Oracle Tales

Recently during a PeopleSoft HCM upgrade to image 24, we noticed our PeopleSoft Query performance was very poor. Thanks to a tip from the psadmin.io podcast, we found a work around referenced in Oracle doc id  - Multiple PSQueries Having Performance Issues After 9.2 Upgrade (Doc ID 2146808.1). The short version of the doc id, is to open Application Designer and switch the PERALL_SEC_QRY and EMPLMT_SRCH_QRY views from using the Oracle Specific SQL, back to the default SQL. It seems in Oracle's efforts to improve the performance of these views for their Oracle DB customers, they may have made it worse depending on your data.

While reviewing an Oracle CPU, I was asked to make sure we are running the current version of Java with our WebLogic servers. This should be an easy task, but Oracle's PeopleSoft DPK loads many version of Java, so it is not easy to know which one is in use. A quick Google, and I found a way to check the path of any running process. (in this instance, we're running Linux) First find the PID for the process ps -ef | grep -i java | grep -i "weblogic domain"       2. Check the path of the process against the /proc/ information ls -l /proc/"PID"/exe An the result will show the path to your java home. If you're not sure the version in the java home, just go to the directory and run  ./java --version For PeopleSoft, if you ever need to change the JAVA_HOME path that your WebLogic domain will use. You just need to modify the file $PS_CFG_HOME/webserv/ bin/setEnv.sh. In this file, is an option to override the default JAVA_HOME.

Recently I was alerted that after an upgrade, PeopleSoft SSO was no longer working. When users tried to access a trusted instance i.e. from FSCM->HCM, they were missing CSS on the page and it contained the error "STR_PCMINVPORTAL: Invalid portal name EMPLOYEE in request" on the page. This was puzzling, because the only info on Oracle support was related to the Interaction Hub aka Portal. After talking with support, it turns out the issue was related to a PeopleTools upgrade. In PT853 you did not need to set the urls on the node tabs. Now this is mandatory.  We also need to make 1 additional change to the webprofile because we are still using classic mode. Steps below: You must set the node url on the portal tab for local AND remote nodes .  This is as of PT854 and newer. Any node that shows up under PeopleTools ->Security Objects->Single Signon must have the Context URI Text and Portal URI Text values set to point at the URL's for the remote systems. You m...

Recently I have been using Docker to build out an Apache reverse proxy in development. The advantages of using Docker in this scenario are: Increased Security through isolation - Docker containers jail your application so that the main operating system hosting the container is protected. The containers are ephemeral and can be rebuilt in seconds. Some organizations rebuild their applications on a nightly basis. Fast Deployment - Once your docker file is setup you can deploy docker containers in seconds. This makes it very simple to graduate changes from development to production or rebuild infrastructure in DR scenario Cloud Friendly  - Docker containers are very portable. If suddenly your organization wants to move to cloud infrastructure or hosting providers, it is a relatively simple task to move these containers. Additionally, cloud companies like Amazon, Azure are heavily invested in Docker and already have many of the tools in place for organizations using Docker. ...

This is a handy script I've used in the past to benchmark a Linux server.  It's helpful when you want to compare the performance between 2 systems. #!/bin/bash #basic benchmark script echo "Running basic benchmark against "$HOSTNAME cname=$(cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep name|head -1|awk '{ $1=$2=$3=""; print }') cores=$(cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep MHz|wc -l) freq=$(cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep MHz|head -1|awk '{ print $4 }') tram=$(free -m | awk 'NR==2'|awk '{ print $2 }') swap=$(free -m | awk 'NR==4'| awk '{ print $2 }') up=$(uptime|awk '{ $1=$2=$(NF-6)=$(NF-5)=$(NF-4)=$(NF-3)=$(NF-2)=$(NF-1)=$NF=""; print }') echo "Downloading Test File....." cache=$((wget --no-check-certificate -O /dev/null https://google.com/somelargetestfile) 2>&1 | tail -2 | head -1 | awk '{print $3 $4 }') echo "Testing I/O...." io=$( (dd if=/dev/zero of=test_$$ bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync ...

Every quarter (January, April, July, October) Oracle releases their CPU (Critical Patch Updates) for all Oracle products. For PeopleSoft there are quite a few different products that require individual patching. Assuming you are running the full Oracle Stack, within the Oracle CPU you should be looking for security patches to: • Weblogic • Tuxedo • PeopleTools (dot level patches not major release) • PeopleSoft Applications (while rare, security issues do come up in HCM,ELM,etc applications) • Oracle Database • Oracle Linux The most significant of these that requires patching is Weblogic. The easiest place to find this patches is on the Weblogic DocID page within My Oracle Support. Patch Set Update (PSU) Release Listing for Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) (Doc ID 1470197.1) Once you have the patch downloaded, there is no need to unzip it, you are ready to start patching.This example will be done on a Linux based PUM appliance First set the variables to your java home...

I seem to be on the Oracle Enterprise manager kick lately, so why not one more post on it. Recently I hit the 85% mark on the Fast Recovery Area due to archive log bloat and did not see any alerts triggered in OEM. Well as I discovered, part of the reason for this is that according to MOS, "If using Fast Recovery Area (FRA) for the archive destination and the destination is set to USE_DB_RECOVERY_FILE_DEST, then the Archive Area % Used metric will not trigger anymore." Well that is annoying. However, I did find that the alert does trigger, but it is buried and doesn't show up on any main pages. To see it, go to the target database home page. Then navigate to Oracle Database->Monitoring->All Metrics . In the left pane you can scroll down to “ Recovery Area->Recovery Area Free Space ”.  There you will see your alert if active. When viewing the All Metrics page, click on the alerts icon to see active alerts. If you want to see it triggered just temporaril...