Create a virtual box-vm with oracle enterprise-linux

http://technology.amis.nl/2013/06/29/how-to-create-a-virtual-box-vm-with-oracle-enterprise-linux-inside-a-dummy-guide/

E Business Suite 12.2 Install Good Links

http://www.pythian.com/blog/step-by-step-installation-of-an-ebs-12-2-vision-instance/ http://krishnasudagani.blogspot.com/2013/09/oracle-e-business-suite-r122.html http://oracledbanow.wordpress.com/tag/ebs-12-2-2-on-rac/

Directory Integration Platform (DIP)

Directory Integration Platform (DIP) : integrates LDAP-enabled applications (Portal, EBS) and LDAP directories (MS-AD, ADAM/MS-LDS, IBM Tivoli Directory Server) with Oracle Internet Directory (OID) 1. DIP provides two type of services : Synchronization and Provisioning a) Synchronization: keeps third party directory server (MS-AD, MS-ADAM/MS-LDS, iPlanet, Tivoli DS) consistent with Oracle Internet Directory (OID). Synchronization Service uses synchronization profile to sync directories and profile is managed by “manageSyncProfiles” or FMW Control (/em) b) Provisioning : User and group information is updated from OID to LDAP-enabled applications (Portal, EBS, OCS). Provisioning service uses provisioning profile to synchronize data between OID and LDAP-enabled applications and profile is managed by “oidprovtool” . Connectors : OID server connects to other directory stores (MS-AD, iPlanet, IBM Tivoli DS) using connector. Connector is prepackaged connectivity solution that exchanges data between OID server and connected Directory server. Connectors use one of following interfaces LDAP, DB, tagged or LDIF. •If third party directory server supports one of above interfaces (LDAP, DB, tagged or LDIF) then it just requires Integration Profile. •If third party directory server cannot NOT use one of above interfaces (LDAP, DB, tagged or LDIF) then it requires Integration Profile + an Agent. Agent :Synchronization agent transforms data from one of formats supported by DIP in to one supported by third party directory server (eg HR). Directory Integration Profile: This profile contains all configuration information that is required to synchronize data between OID server and other directories. There is at least one profile per directory per direction. Directorty Integration Profile contains following information - a) Direction of Synchronization – export only, import only or both b) Type of interface – LDAP, tagged, DB and LDIF c) Mapping rules and formats- attribute mapping and conversion between attributes of OID and third party directory server. (orclodipAttributeMappingRules) d) Connection details of third party directory server – Third party directory server host, port, SSL/non-SSL, credentials Directory Synchronization Service (DSS) - DSS periodically checks directory synchronization profiles and compares the last successful update time and change number with the contents of the chnage log. If there are any new changes to be synchronized, DSS initiates the synchronization process. . Installation and Configuration of DIP 1. DIP can be configured with OID or as stand-alone component (OID is prereq for DIP) on different machine. 2. DIP is J2EE application deployed on WebLogic Server (in 11g OID) or 10g Application Server (in 10g OID) 3. In 11g Identity Management, DIP is deployed on Weblogic and managed server wls_ods1 by default. DIP J2EE application consists of EJB Module dipejb.jar and WebModule dipweb.war. 4.You can start Managed server on which DIP is deployed (wls_ods1) via command line startManagedXXXX , from console (Node Manager must be running and Machine should be setup in weblogic) or via FMW control (/em) To start wls_ods1 managed server, Admin server should be running during first time start; after that Admin server could be down (or up) during wls_ods1 start/stop. More on starting stopping weblogic server here 5. Default DIP web module URL is http://hostname:port/dipapp(where port is port for managed server wls_ods1 – 7005 by default) 6. Utilities related to DIP are $ORACLE_HOME/bin/ dipStatus, manageSyncProfiles, manageSyncProfiles 7. You can also use Fusion Middleware control (/em) or WLST (WebLogic Scripting Tool) to manage DIP . 8. DIP related information is stored in cn=odisrv, cn=Registered Instances, cn=Directory Integration Platform, cn=Products, cn=OracleContext Note* You can use ldapsearch or ODSM to find DIP registration information under this ldap leaf (Oracle Directory Services Management (ODSM) is another java application to manage OID (replacement of ODM – Oracle Directory Manager)).

What's the difference between x64 and IA-64?

