Author Archives: James Morrow

About James Morrow

James Morrow is a Senior Systems Architect and Oracle Applications Database Administrator. He has over 30 years' experience in the Information Technology industry including 29+ years as an Oracle Applications DBA and Unix Systems Administrator. He has extensive experience in systems architecture including installations, upgrades, and advanced configurations of Oracle's E-Business Suite applications from release 9.4.2 through 12.2, including RDBMS 19c. Mr. Morrow also has experience with a wide variety of operating systems and platforms, including every major variant of the UNIX operating system and on Microsoft Windows NT. He has authored or co-authored numerous papers and presentations, including "Installing, Upgrading and Maintaining Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Release 11.5.10+".

Oracle E-Business Suite R12.2.14 Released

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Approximately once a year, typically in the fall, frequently at or near the time of a convention, Oracle announces the new releases for E-Business Suite.

Today is one of those days.

The actual announcement is available to the public here

For those with access to My Oracle Support, you can get more information through MOS 3012829.1. That document includes a link to the R12.2.14 RUP Patch [36026788] as well as a release notes for the patch itself and each of the included modules.

Oracle CloudWorld is happening right now in Las Vegas, NV. Tomorrow, at 9AM (Pacific), Larry will give his keynote address. Hopefully, he will announce the general availability of 23ai for on-premises systems. If that happens, I would look for an announcement from the Applications Technology Group about certification to follow shortly thereafter. For those of you paying attention to the ATG Blog, Elke Phelps posted a seven-part series to “tease” the upcoming certification.

Fingers crossed…

Running ADOP Commands non-Interactively

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I really don’t like answering prompts. It takes extra time, requires extra keystrokes, and makes documenting a process somewhat cumbersome. So, I avoid it whenever possible.

In the world of an Oracle E-Business Suite DBA, one command that we run quite often is adop. Unfortunately, the adop command doesn’t directly support command-line arguments for certain common things (passwords, in particular). So, here is what I tend to do:

First, I tend to manually assign the passwords to variables in my current session. The environment variables go away when the session ends. This also makes documentation easier.

export APPSPW=apps
export SYSTEMPW=manager
export WLADMIN=weblogic

PREPARE

{ echo ${APPSPW}; echo ${SYSTEMPW}; echo ${WLADMIN}; }|\
adop phase=prepare

APPLY

{ echo ${APPSPW}; echo ${SYSTEMPW}; echo ${WLADMIN}; }|\
adop phase=apply patches=1234567

FINALIZE

{ echo ${APPSPW}; echo ${SYSTEMPW}; echo ${WLADMIN}; }|\
adop phase=finalize

CUTOVER

{ echo ${APPSPW}; echo ${SYSTEMPW}; echo ${WLADMIN}; }|\
adop phase=cutover

CLEANUP

{ echo ${APPSPW}; echo ${SYSTEMPW}; echo ${WLADMIN}; }|\
adop phase=cleanup

FS_CLONE

{ echo ${APPSPW}; echo ${SYSTEMPW}; echo ${WLADMIN}; }|\
adop phase=fs_clone

A brief warning, though. I typically run the adop phase=abort command interactively as there are additional prompts that will need to be answered. Fortunately, I don’t have to do that quite as often…

Some things that make my EBS DBA Life Easier

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There are a number of things that I do as part of my “process” that I find make my life a bit easier.

FINISHED block

There are a LOT of things that we do as an Oracle E-Business Suite DBA that can run for a long time. Because of this, we may have something running in another window and not realize that the command has finished. One trick that I use (mentioned in https://www.bluestonesolutionsgroup.com/?p=55) is to tail an ascii art file at the end of the command line. This serves a few purposes.

  • It is something of an attention grabber and makes an easy way to notice that the command has finished without needing to focus my attention on that particular window.
  • Using tail -f will, in many cases, prevent the shell from timing out and closing.

“Stacking” Multiple Commands on a single command-line

Unix/Linux allows you to “stack” multiple commands that will run in sequence. For example, while you might run three different commands (each on their own command-line):

date
ls -lat
date

They could be stacked into a single command line instead:

date;ls -alt;date

I do this quite a bit with the “date” command. This allows me to capture a “start” and “end” time for my documentation.

