Smartsoft Oracle Blog

Jul 30, Dell and HP to Certify and Resell Oracle VM, OEL and Solaris

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:03:01 GMT

Oracle announced on 29 July 2010 that Dell and HP will certify and resell Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their x86 systems and customers will have full access to Oracle support.

Jul 29, Building cloud application businesses on the Oracle Platform for SaaS

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 21:45:34 GMT

Live Webcast on Wednesday, August 4, 2010 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET on how to build, deploy and deliver SaaS applications that leverage Oracle Business Intelligence (BI). Presented by David Novak, Executive Vice President of Sales & Business Development from SPS Commerce, and Kevin O'Brien, Senior Director, ISV & SaaS Strategy for Oracle's Worldwide Alliances & Channels organization.

Jul 28, Virtualisation ROI rises, cloud confusion steals spotlight

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 06:34:45 GMT

A report in June by IDC estimated that cloud-based services accounted for $16 billion of the approximately $2.5 trillion in global spending on IT in 2009 and forecast this number would rise to $55.5 billion by 2014-12 percent of all spending on IT. However, many companies who might go to cloud-based IT, are "suffering from cloud confusion," according to a report from Forrester Research.

Jul 26, Oracle Enhances Tape Storage Product Line

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 22:23:31 GMT

Oracle announced high availability and capacity enhancements to its StorageTek tape libraries and drives on July 26 2010. The scalable capacity of the StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System has increased from 70,000 to 100,000 tape slots and now features redundant electronics to help customers manage growth, increase availability and reduce risk. Oracle's StorageTek LTO-5 tape drives now have 1.5 terabytes of native capacity and are supported on StorageTek tape libraries. Coupling the LTO-5 drive with the StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System provides a native storage capacity of up to 150 petabytes in a single tape library.

Jul 26, Terabyte-sized Java Apps Now Possible

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:48:44 GMT

The latest release of Ehcache, the Java caching software distributed by Terracotta, is able to pool a terabyte of memory for a single application and its data. This terabyte of memory can be run from as few as 10 servers according to the company.

Jul 25, The Link Between Data Warehousing and MDM

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 00:24:56 GMT

New research from Information Difference shows an increasing focus on implementing master data management to support both existing and new data warehousing initiatives.

Jul 21, Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Forum

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 22:35:55 GMT

Explore how the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager enables business-driven IT management on Friday 23 July 2010 from 8:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Sydney.

Jul 21, Oracle R12 EBS Patching Webinar

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 03:28:58 GMT

Recording of webinar for the Latin America and New Zealand/Australia Oracle User Communityon best practices for patching the Oracle R12 E-Business Suite environment.

Jul 20, What keeps the CIO awake at night?

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:21:21 GMT

Video blog from Frank Buytendijk of Oracle.

Jul 19, Celent Names Oracle a Leader in Global Core Banking Sales

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 01:02:18 GMT

Oracle has been classed as a leader in core banking sales for the 12 months ending September 30, 2009 in Celent's Big Leagues Table which ranks vendors on the number of new name core banking deals. The Celent Big Leagues Table rankings include both the value of the deals and an adjustment for the geographical location of the implementation. Oracle led the rankings in all the regions except for Western Europe and the report notes that they had a clear advantage in their traditional African and Asian markets, with deals ranging from large banks to small cooperative financial institutions.

Jul 15, Oracle Service Bus 11g ANT deployment scripts

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:34:06 GMT

Modified scripts for deploying Oracle Service Bus 11g so it only needs one property file and to enable making an export jar from the OSB workspace (OEPE environment).

Jul 15, Oracle Reveals Strategy And Customers For White-Hot Exadata

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:52:04 GMT

Controversial article from Information Week about the success of Oracle's Exadata machines in the market.

Jul 15, Introducing Oracle Identity Management 11g

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:35:42 GMT

Live webacast to introduce Oracle Identity Management 11g "a new and revolutionary approach in application security" on Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET. Presented by Amit Jasuja, Vice President Identity Management and Security Products Oracle Corporation.

Jul 15, Oracle Coherence 3.6 Now Available

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:59:17 GMT

Oracle Coherence 3.6 which provides a distributed in-memory data grid and is part of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, was released on July 12. This release of Oracle Coherence enables greater control of capacity and resource management in grid and cloud environments through the introduction of Coherence Quorum. There is also a new SQL-like query language called Coherence Query Language (CohQL) which makes it easier for developers to manage and use Oracle Coherence.

Jul 13, Upgrading from Oracle 9i to 11g and the implicit migration from RBO

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:28:45 GMT

Probably one of the biggest issues in the upgrade from Oracle 9i to 11g is that of switching to the cost based optimiser as the rule-based optimiser is not available in Oracle 11g. This is mitigated however by the use of SQL Plan Management (SPM). By loading the original RBO plans into SPM you can ensure the Oracle Optimizer won't change the execution plans during an upgrade and the implicit migration from RBO to CBO. This article discusses the 2 approaches available for loading plans into the SPM.

