Wednesday

Openworld 2006

This year I will be attending Openworld once again... I have to say tho, i'm not as excited as in previous years... Last year a coworker went with me and we met for lunches, suppers, etc. I find traveling alone pretty boring...

I finally finished my schedule tho and here are the sessions I plan on attending:

S283027 OAUG SysAdmin Special Interest Group Meeting
S283025 OAUG Upgrade Special Interest Group Meeting
S283047 Archive and Purge Special Interest Group Meeting
S283713 Is Your Production Support Team Working on the "Right Stuff"?
S282990 Top 10 Implementation Tips for Oracle Data Guard
S281377 Technology Directions for Oracle Applications
S281206 Database Worst Practices
S281398 Oracle and Pella: A Case Study in Reducing Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance Downtime
S281651 Oracle E-Business Suite Customers: 10 Things You Can Do Now to Prepare for Oracle Fusion Applications
S280814 Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Updates
S281383 Deep Dive: Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 New Technology Stack
S281393 Tuning Oracle E-Business Suite
S281396 E-Business Suite Lifecycle Management
S281397 Oracle E-Business Suite System Management: Release 12 New Features
S281394 How to Secure Your Oracle E-Business Suite Deployment
S281654 Partitioning and Purging Best Practices for Oracle E-Business Suite
S282383 Welcome to My Nightmare: The Common Performance Errors in Oracle Databases
S281384 Leveraging Oracle Database 10g Features with Oracle E-Business Suite
S281660 A Hidden Treasure: Oracle E-Business Suite Support Tools


As you can tell, they are mostly Oracle EBS related.

Thursday

11.5.9 Rebaseline

If your running Oracle EBS your probably aware by now that Oracle has rebaselined. I heard about this from Steven Chan's blog back in June I believe. (BTW, if you support Oracle Apps his blog is a must read IMHO).

So what does rebaselining mean? Well, Oracle regression tests their patches against a standard patch level... It would be impossible to do this for every conceivable combination. Since the July CPU has been certified against this baseline, then its recommended that you apply the patches as soon as possible.

What did that mean for us? Well, on top of the new baseline and security patches business requested an OTL (Oracle Time and Labour) upgrade as well. In total, that meant we had to apply around 70 patches. The first time you apply the patches it always takes a bit longer because you have to read through the patch notes, pre/post install steps and you usually hit problems which require some investigation. It took us about 50+ hours to put these in our first environment. That was approximately the LOE I provided. Tomorrow we start our stage environment and i'm hoping we can do it in 16-24 hours.

So far we have hit one post patch problem. If you are using autoconfig and applied patch 4489303 - TXK (FND) AUTOCONFIG TEMPLATE ROLLUP PATCH L (NOV 2005) (part of the rebaseline for 11.5.9) you may hit Bug 4891248. To resolve the issue you need a patch, Note:359703.1 has all the details.

Now we just wait for unit and user testing.. Since a number of modules have been touched i'm expecting problems.