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Oracle Documentation: The broken links fiasco continues…

So I was just patting myself on the back for finishing my website clean up, then I happened on a few pages with broken links to Oracle documentation. That annoyed me, but I figured I better do a quick scan to see how many broken external links I had. The first attempt was a complete fail because the tool I used clicked all my Google Adsense adverts, making me a DotCom millionaire in about 3 minutes. I wrote to Google and apologised profusely. In my defense, the tool I used was right at the top of the list in the Chrome Web App Store…

Once I got a link checker that didn’t put me at risk of a jail sentence, things got a little more depressing. A very large number of my articles contain broken links to Oracle documentation. As I started looking at links it became apparent that Oracle have used at least 3 main URLs for documentation over the years:

http://download-west.oracle.com/docs (8i -> 10gR2)
http://download.oracle.com/docs (11gR1 -> 11gR2)
http://docs.oracle.com/ (post 11gR2 stuff)

The versions listed are based on the links I’ve added in my articles. If you check today, all/most docs come from the “http://docs.oracle.com” address.

This in itself shouldn’t present a problem, because any company with an involvement in the web knows that URLs should never change. If by chance you do have to change something, you put a redirect in place. The problem is, Oracle don’t do this, or at least not consistently. Check out the following three URLs:

They are the same document, just using the three base URLs I mentioned previously. If you click them, you’ll notice the first one fails and the following two work. My guess is Oracle have created a 301 permanent redirect from http://download.oracle.com/docs to http://docs.oracle.com, but not bothered to maintain the http://download-west.oracle.com/docs URL, thereby breaking just about every link to its docs on the internet that references anything older than about 11gR1. That includes forums (including their own), blog posts, documents containing URLs etc. It’s just a nightmare.

So PLEASE Oracle:

Stop changing URLs.
When you do change them, PLEASE use rewrites/redirects properly.
Remember, your rewrites/redirects should be permanent, not just long enough for search engines to update their indexes.

This would solve the vast majority of my gripes about the links to the Oracle docs…

Notes:

For those not familiar with web servers, this kind of rewrite/redirect for a whole domain name is really simple. It’s one line in your “.htaccess” file, not a separate one for each page, so I’m not asking for the world here.
I am aware there are other issues with changing URLs at Oracle that a blanket redirect would not solve. I’m not even going to start on whitepapers and PDFs…

Cheers

Tim…

¶ Posted 27 January 2012 † Tim... § Oracle § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Log Buffer #256, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Searching for the blogging inspiration? On the look-out for that Eureka moment for your next blockbuster blog post? Finding the exact ingredients for your dream rambling? Well in the Log Buffer Edition, there are some awe-inspiring posts in this Log Buffer #256. Get Inspired, keep blogging. Oracle: If there is a notable technical database conference [...]

¶ Posted 27 January 2012 † Fahd Mirza § Oracle § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

RIP Flash-based My Oracle Support

The end is nigh for Adobe Flash at My Oracle Support. The first step will happen during this weekend’s planned maintenance of My Oracle support, when all of MOS will be down for 5 hours starting at midnight eastern, Saturday January 28. Once it comes back up, the unadvertised non-Flash supporthtml.oracle.com will come up as [...]

¶ Posted 26 January 2012 † Marc Fielding § Oracle § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Ouch!

Here’s a set of Instance Activity stats I’ve never seen before, and I’d rather never see again. From an active standby running 11.1.0.7 on AIX:

select
        name, value
from    v$sysstat
where
        name in (
                'consistent gets - examination',
                'consistent gets',
                'session logical reads'
        )
or      name like 'transaction tables%'
;

NAME                                                                            VALUE
---------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------
session logical reads                                                 102,731,023,313
consistent gets                                                       102,716,499,376
consistent gets - examination                                          98,170,595,252
transaction tables consistent reads - undo records applied             96,590,314,116
transaction tables consistent read rollbacks                                2,621,019

5 rows selected.

The instance has been up for about 60 hours – and 95% of the work it has done has been trying to find the commit times for transactions affecting blocks that are in need of cleanout. If you look at the two statistics about the transaction tables (those are the things in the undo segment header blocks) you can see that the average work done to find a commit time was a massive 48,000 visits to undo blocks.

The solution was fairly simple – kill all the reports which had been running for the last six hours, because they were the ones that were causing a problem, while simultaneously suffering most from the problem – at the time I killed the worst offender it was managing to read about 50 blocks per minute from the database, and doing about 100,000 buffer visits to undo blocks per second.

You probably won’t see this every again, but if you do, a quick check is:

select * from v$sess_io order by consistent_changes;

Repeat a couple of times and check if any sessions are doing a very large number (viz: tens of thousands) of consistent changes per second.

¶ Posted 26 January 2012 † Jonathan Lewis § Oracle § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

A Quick Pas de Deux with Dancer

This is going to be a short one, but potentially useful for anybody writing a Dancer template module, or just plain curious about Dancer‘s guts. So here goes: A few weeks ago, it came to my attention that Dancer’s Dancer::Template::Abstract, the base class for its template modules, added a test to verify that the template [...]