Jul 5, Oracle Engineer Reveals Latency Mysteries With Heat Maps

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 05:12:55 GMT

Brendan Gregg, Oracle principal software engineer, argues the case to use heat maps to enable system latency to be indentifed and understood more easily. "Presenting latency as a heat map is an effective way to identify subtle characteristics that may otherwise be missed," he states in his article.

Jul 5, New tool to anyalyse Oracle redo logs

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 04:22:17 GMT

A new tool called ddldump for analysing Oracle redo logs has just been released by V3rity. The program parses an Oracle redo log and dumps the DDL statements ( GRANT, CREATE, ALTER, DROP, REVOKE, etc) as XML.

Jul 5, Oracle Upgrade To 11g

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 03:54:19 GMT

An overview of the steps required to perform an Oracle upgrade including the different options available.

Jul 5, Oracle 10g Flashback Database

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 03:54:18 GMT

An overview of the new Oracle 10g flashback database feature including architecture, configuration of the flashback recovery area and how to use it.

Jul 5, Oracle Certification Demystified

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 03:33:56 GMT

The myriad Oracle certification options can be baffling - here's the simple version

Jul 1, Latest News From the World of Oracle

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 02:55:35 GMT

A roundup of the most significant news relating to Oracle this week. New releases, new products and more.

Jun 23, Introduction to Oracle SQL Developer

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:21:40 GMT

How to install and use Oracle SQL Developer and how to get the best out of it.

Jun 23, PLSQL Function Examples Dissected and Analysed

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:21:38 GMT

How to build a PLSQL function including best practice design tips, structure, parameters and exception handling.

Jun 23, Oracle Backup and Recovery Essentials - What Every DBA Should Know

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:14:15 GMT

Oracle backup and recovery can be complicated and the consequences of getting it wrong can be very expensive

Jun 23, Oracle 11g - Grid Computing for the Masses

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 07:05:08 GMT

Oracle 11g is decsribed as making grid computing easy and straightforward. Does it live up to this description?

Jun 22, Use SQL Developer to make migration easy to Oracle 11g

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:05:35 GMT

Podcast on how using Oracle SQL Developer makes migration easier and faster.

Jun 20, Oracle Grid Infrastructure - Reconfiguration/host name change

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 23:01:38 GMT

Oracle Grid Infrastructure is now required for Oracle RAC and for single instance environments with ASM. This sarticle shows how to reconfigure Grid Infrastructure on one server together with change of server name and IP.

Jun 17, Productivitys last great hope

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:34:58 GMT

Statistics show that between 1978 and 2009, New Zealand's capital productivity fell 0.7 on an average annual basis. In the year to March 2009, capital productivity fell 5.3 and labour productivity, which has buoyed our figures with an average annual growth rate of 1.9 from 1978 to 2009, fell 0.3 percent over the last three years. Hidden in the statistics, though, is a signal from business about where its confidence lies. The drop in capital productivity was driven by a 3.3 increase in capital input a large proportion of which was invested in IT-related assets. Both Compac Sorting Equipment and Honda New Zealand have benefited from investment in IT systems. BNZ CIO Peter Yarrington, formerly the general manager of technology National Australia Bank, says BNZ has adopted the 'Agile methodology', which looks to get the company's business and technology people working together to hothouse ideas. This has enabled the development of BNZ's new branches which eliminate the traditional teller-behind-a-desk setup in favour of more flexible interactions with customers.

Jun 6, Job search engine teams up with Facebook

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 00:50:40 GMT

Simply Hired has teamed up with Facebook to enable job seekers to use their account to find job vacancies either with their friends' employers or with organisations whose Facebook pages they like.

Jun 5, Migrating from VMware to VirtualBox (Part 1): Oracle Enterprise Linux

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 04:19:51 GMT

Whilts the best solution is to not migrate and instead build a new vm, if you really must migrate an existing Oracle Enterprise Linux vm from VMware to Virtualbox, this article tells you how to do it.

Jun 4, Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition High Availability Performance Whitepaper

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 05:18:14 GMT

measuring the impact of HA on JE performance when running on large configurations. A study of the performance of Berkeley DB Java Edition (JE) in an High Availability (HA) environment on large-system hardware configurations. The tests are broken into two general categories:

Tests measuring the overhead of JE HA in various configurations
Tests measuring the overhead of additional JE HA replica

Jun 3, Partition wise joins in an Oracle data warehouse

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 03:26:54 GMT

How to ensure your partition wise joins are efficient.

Jun 1, Oracle Database 11g - Which Edition Is Right For You?

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:26:05 GMT

As all editions are built from a common code base, your database applications can be moved from a small, single-processor development database to a production database on a cluster of multi-processor servers without having to change a single line of code. Oracle have prodcued a handy table to enable the features of each edition to be compared.

Jun 1, What Makes Oracle Exadata Smart Flash Cache So Smart?

