EBS, Collaborate, Security, BPEL, OWB, Blog of Note, Hyperion, EPM, Burnout, WiFi

General, Miscellaneous and a Bit of Everything
Christopher Gait, Oracle Infogram Editor | Sep 2, 2010 16:50 +0000

EBS

This week at the E-Business Suite Technology blog:





Collaborate 11


Esoteric Security

Great, now even if you invest a fortune in extremely esoteric quantum crypto equipment to guard your data transmissions....you're still vulnerable. So far the system used by the ancients--training a trustworthy courier to keep secrets and sending him to the place the data is needed--seems to still be the best technique available: Hardware hackers defeat quantum crypto • The Register

BPEL

Over at the Online Apps DBA blog there is a handy posting on Troubleshooting BPEL worklist integration with Oracle Single Sign-on.

OWB

The Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) Weblog has a recommendation for those upgrading to OWB 11.2.0.1: Recommended OWB Patch before Repository Upgrade or Migration: 9802120

Blog of Note: Rittman Mead Consulting

You'll find a lot of postings here linked from the Rittman Mead Consulting blog. It's one of the best out there, with consistently high quality technical content. A couple of samples over the last week or two:

Oracle BI EE 11g – Authentication & Authorization – Weblogic Security

and

Oracle BI EE 11g – New BI Server Functions

Hyperion

Speaking of great blogs, In 2 Hyperion has a posting on Long Live The Essbase Add-In!

EPM

New EPM Documentation Portal Available on Oracle.com

The EPM Documentation Portal provides a single entry point to locate documentation, training and other useful information that assists with the implementation process and enhances a customer’s experience with our products.

The tool is available on oracle.com from this link: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/index.html.

· On the right hand side of the page, click on Technical Information

· then Enterprise Performance Management Documentation Portal

which takes you to this page: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/technical-information-147174.html

Burnout

Over at Lifehacker, always one of my favorite general technology and office life blogs, is an article on the addictive nature of technology and how to keep it from consuming your life:

Why Technology Is So Addictive, and How You Can Avoid Tech Burnout

WiFi

Wifi has become an increasingly important part of day to day life. Windows' wifi builtin is crude at best. Several of these programs look interesting, but I haven't tried them yet, so I can't give you a review. I plan to get the one that measures signal strength of Wi-Fi servers in your home area, though, since it would be nice to know that you are on a channel not getting interference from a neighbor:

6 useful Wi-Fi tools for Windows - Computerworld


Scripting, Doom

General, Miscellaneous and a Bit of Everything
Christopher Gait, Oracle Infogram Editor | Aug 31, 2010 09:43 +0000

Scripting

This posting Effect Of Multiple SHMMAX Settings at the AskDba.org Weblog is useful in itself, but points out something I learned back in my days as a DBA that is of wider utility: Computers are dumb. Yes, I know they seem smart enough, but if you tell them in a batch file: Pour coffee. Put cup in coffee machine filling bracket, that's exactly what they'll do: Pour the coffee all over the floor and then drop the cup in place. The duplicate settings problem can be especially vexing. It reminds me of a time a friend of mine played a CD. Only something completely different played than he had expected. He took out the CD, looked at it, and only then realized that there had been a CD already in the drive and he put the new one in on top of it. Silly error? Perhaps, but things happen. Scripts are prone to this kind of error, and all the more prone if you don't document changes. Let's say Oracle Support solved a problem you were having in 10.2.0.3 by giving you an underscore parameter. You put it in your initialization parameters and all is good....at least until you move to 10.2.0.5 and find whackiness breaking out all over the DB. If you documented things you will find the date and reason that unserscore parameter was set and comment it out. If not, you may have to do a lot of exploring before you remember that change and track down why it is there and why it has kept you up nights all week.

Doomed Again
Every few years (well every few months, really) another death knell sounds for the relational model. Trouble is, it's based on solid math and just doesn't die off. Other bright attempts, however, like the hierarchical database and its stepchild the object oriented application-implemented approach, seem to haunt us regularly, but they never quite measure up to reality. The relational model, of course, is not implemented as theoretically envisioned, in any commercial RDBMS. But the fundamentals are there. This article at ReadWrite Enterprise has some interesting thoughts (in spite of calling tables 'entities' when a relational table is a relation, thus the name: relational): Is the Relational Database Doomed?

Security

General, Miscellaneous and a Bit of Everything
Christopher Gait, Oracle Infogram Editor | Aug 26, 2010 19:38 +0000
Security

An iTunes security flaw from a week or so ago (since fixed) has given rise to a more fundamental issue in Windows security. Ars Technica discusses it: Windows DLL-loading security flaw puts Microsoft in a bind .

EBS, Storage Performance, Exadata, Book Review, ADF, JDE

General, Miscellaneous and a Bit of Everything
Christopher Gait, Oracle Infogram Editor | Aug 24, 2010 18:13 +0000


The start of a series over at James Morle's always entertaining and useful blog: SaneSAN2010: Serial to Serial – When One Bottleneck Isn’t Enough

Exadata

An Oracle employee has some well-reasoned responses to what is being published by the competition over on his personal blog, Oracle Exadata and Netezza TwinFin Compared – An Engineer’s Analysis

Book Review

We've already passed along some kind words for Tom Kyte's latest book, but this review from Charles Hooper was so thorough I couldn't resist linking to it: Book Review: Expert Oracle Database Architecture: Oracle Database Programming 9i, 10g, and 11g Techniques and Solutions, Second Edition.

ADF

Some ideas from the on what's coming up from the GE2ORGE MAGGESSY blog on ADF at Oracle Open World (you are going, aren't you?): ADF and JQuery working together.

JD Edwards

A lighthearted rundown over at ITToolbox.com of the Top 10 Signs Your Company Needs Additional JDE Training (light-hearted in a 'ha, ha, only serious' manner, that is).