok, I'm using VMWare and did this from the Windows host, while the Content Server runs on one of my Linux machines. I tried with a browser inside the VMWare itself. Same result. Searching the OTN forums I found a part of the solution. The posts say that you need to add the IP address of the machine to the config.cfg file. Then the apache.cfg file needs to be changed ("Allow from any" becomes "Allow from all"). The final step is the restart of the server. Well - it took me a while to find out why it didn't work. The content server has (at least) two servers: one in $UCM_HOME/etc and one...

Oracle has a competition which is called "Are You The Smartest". This is for Oracle partners only. After five sessions with four multiple choice tests the results came in last week. I won for Accenture. Apparently I was the only one who prolongated his title from the 2008 competition. So I will be on a trip to see Oracle's HQ in Redwood Shores, enjoy Las Vegas and fly with a helicopter to the Grand Canyon. Before you all think I'm bragging I need to tell you that I did not expect it, and the two runner ups were just trailing one and two points. So the competitors were very good and I will need to do my best to beat them again next year. However the best is of course that I have again learned some things which I did not know before. This is the BEST PRICE EVER!

I found this on the Oracle OOW2009 blog: http://blogs.oracle.com/oracleopenworld/2009/05/come_fly_with_me.html# I hope that the possibility to fly with Sean Tucker also applies to presenters - who register in a different way than the normal conference attendee. BTW: I just showed the YouTube movie of Sean Tucker to my wife. She just said: "All Oracle people are crazy!". I just replied: "Yes - they are! And this is a good thing ;-) ".

As I am setting my first baby steps into the world of Weblogic I have to deal with things that might seem very easy for the experienced Weblogic gurus out there, but nevertheless I put my ranting on this blog. When you are faced with an issue in your Weblogic domain, there is apparently no tool to delete this domain. The only solution seems to be to remove the directory in which you have created this domain.

When I was extracting some information from an OID I found that the LDIF lines contain a line break. Some searches on the Internet delivered a nice solution from Dan Norris: http://www.dannorris.com/2008/09/08/concatenating-lines-in-ldapsearch-results/ Using that the the ldif file was modified and was reusable for my purpose (creating provisioning profiles for DIP).

Sometimes you just need a system to be gone immediately. And with immediately I mean NOW. The moment I do something it should be gone. This comes in quite handy when you work in an environment that offers High Availability, such as an Oracle RAC, and you need to test a failover or a node crash. The same applies to a middle tier that runs the Oracle Application Server on multiple machines. Well, if you want to do this you can use these handy commands: [root@mymachine] cd /proc [root@mymachine] echo c > sysrq-trigger Of course you must be root to write into that file. And be aware, you must have (physical) access to the machine as you really need to boot it again. This can be done by pressing the button, or if you use virtualization or any ILO-tool by the available interface.

Another issue during the installation with RAC on Windows was the fact that the VIPCA failed. Of course both machines were pingable so there was no obvious error. After some searching the following emerged: the VIP's for both nodes were all on one node. While trying to move the VIP to the other node it showed that the network was called "Team A + B" on machine 1 and "Team A+ B" on machine two. Apparently under windows the network name is used as well when it comes to the VIPCA. After fixing this error the VIPCA completed and the resource could be moved to the second node.

I added a nice gadget to the sidebar. If you are a follower of this blog just get on it.

After having some "nice" experiences with the installation of RAC on Windows I like to share this with you - so you might find a solution easier. The environment is easy, but not without some nice "features". We have a three node RAC cluster with two machines in room 1 and the third machine in room 2 (both on the same site). We did not run cluvfy as this very often gives errors when everything is OK. On the SAN we will start with only one voting disk, and add two more later. Also the OCR will be mirrored. Furthermore we intend to use OCFS on some of the LUN's of the SAN. Well, the installation went ok, the other machine was found, etc etc etc. However the first configuration assistant failed. Research showed some error - the usual stuff about node connectivity. Stopped the OUI and retried from the command line. Found the following errors in the evmd.log Oracle Database 10g CRS Release 10.2.0.1.0 Production Copyright 1996, 2005 Oracle. All rights reserved. 2008-...