What's the difference between x64 and IA-64? http://mikedimmick.blogspot.com/2006/03/whats-difference-between-x64-and-ia-64.html There still seems to be a bit of confusion over the identity of 64-bit processors for Windows operating systems. Windows runs on two types of 64-bit processor, identified as x64 and IA-64. Going with the oldest first, IA-64 stands for Intel Architecture, 64-bit and was Intel’s attempt to move to a 64-bit architecture. It remains compatible with 32-bit user-mode code through hardware emulation, but this hardware emulation performs so poorly relative to a genuine x86 that all operating systems shipping for IA-64 now include a software x86 emulation called IA-32 EL. IA-64 is the instruction set; the family of processors which implement it are named Itanium (which you’ll see critics refer to as Itanic, suggesting that it’s sinking) and so you’ll sometimes see code written for them referenced as Itanium Processor Family or IPF. You need a new operating system to run any code on an Itanium – it cannot boot a 32-bit operating system. x64 is actually a Microsoft term and stands for Extended 64. It is implemented by both AMD and Intel who respectively call it AMD64 and EM-64T (Extended Memory 64 Technology). AMD invented it as extensions to the existing x86 architecture. An x64-capable processor natively implements x86 in hardware – it is an x86 processor, with additional modes. It boots up in the same 16-bit ‘real mode’ that an x86 does. It can run existing 32-bit operating systems. You may well have an x64-capable processor without realising it. All AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron processors, and Intel Pentium 4, Pentium D and Xeon processors built within about the last year, implement x64. To check whether your Intel processor supports x64, use Intel’s Processor Identification Utility. Itanium had the early lead and for a while held the general performance crown, but the relentless increase in x86 clock speeds eventually had AMD’s Opteron overtake it for integer calculation performance. Itanium still leads for floating point performance but has been stuck at 1.6GHz for about two years, if I recall correctly. It’s liable to be beaten by Intel’s own ‘Woodcrest’ Xeon-replacement later this year, in my opinion, if it remains stuck at this (now relatively low) speed. Itanium is now pretty-much reserved to big-iron datacentre servers. It’s good for highly computationally-intensive applications. If you just need lots of memory, go with x64. Itanium used to have an advantage in number of supported processors too, but IBM recently started selling the xSeries 460 which supports up to 32 dual-core Xeons. This hits Microsoft’s limit of 64 logical processors which applies to both architectures.

Difference between OBIEE Analytics and OBI Publisher

, BI Publisher is either a 'different Feature' within OBIEE, or it's a completely different Application who competes with OBIEE in 'reporting business'. So today, i am hoping to make it easier to understand the difference between the two. BI Publisher was originally a different application, which is now part of OBIEE. The best way to put it is, BI Publisher is another technology that has been integrated with OBIEE, so now the two are both parts of Oracle Business Intelligence. Now let's understand what are each for: OBIEE analysis provides dynamic and interactive ad-hoc reporting capabilities that allows users to dynamically change queries on the dashboard as well as interacting with other objections on the dashboard through action links. These are the original features of OBIEE, these capabilities can date back to nquire or Siebel Analytics time. The idea was to create a reporting platform and have users stay there, like the dashboards. However, certain business requires very specific type of reports that are highly standardized across the industry that has to be pixel perfect in very specific ways. These can be financial statement, invoice statements, certain transactional statements in Auto industry and so on. These reports are typically generated by the department and have to be eventually mailed out to external customers, therefore the look and feel of these reports will have to pixel perfect, meaning that the space between each line has to be specific, the colors, the fond and layouts among all the fields have to be arranged in specific ways. Moreover, when you print these reports out, it should ideally fit in to one page (in most cases). All these requirements can't be achieved easily using OBIEE's native dashboard features. Therefore, Oracle has decided to integrate BI Publisher into OBIEE platform and making it additional reporting layer on top of dashboard. BI Publisher allows you to define your data model using existing OBIEE analysis (or others) as data set where reports draw data from onto it's templates.

