.:MattTopper.com:.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working with Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) lately and I’m putting together some walkthroughs / tips and tricks on working with the product.  I’ll start with a quick and short one today.  Sometimes DBA’s get wild hairs, I think its in their nature, the just decide they want to rename a database and tell all the developers that they need to make updates to their code / jdbc data sources to reflect that.  Inside an OIM deploy with OC4J there are two files you need to change to make this happen.  They are:

• <OH>/j2ee/<oim container>/config/data-sources.xml (2 places)
• <OIM HOME>/xellerate/config/xlconfig.xml (1 place)

If you search for ‘jdbc:oracle’ in each of the files you should be able to find these references pretty quickly.  These are also the places you need to modify things if you are migrating into a RAC environment or if your IP address / hostname / port change on the database.

Hopefully I’ll have something with more meet to post this weekend.

So I’ve been missing from here, email, etc for a while but I’ll address that later, for a sneak preview of why you can see my new disclaimer on the right hand side of this blog.  If you’ve been paying attention to the guys over at AppsLab (and who wouldn’t be), you’ll have noticed that they added some new functionality to Oracle Mix to nominate and vote on sessions for this years Oracle Open World.  Not too long after the launch Jake mentioned that they needed some new ideas on how to review the submitted sessions.  I had an idea to create a wordpress widget that lists all the sessions in a random order.  It took me a little while squeezing it out while life got in the way, but here it is:

Download mix-oow-2008-widget

If you want to check it out you can see it running in the sidebar of every page on this blog.  It’s a pretty generic plug-in, if you want to stream any feed from mix it should be pretty simple to modify, just remove the parsing for votes in the code.  The installation is pretty simple: Read the rest of this entry »

I keep seeing things pop up and people having trouble getting the Discoverer / BIP integration working.  I will say this is not the easiest of configurations, but with some additional steps anyone should be able to complete the task.  For those of you that have been following along, the latest Discoverer Cumulative Patch (CU4, p6357481) was released and  the Discoverer / BIP integration was not included with created a new interop patch for everyone numbered 6622352.

Just a couple notes on the install.  If you are applying the patch to a unix system you’re going to have to run the dos2unix command on the CreateOIDContainer.sh file in the <OH>/discoverer/util directory.   Also, notice the CreateOIDContainer.sh file, yes its case sensitive and don’t forget to edit the file and replace the %ORACLE_HOME% directive with your actual Oracle Home path, while you’re at it make sure you chmod 750 CreateOIDContainer.sh too.  Can you tell it was a windows guy who wrote the script ;-).

Anyways, before executing the CreateOIDContainer.sh script you’ll also need to properly setup all your paths which includes:
export ORACLE_HOME=<Your Oracle Home Path>
export LIBPATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib32:$ORACLE_HOME/lib:$ORACLE_HOME/jlib:$LIBPATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib32:$ORACLE_HOME/lib:$ORACLE_HOME/jlib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH


The big kicker that bit me this last time was that I was getting an error that the Discoverer product container doesn’t  exist in the OID Repository.  Well, for some reason that container doesn’t actually exist until a user is created in the OID through something like OIDDAS, since this client was using Server Chaining to bring in all their users (another blog post soon) we had never actually created a “new” native user in OID.

Needless to say the 10.1.2.3 Discoverer patch set can’t come soon enough which includes this patch with it.  Till then feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions.  If you want some more in depth examples of the config let me know and I’ll get some screen shots the next time I do this.

Alright, last night I posted on Twitter that this would be released this morning, well its still morning somewhere. Without further ado here is version two of the click-clack. Make sure you read through to the end for some interesting changes coming to the site soon or already deployed.

1. The first story was submitted by me, and not through the big controversial RSS feed option. The story entitled Do you recognize the man in this picture? came to my through my normal RSS feeds. Mashable is a great site that covers new and exciting web 2.0 site and other technology news. Low and behold I’m going through their feed today and saw an article that sparked my interest on a judge who sentenced a hacker for listing the ips coming from a usenet server. I clicked through and look at the picture in the article and its none other than infamous Oracle DBA / Miniature Horseman / Truffle Entrepreneur Don Burleson. Yes that is truly Don, if you don’t believe me, scroll down to the bottom of his own website for the picture. Too funny. 1,000,000 bonus points for Dan Norris for being the first to identify him.
2. The next article comes from Patrick Wolf the Oracle ApEx world asking people if its a good thing to create an ApEx certification. Certifications are something that I’ve always debated about with people, many people can read a book, pass a certification test and have no idea how to apply things in the real world. While there are some certifications that combine book and hands-on during the tests many do not. Personally, while certifiable, I don’t carry any certs its just something that doesn’t appeal to me, I prefer to spend my time learning new things and sharing with the world letting me experience and reference speak for themselves. I do agree that for newbies, certifications provide a great way for them

Read the rest of this entry »

Click this link. That is all.

Well, part of starting Ora-Click I wanted to start a series of blogs covering the top 5 articles of the week. Due to some technical difficulties I’m a week late, but I promise to make it extra extra interesting. So without further ado here are the top 5.

