Oracle Apps

Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX), formerly called HTML DB, is a rapid web application development tool for the Oracle database. Using only a web browser and limited programming experience, you can develop and deploy professional applications that are both fast and secure.

This month some of the top APEX gurus got together for APEXposed! 2008, held in Chicago on October 29th and 30th. Crowds of close to 300 participants came to hear some of the industry's best APEX and PL/SQL experts present on topics ranging from security to error handling to integrating Ajax components with Oracle Application Express. This year, APEXposed joined forces with Steven Feuerstein's OPP (Oracle PL/SQL Professionals) conference, giving attendees the option to choose presentations from either track.

We don't mean to gloat (much), but we've got Scott Spendolini, President of Sumner Technologies, offering two APEX training classes the week of December 15-19 (just in time for some good skiing). Scott co-authored a new book with John Edward Scott, Pro Oracle Application Express. Click here if you'd like to see a preview of John and Scott''s book.

If you'd like to read more about APEX, check out some of these sites:
http://deneskubicek.blogspot.com/ - Winner of this year's Oracle APEX Developer of the Year
http://jes.blogs.shellprompt.net/ - John Scott's blog - he's a co-author of Pro Oracle Application Express
http://spendolini.blogspot.com/ - Scott Spindolini's blog

Sign up for Scott's Introduction to APEX 3.1 class in Salt Lake City, Utah, Dec 15-17
Sign up for Scott's Intermediate Oracle APEX 3.1 class in Salt Lake City, Utah, Dec 18-19

When I was in Salt Lake City last month, Barbara Matthews asked me for my “Top 10” books about Oracle. I don’t normally do lists – and I don’t read many Oracle books – but Iggy Fernandez put the same question, slightly differently phrase, as part of a brief interview for the Northern California User Group magazine a few days later. So I thought I’d try to come up with a useful answer. This is Iggy’s phrasing:

Let's say that I'm a junior Oracle DBA and my manager offered to buy ten books on Oracle for me. Which books would you recommend?

Ten is a pretty big number, and I think you'd have to consider getting some books which are tailored to the parts of Oracle used by the business (such as RAC, streams, and so on) but I'll restrict myself to a fairly generic response - to the extent that some of the books aren't even specific to Oracle.

For my first choice I'd try to claim a Kindle or Sony e-Reader as the first "book". I haven't used one in anger, and the Kindle isn't even available in the UK, but the brief play I had with the e-reader left me keen to buy one. (Unfortunately the demo model in the shop was sealed in a tamper-proof frame and had no real books on it because someone had accidentally deleted all (100) books from its memory – so maybe I should be a little cautious about recommending it.)

The second choice(s) ought to be some Oracle manuals. I know you can get them in html or pdf form online (I prefer the pdfs with Acrobat indexing); but for simply reading (rather than reference) there's nothing quite like a real book - and I don't mean a stack of paper from a laser printer. My books of choice would be the Concepts Guide, the Database Admin Guide (Fundamentals) and the Performance Tuning Guide. I might pick the 9i versions, rather than the 10g versions because some of the 10g manuals are getting to the stage where they lean too heavily on "how to use the OEM GUI".

But if you've got a Kindle or eReader, you can probably load the entire set of pdf files for the last four versions of Oracle, and carry them all around at once ! So I'm not going to count any of the Oracle manuals towards my list of 10.

In no particular order, then, here are the other nine:

2. Tapio Lahdenmaki and Mike Leach: Relational Database Index Design and the Optimizers. The authors are better known in the DB2 world than the Oracle world, but the concepts and understanding needed to design good indexes are the same even when there are variations in vendor implementation. (For more details, check my review on www.amazon.co.uk)

3. Dan Tow: SQL Tuning. This is the book that does for SQL Tuning what Tapio Lahdenmaki and Mike Leach do for understanding indexes. There is a way to think through the problems of data access - that method is going to help you find the best execution plan and work out what indexes your system needs.

4. Toon Koppelaars and Lex de Haan: Applied Mathematics for Database Professionals. This is a book that many might think too theoretical for a practising DBA - but if you don't have some idea of why the relational model is a "good thing" then you can't do your job properly. This book may not be a direct help to you in your work, but it may help you to appreciate what you can achieve with the Oracle software. (For more details, check my review on www.amazon.co.uk)

5. Tom Kyte: Expert Oracle Database Architecture. For a wealth of information about a wide range of the Oracle technology and how best to use it. This book tells you a lot about what Oracle can do, but also shows you, by the way it's written, how to extend your knowledge into new areas. If I were allowed a longer list, I would also include Tom's Expert One-on-one Oracle.

6. Jonathan Lewis: Cost Based Oracle - Fundamentals. I know that it's my own, but it is the best book you're going to find about how the optimizer works, and if you understand the core features of the optimizer you'll find it much easier to solve problems with slow SQL. (And if I were allowed a longer list, I probably would include Practical Oracle 8i)

7. Christian Antognini : Troubleshooting Oracle Performance. A recent release that contains a huge amount of information about how to identify and address performance problems.

8. Cary Millsap and Jeff Holt: Optimizing Oracle Performance. There are a couple of key points about Oracle performance that are rarely stated as clearly as they are in this book. One is the focus on addressing the users' complaints, the other is the impact of concurrency. It won't be casual reading for everyone - but the chapter on queueing theory is a must-read for all DBAs.