Oracle Forms in the SOA World

Oracle Forms in the SOA World Oracle Forms can be part of your service-oriented architecture. Today's enterprise is under pres-sure to interconnect its many disparate systems and applications. This pressure to integrate is a major driving force behind the adoption of Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) as an enterprise blueprint for reducing the cost and complexity of integration initiatives. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has rapidly established itself as the industry standard for this integration, and Oracle BPEL Process Manager offers a comprehensive and easy-to-use infrastructure for creating, deploying, and managing business processes. Oracle Forms, with its support for Java, can participate in any BPEL process flow. Oracle Forms interacts with Oracle BPEL Process Manager, using Java Importer, a feature that can expose your Oracle Forms applications to server-side Java classes. Java Importer allows you to import Java classes into your Oracle Forms modules, generating PL/SQL wrappers for the classes you select. You can then use PL/SQL throughout your Oracle Forms application, and at runtime Oracle Forms will send those PL/SQL calls to the Java classes you have imported. This article illustrates how a simple Oracle Forms application can interact with Oracle BPEL Process Manager. Background/Overview The application in this article is based on an application called the Loan Flow Plus sample, which is part of the Oracle BPEL installation. The goal is to build a simple business process to determine the best interest rate for a prospective loan customer, as shown in Figure 1. After the customer provides the details, Oracle BPEL Process Manager retrieves that person's Social Security number (SSN) and uses it to obtain the applicant's credit rating. Oracle BPEL then queries the loan services of two banks on behalf of the customer to see what annual percentage rate (APR) the loan services offer. It then selects the best loan and reports the interest rate to the customer. Figure 1: Process flow for the Loan Flow Plus application The Loan Flow Plus sample application illustrates some of the benefits of BPEL: Integrating services from different vendors using different implementations Handling asynchronous Web service invocations Calling a Web service that is long-running and has to call back the originating Web service later Invoking processes in parallel rather than in sequence The original Loan Flow Plus sample application (installed under your Oracle BPEL Process Manager home directory) uses JavaServer Pages (JSP) to interact with a BPEL process flow. But there's no reason why Oracle Forms can't also interact with a BPEL process flow, so you will take one of the screens from the original sample application and implement it by using Oracle Forms instead. Here is how the sample application is implemented: As you can see in Figure 1, Oracle BPEL Process Manager applies for a loan from both Star Loan Bank and United Loan Bank. The United Loan Bank service is automated and quickly returns a result to BPEL Process Manager. But Star Loan Bank requires human intervention to approve a loan. Figure 2 shows the Oracle Forms approval application that the Star Loan Bank lending officer uses, with a loan for Dave about to be approved with an APR of 7.4 percent. Figure 2: The Star Loan Bank approval form Note that the form in Figure 2 is not retrieving any information from a database; indeed, this sample application does not even connect to any database. When the user clicks on the Refresh button, Oracle Forms calls out to a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to invoke your Java classes, which, in turn, call out to Oracle BPEL Process Manager to get the information that is displayed on-screen. Similarly, when the user clicks on the Approve or Reject button, Oracle Forms calls out to the JVM, which notifies Oracle BPEL Process Manager whether the loan was rejected or approved (and what the APR is). Figure 3 shows a high-level overview of the communication between Oracle Forms and Oracle BPEL Process Manager. Oracle Forms automatically starts the JVM the first time it needs to call out to Java. Oracle BPEL Process Manager is the engine that manages the process flow and the interaction with the various Web services and other processes. Figure 3: High-level architecture overview Web Service Interface Versus Java API Any BPEL process deployed to Oracle BPEL Process Manager is accessible via a Web service interface or through a Java API. The Web service interface uses standard SOAP communication and can be used for clients that are implemented in any language. Alternatively, for clients written in Java, you can communicate with Oracle BPEL Process Manager via the Java API. There are two benefits to the Java API: You get better performance than with a Web service, and you can invoke/initiate the business processes transactionally. Oracle Forms can easily interact with any Web service via the Java Importer feature. You can find articles on calling a Web service with Oracle Forms at oracle.com/technetwork/products/forms/techlisting9i.html and oracle.com/technetwork/products/forms/techlisting10g.html. As this article continues, it shows Oracle Forms interacting with Oracle BPEL Process Manager by use of the latter product's Java API. Step 1: Create the Java for calling BPEL. Because Oracle BPEL has a Java API and you can make Java calls from Oracle Forms, you can have your Oracle Forms application interact directly with Oracle BPEL Process Manager. However, there is more to the interaction than invoking some methods on the Java API: You need to, for example, manipulate XML messages that you will pass to and receive from the API. So it makes sense for you to write some Java that sits between Oracle Forms and Oracle BPEL Process Manager and passes to Oracle Forms only the information it needs. Therefore, you need to create a Java class for the Star Loan Bank screen that enables Oracle Forms to do the following: A. Retrieve the list of loans awaiting the loan officer B. Approve a specific loan and set the APR C. Reject a specific loan The following is an outline of the Java