Speculation about EBS Release 12.2

Floyd Teeter raises some good points in his blog posting out today. You can read the full posting here (http://orclville.blogspot.com/2012/08/i-wonder-what-tomorrow-has-in-mind-for.html). Primarily, that we won't actually have EBS R12.2 released during OpenWorld (as many of us were hoping).

Don't get me wrong, there will certainly be some good EBS R12.2 information out there. Oracle put together a very informative presentation and discussion surrounding the patching changes at Collaborate in Las Vegas this past spring. You can almost certainly bet that there will be an updated version at OpenWorld.

But, considering that the closed Beta program is still underway and the Early Adopter program hasn't started, any path of deduction should tell you that you're not going to have a R12.2 "GA" announcement for a few months at best. Which most means that sometime around Collaborate 2013 (Denver) would be a decent guess.

– James

Listing Installed Packages on Linux

NOTE: First, let me mention that, unless otherwise indicated, when I blog about Linux it will be about the RPM-based distributions that are certified with the Oracle Database (RedHat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux).

Normally, when you're looking to see which packages are installed on Linux (RedHat, Oracle, CentOS), you would use this command:

rpm -qa

Unfortunately, the standard output of that command omits alot of useful information. It may or may not indicate if you have the 32 or 64 bit version of a package installed, for example.

So, for a command that will show you which packages are installed in a format that looks like the name of the RPM file:

rpm -qa --queryformat \

"%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}.rpm\n" |\

sort > pkglist_`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M`.txt

– James

Useful desktop tools for the EBS Consultant (and DBAs)

This is a short list of some of the tools that I (and others) depend on when we're working at clients.

Snag-IT! Commercial ($49.95). (Windows & Mac) http://www.techsmith.com/snagit.html Excellent tool if you have to document graphically intensive tasks. Provides nice ways to highlight and circle captured images, also allows you to quickly capture just the active window (or a pre-defined region of the screen), dump multiple captures into a directory, and even sequentially name the files.

Toad Commercial ($955.00 and up). (Windows only) http://www.quest.com/toad/ For many developers and implementation consultants, Toad has a virtually religious following. It is an excellent SQL query/development tool and allows you to easilly save query results into Microsoft Excel format (which will keep Oracle Support plenty happy).  [Full disclosure:  Those of you that have worked with me in the past know that I don't use Toad (or TOra, or SQL Developer, for that matter) for a variety of reasons (which will be explained in a later posting).]

TOra Open Source (Free). (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris) http://torasql.com/about Has many of the same core features as Toad.

Oracle SQL Developer Commercial (Free-ish). (Windows, Linux, others). http://www.oracle.com/sqldeveloper Also has many of the same core features as Toad.

VirtualBox Open Source (Free). (Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris) http://www.virtualbox.org Do you want to run a Virtual Macine on your laptop? Maybe you're running Windows 7 and need a copy of Windows XP and an old version of IE so that you can test things and support your users? What if you'd really rather be using Linux but still have to run some Windows software? VirtualBox provides an easy way to create and run a VM of another operating system. Literally run Linux in a Window! (Or even fullscreen).

SecureCRT Commercial ($139.99) (Windows, Mac, Linux) http://www.vandyke.com/products/securecrt/index.html This is a very nice ssh client. It works very well and has a very nice user interface. Unfortunately, it's fairly expensive. Other (free) choices (on Windows) include: PuTTY http://www.putty.org/, BitVise Tunnelier http://www.bitvise.com/tunnelier, OpenSSH for Windows http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/, and Cygwin http://www.cygwin.com/. If you're on a Mac or Linux system (or running a copy of Linux in a Virtual Machine), then you already have a built-in ssh client.

– James