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 22:08:41 GMT

3 minute video from Oracle explains how Oracle Exadata Smart Flash Cache helps to mitigate I/O bottlenecks and deliver extreme performance for consolidated database applications.

Jun 1, Oracle 11g Backup and Recovery

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:34:35 GMT

New backup and recovery features in Oracle Database 11g save time and data.

May 27, CIOs are reconsidering outsourcing

Thu, 27 May 2010 22:35:08 GMT

The latest Technology Trends survey of more than 500 CIOs by Ovum found that CIOs are reconsidering the outsourcing of security and other IT management functions. According to the survey only 7 of CIOs were considering outsourcing IT security over the next two years, compared to 18 previously. "The main reason for this shift away from IT security outsourcing is most likely a lack of confidence. Organisations are now more subject to compliance considerations in the form of both formal external and internal policy-driven requirements, particularly in the wake of the US banking controversies and other financial scandals." said Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst at Ovum.

May 15, Lower the Cost of SAP with Oracle 11g

Sat, 15 May 2010 05:32:48 GMT

Free on-demand webcast. Gerhard Kuppler, Oracle's Director of SAP Alliances, talks about the #1 database for SAP Applications. As of April, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 is available for SAP.

May 9, Desktop to Data Centre Virtualization

Sun, 09 May 2010 23:24:47 GMT

Techcast replay featuring Wim Coekaerts, Oracle SVP for Linux and Virtualization. Learn how the addition of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, VirtualBox, and Sun Ray now enable Oracle to offer virtualization from the desktop to the data centre.

Mar 24, Expenditure on external service providers to increase

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:51:06 GMT

A recent survey by Gartner on the spending plans of organisations worldwide indicates that the IT services market is likely to grow due to the increased spending on external service providers. 85 of the respondants anticipate that their spending with external service providers will either increase or stay the same. Organisations in Australia and New Zealand were reported to be the most optimistic and those in Japan the most pessimistic about the prospects of economic recovery. According to Gartner "service providers across all types of service categories and relationship models have the potential to capitalise on growth opportunities as the economy recovers, yet there will likely be little relief from the extreme competitive challenges experienced by service providers in the 2008-through-2009 economic downturn."

Mar 17, How To Increase Priority of lgwr Process

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:41:41 GMT

What to do when your Oracle database is spending a significant amount of time waiting on "log file sync".

Mar 17, How to Thrive Under Pressure As A CIO

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 21:17:27 GMT

Running IT organizations with thousands of employees and budgets of tens of millions of dollars takes wit and wisdom. Some CIOs at Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders conference this week shared both, including the CIOs of Johnson & Johnson, Walt Disney Studios and FedEx.

Mar 16, CIO Agenda 2010

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:45:09 GMT

What will be the top business and technology challenges of 2010 and how best to mangae them? CIOs and analysts give their views.

Mar 15, Why the new normal could kill I.T.

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:52:48 GMT

Gartner believes that by 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets at all! This and the desire for business to do more with less and to innovate faster threatens the ability of I.T. to manage conflicting requirements even when things get back to "normal".

Feb 26, Cloud co,puting case studies

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:23:45 GMT

For organisations considering using Cloud storage to augment current application infrastructure here are 2 video case studies of organisations using CloudArray software together with Cloud storage. The focus of these case studies is more on the impact of applications as opposed to using Cloud storage for file/print or as a specific tier of storage.

Feb 23, Live Webcast - Consolidate for Bus Advantage: From Storage to Scorecard

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:30:25 GMT

Learn how to: * Drive pervasive insights and decision-making with Oracle Business Intelligence * Unify enterprise information at low cost with Oracle Data Integration Suite * Get extreme performance and manage data growth with Oracle data warehousing

Feb 23, Oracle Live Webcast: 3 Ways to Transform your Enterprise with Data Integration

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:51:01 GMT

Transform your Enterprise with Data Integration w/DirectTV. Golden Gate, ODI, Exadata and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition together.

Feb 23, Oracle Live Webcast : Upgrading to 11g

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:51:01 GMT

Learn best practices for upgrades from Oracle9i and Oracle 10g and how to fine-tune your upgraded environment with Oracle Real Application Testing. You'll also get access to the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 'Upgrade Companion'. And Roger Snowden, from Oracle Support Center of Expertise, will be available for Q&A.

Feb 22, How to build an integrated enterprise

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 03:27:07 GMT

Replay of webcast from Computing and Oracle discusses how an enterprise can create an integrated IT strategy covering the challenges, technologies and best practices.

Feb 21, Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 Solutions Puzzles 1 & 2

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:50:29 GMT

Oracle BI EE has been positioned in the leader's quadrant in Gartner's BI Magic Quadrant which makes it increasingly likely that organisations will be using it. Here are the solutions to a couple of puzzles about OBIEE.

Feb 21, Solve your business challenges in 2010

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:11:25 GMT

Get the answers to the biggest challenges facing your business in 2010 from an expert panel of local business advisors.