class, LoanFlowPlusForms , that you create and that gets imported into Oracle Forms, showing the methods that correspond to A, B, and C, above: public class LoanFlowPlusForms { public static String[] getLoanApplicationList(String pEmail) { ... } public static void approveLoan(String pTaskId, double pApr) { ... } public static void rejectLoan(String pTaskId) { ... } } The full code of the LoanFlowPlusForms class is available in Listing 3. The getLoanApplicationList() method takes the pEmail parameter, the e-mail address of the loan officer at Star Loan Bank—each user (loan officer) should see only the loans that person needs to approve. The approveLoan() and rejectLoan() methods accept a parameter called pTaskId , which is the ID of the loan that is to be approved or rejected. The approveLoan() method takes another parameter for the APR of the loan. The getLoanApplicationList() method returns an array of strings in the following format: ||| || Oracle Forms can parse these strings and display the data on-screen. The following is an example of data returned from getLoanApplicationList(). 1466|Kris|bullit@cs.com|987-65-432| 583|HondaHybrid|2004|28000.0 1554|Dave|demo1@otn.com|123-12-1234| 560|BMW Z8|2001|100000.0 1893|Jonas|chef@bork.com|135-246-78| 517|Ford Freestar|1999|12000.0 Figure 2 shows how this data is displayed in the runtime sample application form. Step 2: Merge the Java code with the Oracle Forms application. Before importing your Java class into Oracle Forms, you need to put it on the classpath, so that Oracle Forms Builder will be able to find it. In Windows, you can do this in the Microsoft Windows Registry. Modify the FORMS90_BUILDER_CLASSPATH variable, and add the path that points to your class file. Start Oracle Forms Builder, and create or open your form. Choose Program->Import Java Classes... from the menu to open Java Importer. Select the path to LoanFlowPlusForms , and click on Import , as shown in Figure 4. Figure 4: Importing the LoanFlowPlusForms Java class Java Importer examines th e Java class and creates a PL/SQL wrapper for it. You will see in Oracle Forms Object Navigator that there is a new package containing the PL/SQL version of the Java methods you have created, as shown in Figure 5. You can now call these procedures and functions from anywhere in your form and pass the necessary parameters. Figure 5: The PL/SQL wrapper for the Java class Next you create the Star Loan application, which lists the loan application details to be approved or rejected. Listing 1 contains the code for the WHEN-BUTTON-PRESSED trigger behind the Refresh button that calls out to the JVM. The Java class returns an array of String objects containing the details of the loan applications to be approved, as shown in Figure 2. Remember that the getLoanApplicationList() method takes the e-mail address of the Star Loan employee. For the sake of brevity, it has been hard-coded in Listing 1 as 'jsmith@starloan.com'. Code Listing 1: Code for WHEN-BUTTON-PRESSED trigger DECLARE loanList ORA_JAVA.JARRAY; listLength NUMBER; loanString VARCHAR2(255); delimiterPos NUMBER; -- Each loan has the following fields. taskId VARCHAR2(50); customerName VARCHAR2(50); email VARCHAR2(50); ssn VARCHAR2(50); creditrating VARCHAR2(50); carmodel VARCHAR2(50); caryear VARCHAR2(50); loanamount VARCHAR2(50); BEGIN -- Call out to Java to get the list of loan applications to be approved. loanList := LoanFlowPlusForms.getLoanApplicationList('jsmith@starloan.com'); -- How many strings did the Java return? listLength := ORA_JAVA.GET_ARRAY_LENGTH(myGlobal.loanList); -- For each string, extract the details of the loan. for i in 1..listLength loop -- Get element i from the array of strings. loanString := ORA_JAVA.GET_STRING_ARRAY_ELEMENT(loanList, i); -- Parse the string looking for the '|' character to get each field. delimiterPos := instr(loanString, '|'); taskId := substr(loanString, 1, delimiterPos-1); loanString := substr(loanString, delimiterPos+1); delimiterPos := instr(loanString, '|'); customerName := substr(loanString, 1, delimiterPos-1); -- Do the same for the rest of the fields ... -- Now that we have all of the loan information, display it on the screen. ... end loop; END; The code for the Approve button is shown in Listing 2. Next Steps READ more on Oracle BPEL oracle.com/technetwork/products/ias/bpel oracle.com/technetwork/oramag/oracle/web more on Oracle Forms oracle.com/technetwork/products/forms/techlisting9i.html oracle.com/technetwork/products/forms/techlisting10g.html DOWNLOAD Oracle BPEL Process Manager The code for the Reject button in Figure 2 is the same as the code in Listing 2, except that you replace the line LoanFlowPlusForms.approveLoan (jo, :applications.taskId, :applications.apr); with the following line: LoanFlowPlusForms.rejectLoan (jo, :applications.taskId); Code Listing 2: Code for the Approve button DECLARE jo ora_java.jobject; ex ora_java.jobject; myAlert NUMBER; BEGIN jo := LoanFlowPlusForms.new; LoanFlowPlusForms.approveLoan(jo, :applications.taskId, :applications.apr); clear_record; END; Now the form is ready to run. When the user clicks on the Refresh button in the runtime form, Oracle Forms will call out to the LoanFlowPlusForms class, which will communicate with Oracle BPEL Process Manager to get the list of loan applications. The details of the loan applications are extracted and displayed on-screen. You can then notify Oracle BPEL Process Manager of your action, by clicking on the Reject button or typing in an APR and clicking on the Approve button. This article has covered important aspects of building one screen of the sample application, but there is much more to the application. You can download the full sample application from oracle.com/technology/sample_code/products/forms. Conclusion In this article, you've seen Oracle Forms interacting with a separate system that has an entirely independent implementation. Oracle Forms Java Importer allows you to integrate Oracle Forms with Oracle BPEL Process Manager, so that your Oracle Forms applications can interoperate with the other applications in your enterprise environment. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/issue-archive/2005/05-mar/o25forms-097108.html