How to Use this Book

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This book touches all aspects of what an Apps administrator does day to day. We will look at what is involved in installing a new 11i environment, what goes into upgrading from a 10.7 or an 11.0.3 release, and what happens during a migration from one maintenance release of 11i to another. Once you have it installed, what is entailed in patching, cloning, and exactly what are all of those AD Utilities that everyone is always talking about? What are all of the services that will be running on my middle tier and what do I do with these finicky Concurrent Managers? This book will provide you with real world hints and tips to help you with your day-to-day tuning, troubleshooting, and maintenance and will help you efficiently provide reliable service to your end users.

Managers, co-workers, and those who have to deal on a day-to-day basis with the Apps DBA will find this book helpful as a tool to understand what the Apps administrator is talking about and what that job looks like from the inside.

Chapter 1: Introducing Apps

This introductory chapter explains what exactly this new suite of products (that have been packaged together and launched to be accessible through any browser anywhere) has to offer and what it means to the company and to the Apps DBA. It discusses the technical architecture and gives the reader a background in the fundamental language of the Oracle E-Business Suite as well as the language of the corporate environment in which it is used. It also touches on the responsibilities of the Apps DBA and how this role differs from that of a typical Oracle DBA.

Chapter 2: What Is New in 11i, 8i, and 9i

This chapter discusses what new features not only the Oracle E-Business Suite brought with it, but the features of 8i and 9i that it takes advantage of, as well as those features that an Apps DBA can take advantage of in daily dealings with the system. Many of the new features are those which a DBA might deal with in day-to-day life, stressing the fact that an Apps DBA still maintains all of the awareness of the database and its operations as any other DBA does with the added attention to the details of Applications' middle tier of products.

Chapter 3: The Surrounding Environment

Oracle E-Business Suite does not live in a vacuum and this chapter stresses those portions of the environment that touch the Oracle E-Business Suite and allow it to function to its fullest. Many of these are things that you may have had to deal with or have read about previously, but they are now impacting your life in an entirely new way. Some of these are things that you will probably never have dealt with before, but they will make your dealings with Oracle E-Business Suite in some ways easier and more intuitive, and in some ways more challenging and confusing. Some of the surrounding environmental pieces are geared particularly to those operating in a Windows® environment; some are universal to all operating systems.

Chapter 4: Apache

Apache is the core of the Oracle 9iAS services. With its rather in-depth and flexible configuration files, directives, and containers, casual familiarity with the inner workings is something that the Apps administrator needs. This chapter will give you an overview of the inner workings of the Apache server that is at the heart of the Oracle Applications HTTP server.

Chapter 5: Java and JServ

Extending the capabilities of Apache by means of the mod_jserv module, JavaServer pages, and other Java components, Oracle E-Business Suite makes extensive use of the newer Web programming standards. Without some understanding of what these are and what they could mean to you, your job as administrator could become significantly more difficult, especially when it comes to debugging problems. You will want to look to this chapter for information that will give you a better basic understanding of the way that Oracle uses Java and how it can impact your life.

Chapter 6: Other Services

In addition to JServ and Apache, there are more services in 11i that you will work with frequently. Once running, many will cause you few concerns. Others may be more problematic. Several have been around for a long time. Several are new components of the core product, but were available as add-ons in previous releases. In this chapter, you will find information dealing with these components.

Chapter 7: Printing

Printing is often one of the most misunderstood parts of how Oracle E-Business Suite works. Everyone takes for granted that when you tell a document to print, it is almost magically going to show up at the printer. In many programs that you use every day, this is almost true. With 11i you have to have a basic understanding of the inner workings of the way that the application and the printer interface via the operating system. While not an all-inclusive explanation of all of these inner workings, Chapter 7 will allow you to have a basic understanding, enough of an understanding that you can set up and troubleshoot printing as it occurs on the application.

Chapter 8: AD and Other Utilities

Chapter 8 addresses the mystical sounding AD Utilities and some of the other handy utilities that you will find yourself dealing with often as you maintain your system. These utilities are often seen sprinkled throughout resumes and job listings for Apps professionals, and they look impressive and complicated. This chapter will acquaint you with the utilities that you will find becoming your friends as you navigate your way through the life of your system. After reading this chapter, you too will be able to liberally use words like ADADMIN and ADPATCH with ease and understand what you are talking about, what they do, and what to look for when a good utility goes bad.

Chapter 9: Installing, Upgrading, and Migrating

How do you actually get the thing onto your system? Chapter 9 will give you hints on what to plan for in an upgrade or a migration. It will give you hints and tips on what to do to stay sane in an insane world and how to remember what you did later. There are different things to take into consideration with the different approaches to getting your system to the latest release of the Application. The path that you follow will have its own set of opportunities and problems and with the help of this chapter you will be ready to deal with them.

Chapter 10: Patching

Patching is the mainstay of many Apps DBAs' existence. Chapter 10 addresses the pieces of a patch, what each does, what can break, and how to make the best use of your patching hours. There are suggestions on what to look for in the logs and how to manage what can quickly appear to become an unmanageable process. In this chapter you will find out how to merge many patches into a single patch to minimize impact to your system and find out when you cannot merge a patch no matter how enticing it looks. You will also look at patches that do not use ADPATCH to do their installation and find out the new manner of installing database patches.

Chapter 11: Cloning

Plants do it, sheep have done it, and it is one of the more common things to occur on an Oracle E-Business Suite system — cloning. In Chapter 11 we look at logical times to clone, the main Oracle manners of cloning, and alternative ways to proceed through making an exact (or near) duplicate of one system into another environment. We also look at some of the ways that a clone can break and what to do if one does. There are some almost supported methods to fixing a clone gone bad and the more supported (but often less practical) way to accomplish the same ends.

Chapter 12: Concurrent Managers and Concurrent Processing

One of the most powerful features of the Applications product suite is the ability to do Concurrent Processing. Concurrent Managers, Concurrent Programs, and the ability to do Concurrent Processing is one of the ways to turn your Online Transaction Processing system into a batch processing environment without having to make any changes to the parameters and without having to restart the instances or port the data to another environment. Concurrent Managers are often quirky, sometimes difficult to tune, and often tricky to report on. Chapter 12 gives you some ideas on how to tune your Concurrent Processes and make an already powerful feature work even better for you.

Chapter 13: AutoConfig and Oracle Application Manager

Two of the latecomers to the 11i suite of products are the ability to run AutoConfig (automatic configuration) to maintain your system's configuration settings and use the Oracle Application Manager to monitor and manage different parts of your system. Throughout this chapter we look at the new features that help make your life easier and how you can make use of the tools that you are already paying for. Chapter 13 also provides you with some information on the alternatives that are available through third-party providers.

Chapter 14: Odds and Ends

Chapter 14 brings you things that do not elegantly fit anywhere else, but do not really require a chapter of their own. In this chapter we look at dealing with Oracle Support and effective tuning methods you can use to determine bottlenecks in your system and printing, to name a few. In this chapter, you also get ideas of other places to look for information, where (other than directly from Oracle) to ask the pressing questions and get an answer from someone who has really been there, and what groups are available to assist you in your journey down the road to successful Apps administration.

Let the adventure begin.

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