The one caveat, however, is that sometimes, the second “date” command will get fed into the command before and taken as a response to a prompt. So, test carefully.

The GNU Screen tool

GNU Screen is a package that can be installed on most Unix/Linux variants. The beauty of this tool is that you can detach an interactive shell session and re-attach it later on. While it’s detached, any commands that are actively running in that shell session will continue to process normally.

This is particularly useful if you’re on a network connection that might drop unexpectedly. Just re-connect, and re-attach the session.

Running an Empty Patch Cycle in R12.2

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There are situations where it makes sense to run an “empty” patch cycle in E-Business Suite R12.2. For example, I will run an empty patch cycle after a major operation (R12.1.3 to R12.2 upgrade, platform migration, etc.) to confirm that I can, successfully run a patch cycle.

The other “trick” that I tend to use is a tail.txt file to indicate when a process has finished.  It is a simple ASCII text file that contains the following:

 ####### ### #     # ###  #####  #     # ####### ######  
 #        #  ##    #  #  #     # #     # #       #     # 
 #        #  # #   #  #  #       #     # #       #     # 
 #####    #  #  #  #  #   #####  ####### #####   #     # 
 #        #  #   # #  #        # #     # #       #     # 
 #        #  #    ##  #  #     # #     # #       #     # 
 #       ### #     # ###  #####  #     # ####### ######

There are several ways to create it.  I used to use the Unix banner command (which isn’t generally present on Linux systems). Because of that, the easiest way now is to use an online ASCII art generator:

https://www.patorjk.com/software/taag/#p=display&f=Banner&t=FINISHED

By having tail -f ${DL}/tail.txt run at the end of a long command, it is pretty easy to notice when the process completes.  This is particularly useful when you may have the window in the background, be running from a different machine, or maybe you’re just glancing at the screen from across a room.

As an example, let’s say you wanted to run an “empty patch cycle” as described in MOS 2316218.1:

. /oracle/${TWO_TASK}/EBSapps.env run
date;{ echo ${APPSPW}; echo ${SYSTEMPW}; echo ${WLADMIN}; }|\
adop phase=prepare,finalize,cutover; date; tail -f ${DL}/tail.txt

. /oracle/${TWO_TASK}/EBSapps.env run
date;{ echo ${APPSPW}; echo ${SYSTEMPW}; echo ${WLADMIN}; }|\
adop phase=cleanup cleanup_mode=full;date;tail -f ${DL}/tail.txt

IMPORTANT: Simply printing the FINISHED text block does NOT indicate SUCCESSFUL completion.  Only that the command has finished.  As always, be sure check for errors.

Including Date/Time in the Linux Prompt

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The basic way to set a prompt is by setting the “PS1” variable.

In Linux (the BASH shell, in particular), the default format is:

export PS1="[\u@\h \W]\$ "

That will give you a prompt that looks like this (where “dir” is your current directory)

[username@host dir]$

We can add a date/timestamp to it by changing the prompt to this:

export PS1="\D{%F %T} [\u@\h \W]\$ "

So, for today (August 21, 2024 at 14:45:00), the prompt would look like this:

2024-08-21 14:45:00 [user@host ~]$

So, why would I want to set my prompt this way?

Generally, I wouldn’t. I tend to like things pretty clean.

But, if I’m doing a big upgrade with a lot of steps, it would be nice. Combine that with a terminal emulator that logs everything and you have a pretty decent way to capture “start/stop” times for individual commands.

You could even put some sort of token at the front to make the lines easier to grep out of the log. This one would put “[CMD] ” at the front of each line:

export PS1="[CMD] \D{%F %T} [\u@\h \W]\$ "

Keep in mind though. This prompt is not “dynamic”. It will only show the time at the instant that the prompt is printed.

Rebirth

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Welcome to the re-launch of the BlueStone Solutions Group, Inc. site. I will be posting new content (and re-posting some of the old content) in the near future.