¶ Posted 26 January 2012 † Yanick Champoux § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Nested Tables 101

From An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology

A nested table is much like an associative array but you do not determine the index. The index grows by using the extend command and the index is always an incrementing integer value. You can use the DELETE attribute to delete individual elements so you will always want to

¶ Posted 26 January 2012 † An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology § Oracle § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Hello There LinkedIn, It’s Been a While

Attending an enterprisey conference means exchanging and collecting lots of business cards. I usually carry stickers, but somehow they’re not in my laptop bag anymore.

Anyway, one guy I met decided to connect to me on LinkedIn, a brilliant reminder of that professional network that I’ve neglected over the last half decade. I’m really glad he did because I was then reminded that most of the people giving me business cards, also are on LinkedIn.

So, I’ve been building my professional network like a boss.

Interestingly, like Facebook, LinkedIn’s search leaves much to be desired; it’s great if you’re within two hops of the person, but if not, good luck to you.

Google, however, is really good at searching LinkedIn, which tells you a lot about why Twitter decided not to renew their search agreement. On the one hand, you could argue that allowing Google to index your content brings people to your site, makes you relevant, etc. If you go this route, why even have search at all?

On the other, if Google decides to tweak (ahem, socialize) its algorithm, then your results could suffer. Most services offer search, but why does it have to be so bad? I wonder if LinkedIn has hidden some results based on the degrees of separation. They do try to upsell you when you try to connect to people outside your immediate network.

Anyway, search always needs to be better. My LinkedIn profile needs more attention, etc.

Thoughts?Possibly Related Posts:

¶ Posted 25 January 2012 † Jake § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Pythian at RMOUG Training Days 2012

Pythian is very excited to return to the much-awaited RMOUG 12 held in Denver, Colorado from February 14-16, 2012. Keep your eyes open for Alex Gorbachev, Marc Fielding, Don Seiler and Gwen Shapira in attendance. We have a fantastic line-up of speakers this year featuring a total of seven papers presented by Alex, Marc, Don [...]

¶ Posted 25 January 2012 † Maryanne Birksted § Oracle § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Where’s the Halo Exactly?

Apple’s earnings noted a halo effect, a.k.a. as the iPhone as a gateway drug.

Enterprise iPhone 4S activations spike, highlight Apple’s halo effect | ZDNet

Since its release in 2007, the iPhone has served as the perfect gateway drug to other Apple products in the home. Apple is now seeing this among enterprise buyers too.

I spend a fair amount of time attending enterprisey gatherings, so I get a nice sample of the hardware people rock for work. Years ago, I was among the very small number using a Mac. That has changed, but PCs still dominate these gatherings, by a large margin.

I see a ton of iPhones, like 95%, and iPads are very common too. Macs, not so much though, maybe 10-25% depending on the attendees.

So, if there’s a halo, I’m not seeing much of it.

I also get the sense that very few people BYOD, at least to conferences, e.g. many of the Macs I see have corporate inventory tags on them.

You? Comments?Possibly Related Posts:

¶ Posted 25 January 2012 † Jake § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

E-Business Suite and APEX installation

Before doing the integration of Oracle Application Express (APEX) with E-Business Suite (EBs) you need to have both environments installed. The Oracle white paper talks about the installation of APEX, but not about installing E-Business Suite.

The white paper states; the prerequisites for the solution given are:

Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 or above
Oracle E-Business Suite Patch 12316083
Oracle Database 10.2.0.3 or above
Oracle Application Express 3.2 or above

The first thing I needed was an E-Busisness Suite environment. Oracle provides some VM Templates for E-Business Suite 12.1.3. I wanted a complete demo system, like for example the HR schema in the Oracle database or the Sample Application in APEX. The VM Template for E-Business Suite includes the Vision demo.

I never installed EBs before, so I did some research how to do that. Finally I didn't proceed with installing E-Business Suite on our servers, as MCX was happy to provide us with a complete Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 Vision installation on their servers. The version of the underlying Oracle database is 11.2.0.2.0. I also asked them to apply patch 12316083.

APEX needs to be installed on the same Oracle database as the Oracle E- Business suite database server.
We went with installing the latest version of APEX at the moment: APEX 4.1.

Installing APEX is not that hard, basically running some scripts. The only bit you have to be careful with is the choice of web listener. APEX supports three web listeners: mod_plsql, EPG and the APEX Listener.
The mod_plsql gateway is disabled by default by EBs R12, so you shouldn't go with that. The EPG is not recommended either as it will add additional load on the database server, so the best choice would be the APEX Listener. The APEX Listener is the recommended choice in any circumstance anyway, regardless of EBs. (on a related note; I'm giving a presentation about my experiences moving to the APEX Listener at OGh and ODTUG.)

So after installing APEX and using the APEX Listener on an EBs configuration, the architecture looks like this: