Oracle E-Business Suite updates from OpenWorld 2014

Oracle OpenWorld has always been my most exciting conference to attend. I always see high energy levels everywhere, and it kind of revs me up to tackle new upcoming technologies. This year I concentrated on attending mostly Oracle E-Business Suite release 12.2 and Oracle 12c Database-related sessions.

On the Oracle E-Business Suite side, I started off with Oracle EBS Customer Advisory Board Meeting with great presentations on new features like the Oracle EBS 12.2.4 new iPad Touch-friendly interface. This can be enabled by setting “Self Service Personal Home Page mode” profile value to “Framework Simplified”. Also discussed some pros and cons of the new downtime mode feature of adop Online patching utility that allows  release update packs ( like 12.2.3 and 12.2.4 patch ) to be applied with out starting up a new online patching session. I will cover more details about that in a separate blog post. In the mean time take a look at the simplified home page look of my 12.2.4 sandbox instance.

Steven Chan’s presentation on EBS Certification Roadmap announced upcoming support for Android tablets Chrome Browser, IE11 and Oracle Unified Directory etc. Oracle did not extend any support deadlines for Oracle EBS 11i or R12 this time. So to all EBS customers on 11i: It’s time to move to R12.2. I also attended a good session on testing best practices for Oracle E-Business Suite, which had a good slide on some extra testing required during Online Patching Cycle. I am planning to do a separate blog with more details on that, as it is an important piece of information that one might ignore. Also Oracle announced a new product called Flow Builder that is part of Oracle Application Testing Suite, which helps users test functional flows in Oracle EBS.

On the 12c Database side, I attended great sessions by Christian Antognini on Adaptive Query Optimization and Markus Michalewicz sessions on 12c RAC Operational Best Practices and RAC Cache Fusion Internals. Markus Cachefusion presentation has some great recommendations on using _gc_policy_minimum instead of turning off DRM completely using _gc_policy_time=0. Also now there is a way to control DRM of a object using package DBMS_CACHEUTIL.

I also attended attended some new, upcoming technologies that are picking up in the Oracle space like Oracle NoSQL, Oracle Big Data SQL, and Oracle Data Integrator Hadoop connectors. These products seem to have great future ahead and have good chances of becoming mainstream in the data warehousing side of businesses.