9. Recovery. If you're a DBA, then the most important job you'll ever do is to make sure that you can recover the database quickly after a disaster - and if you're lucky you'll never have to do it. There's probably a good book out there somewhere, but I've never had any need to go looking for it. But if there is one, then every DBA should have a copy and be made to practise. The difficulty with recovery is that the bits you need to cover well are site dependent, and no one book will tell you all you really need to know about the way you end up doing things for your site.

10. X: One of my pet theories is that people learn more by seeing things go wrong, rather than being told what things look like when they are going well. So all DBAs should be given at least one really bad book about Oracle and told to compare the clarity of writing, quality of explanation, and method of teaching with a good book so that they can learn to recognise suspect material. There are plenty of bad books on the market - fortunately I haven't seen enough of them to be able to give you a "bottom 10" list.

Recently, I was installing a Vision instance on a development computer at home. This meant that I alone was responsible for the installation of the operating system and various Oracle products that I was interested in. The first hurdle was getting everything downloaded. For those who do not know, you can download the various Oracle products from http://edelivery.oracle.com. There are some agreements you have to sign regarding the software's use as well as agreeing not to export the software. After giving Oracle your name, email address and the name of your company, you are good to go on downloading just about everything Oracle has.

So, I started with downloading Oracle's Unbreakable Linux. I chose an older version to insure that everything I was going to be installing for testing was already certified. The download went smooth, the burning of the iso image to a compact disk for bootup installation worked well. But, as soon as I tried to complete the install I ran into the first of a few issues. The computer hung on the initial screen. What the heck? Why won't this dog-gone computer boot into the installation phase? A weekend to mull it over and several google sessions got me an answer. The SATA hard drives I was using were being adversely impacted by the USB mouse and keyboard. One forum note pointed out the exact solution. Boot into the BIOS and change the compatibility mode from IDE to RAID. How easy is that? Well, wouldn't you know, it worked like a charm. Bang.... the rest of the install went smoothly. What's next?

The whole intent of this project was to install an E-Business Suite R12 Vision instance. Have you ever tried to download the E-Business environment from Oracle? I'll pick this article back up when I am done...

Okay, it has been 3 days and I am ready to install. Yep, you heard me say it. Three days to get the whole suite downloaded. Soooooooo painful. But, I'm ready to rock. Everything is unzipped and here is the size you can expect:

25G oraAppDB
5.3G oraApps
1.3G oraAS
2.5G oraDB
1.6G startCD

To re-phrase, let's get ready to installllllllllllll. Just kidding. Now that everything has been unzipped we can navigate to the following directory:

/soft_stage/R12_SRC/startCD/Disk1/rapidwiz

and execute ./rapidwiz. Make sure you use the dot convention since you are doing this install as root and will not have the requisite path set up. Of course, you may have taken the time to set all of this up, in which case you should be good to go. This install will require X windows graphical libraries, which I got at by kicking off a vnc session. VNC has various flavors, all of which can be downloaded free off the net. So, I started my VNC session using the command:

vncserver :25 -depth 8 -cc3

This command input set the right pseudo color levels per Oracle's instruction, and the install began. You can test if it worked by executing the "xclock" command, which should produce a graphical clock. If you see the clock continue on. If you do not, use MetaLink to look at the error you just got. Now it's time to execute the rapdwiz command as illustrated below:

./rapidwiz

We have our graphical Oracle Universal Installer window now. The remainder of the install is very straight forward and kind of beyond some of the things I wanted to cover here. If you want a blow by blow of the install, leave us a comment and we'll write that up for the next newsletter. By the way, if you are planning for the space needed for the install you will need the following:

25G apps
136G db
56M inst

But, enough about that. One of the primary drivers for this article was an interesting error I got: RW-20019.



I encountered this error after working through all of the configuration options from the various screens. At the end, you get to a screen that allows you to add an additional node into the install. As this was a single node install I went right past it by clicking "Next". But after doing so, I got this dreaded RW-20019 error. The error seems straight forward but I did just go through every configuration screen, so how could there be no actions? Clicking on "Add Server" allowed me to put the server name information in, but then it errored out saying the name was already being used. Starting the install over and insuring every box was filled out correctly did not change help at all. I looked at MetaLink but found nothing of use. I googled this error and came up with several other folks asking the same question but no answers.

What was left? I went ahead and jumped on Red Hat's knowledge base and found some help from a forum note saying this was related to a network problem. That is the pitts since I am not a network guy! The actual article that gave me the thought process on solving this issue was a development article talking about how some programs look at the /etc/hosts file for network information even when there is not a real need. So, I opened up the /etc/hosts file and there was nothing in it. There was some header information but no network entries at all. Not even my localhost information. While I am not sure why that happened it was an easy fix. I added a line for my localhost designation as follows:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

I also added an entry for my statically assigned IP address as follows:

192.168.1.1 srvr1.localdomain srvr1

Pow... the configuration phase completed and after the install, the instance fired up right nicely... So, I was talking to other people and decided that detailing my brush with the RW-20019 error might give others a quicker resolution. So, here it is...

Lon White, Chief Technology Officer, Triora Group