1. The big story of the week wasn’t Jakes post on the “8 Things” but actually the User Your Nose to Install an Oracle Database article. Some people claim that Oracle software is among the hardest to install. I tend to agree many of the earlier releases (<8) were a pain in the butt, but Oracle’s come a long way since then. Just to prove it Howard posted a link showing exactly how easy it is. I would love to link to it, but as I’ll discuss later Howard has shut down his blog until the “8 Things” craze slows down. When he gets back to earth the article can be found here.
2. The second article covers the new fixes and features of the latest mix.oracle.com release. I’m proud to be member 41 on the site and really think its a great way to get open and honest customer feedback. As the site grows there’s definitely some new features that need to be added to help manage consuming all the new content but knowing the AppsLab guys they’re already working on it. I would love to see Oracle open up the source to mix, as suggested by Jake here. I know that Anthony and Rich are overloaded fixing bugs and working on new features, it would be great to have the Oracle

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick post on something I was working on, my father passed away suddenly yesterday so I don’t have as much time to put into this post as I had hoped. Anyways, over the holiday I put together a quick Ubuntu VMWare virtual machine with Oracle XE, the new 11g Technical Preview 3 jDeveloper release and the SOA suite. Over the last week I uploaded it to Amazon S3 and am now distributing it as a torrent. Here are the links to the four torrent files (Amazon doesn’t let you compress multiple files into a single torrent).

http://www.matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk1.zip.torrent
http://www.matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk2.zip.torrent
http://www.matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk3.zip.torrent
http://www.matttopper.com/personal/torrents/Oracle11gTechnicalPreview.disk4.zip.torrent

It is a VMWare virtual machine, personally I still like VMWare because I can run it on my laptop and take it with me anywhere. Oracle VM has its place in the server room, but not on the desktop, yet. It can be used by anyone with VMWare Player (www.vmware.com) for free.

The username and password for the machine is : oracle / oraclevms
These are torrents so please continue to seed them after your downloads are complete, this is the only way I’ll be able to afford to keep them online for people. If you are new to torrents check out http://support.bittorrent.com/ there you will find all the info you need, or just ask one of your pirate friends and I’m sure they can help you out. Admittedly the VM isn’t as nicely put together or as small as I normally do, but due to the circumstances I hope people can understand. I may be offline for a few days, but enjoy the download. This is my trial run for the bigger Oracle/VMware torrent site I hope to have together soon. Thanks to everyone helping with it, we’ll be launched shortly.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to “Click It” below:

I like to think of myself as a pretty good follower of the Oracle news world, I spend at least an hour a day going through blogs, tweets, google alerts, etc. to make sure I’ve got a finger on the pulse of everything going on at Oracle. Honestly, its never enough, and for the many Oracle customers who’s job isn’t to keep up with every piece of Oracle technology its a confusing world right now.

Every other week we are seeing a new acquisition, new great code examples, etc. and there is no time to keep up with it. Also, its hard to find the best content through all the different sources. I’ve been using sites like Digg and Reddit to keep up with non-Oracle news. While Oracle is huge there is no way Digg would ever create an Oracle category, so I began my search to create my own Digg clone for the Oracle community. Luckily someone already had the same type of idea and created the open source software package, Pligg. All I had to do now was come up with a new design, deploy the site and tweak some of the settings.

So without further ado here it is http://www.ora-click.com the Digg clone for Oracle news. Feel free to join the site, submit some stories and contribute some comments. Right now I’ve got it set so that it takes three “Clicks” for it to appear as Popular News, obviously over time as more stories are submitted we’ll have to bump it up, but I think three is a great start.

If you’re looking to submit your own news all you have to do is log in and go to http://www.ora-click.com/submit.php put in your URL, story title and description. If you’re looking to embed the Ora-Click buttons in your own site I’ve created two sets of buttons to add to your posts.

The small button:

which can be added with the code:

<script src="http://www.ora-click.com/clickit/button-small.php" type="text/javascript"></script>

And the large button:

which can be added with the code

<script src="http://www.ora-click.com/clickit/button.php" type="text/javascript"></script>

It’s that simple, feel free to Click this story and try it out. The site has full RSS feeds for the entire site and also the categories individually. If you have any questions or comments please let me know either through comments here or via email at matt@matttopper.com.

Have fun and enjoy, for those that have asked the virtual machines site isn’t dead, I’ve just been working a million hours and haven’t had time to bring it up to my standards. Look for me to launch a new VM tomorrow on this site as a trial run for it.

I’ve always been intrigued by all the Oracle BI user groups out there, IOUG vs ODTUG vs OAUG. All of them have great leadership but none of them have great participation from the members. Over the years in working with all of them I’ve noticed that there aren’t many differentiators between them. An interesting questions popped up on Mix the other day wanting to merge all the BI related SIGs. Personally, I think its a great idea, but I know there are a lot of opinions out there on it. So lets hear it, make your voice heard in the mix discussion.

https://mix.oracle.com/ideas/13754-merge-all-bi-related-sigs

We’re all here for the same reason, trying to bring great BI to the world (sounds like a great campaign slogan).

Let the barrage of OpenWorld begin. Between two internal preparation meeting tomorrow, finalizing my slides tonight, and other various activities getting ready, the Oracle World barrage has begun. I’m sure many people have seen that I’m speaking this year, and for my first year presenting I’m going to be pretty busy. I have 4 official presentations and I’m hoping to get a fifth with the Unconference event going on. I’m going to try and spend a good chunk of my time in sessions. This is a really exciting year with all the 11g Application Server things being demoed and I can finally start talking about all the cool stuff I’ve been building in the beta period. If you want to meet up give me a ring during the week, my cell number is over in the right or feel free to come and heckle me at one of my sessions.

I’m also planning on attending the Ace Dinner, AppsLab Get Meetup, and Oracle Blogger Meetup. I’m hoping to chronicle the debauchery of the week via all my feeds, here, on twitter, and through flickr. I can’t wait to see everyone there!