On a recent project we had a business and technology reason to connect Oracle EBS running 11g to a DB2 database.  After a few weeks of researching for the best practice and approach we decided on the following implementation steps.

1. Download a DB2 driver, such as from DataTek, and download to your application server in any storage directory.
2. Create a directory called “YM” under your custom application top.  example: $CUSTOM_TOP/java/YM.  (Assumes you have already created a $CUSTOM_TOP and it has a directory called “java”.
3. Copy all files from the storage directory to $CUSTOM_TOP/java/YM
4. Add 3 entries to s_adovar_classpath and s_adovar_afclasspath to point to the files in $CUSTOM_TOP/java/YM.
5. Make sure you run auto-config on your updated environment.
6. Bounce the application and database tier.
7. Perform any select, insert, update and or delete from the Oracle EBS application via java program to the DB2 database.  The java program will reference the DB2 connection from a jdbc connect string such as: “jdbc:oracle:db2://servername.com:port;databasename=xxxxxx; User=xxxx; Password=xxxx”

Most organizations leave their mission critical systems vulnerable to security threats and performance degradation. Recent studies show that organizational constraints are at the core of this issue. These constraints range from organizational policies, budgets and staff availability and even competency.

26 percent of organizations apply critical security and performance patches as they are released, 20 percent will eventually apply 6 to 9 months later while another 20 percent have no requirement at all to apply them. That leaves many companies data unprotected.

There are several ways to combat these constraints. One way is gain support from your organization. This can come in the form of support from executives, security / audit team and other critical policy makers. By establishing new and or updating existing security policies, and as a critical component, patching, these guidelines and timeliness of patching removes some of these constraints. A second way to protect and improve data integrity is to use technology. By keeping current on latest software, technology can help you reduce time and budget constraints of getting current applications and databases tested and allow your team to proactively assess the impact to your enterprise.

Centroid believes in 2 degrees of continuous change instead of wide arcs of re-activeness. These small degrees of change allows for continuous improvement across the organization. Whether it be through technology or process slight proactive adjustments make the enterprise perform at a higher degree then you can ever accomplish by large scale reactive measures.

Centroid is in the business of Future Proofing Oracle environments. In fact, Centroid is the leader in Future Proofing your Business and Technology and no one does it better. No one.

Often, in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (R12) during an implementation or after patching, the pre-compiled jsp’s need to be recompiled because you aren’t seeing the change you expect. You can selectively recompile jsp’s using this program, but I like to just blow away everything and start fresh. Support documentation states “AD utilities to perform this action, for example after patches are applied which replaced 1 or more JSP pages” but I frequently have to use this tool manually after patching to see the expected results.

This is my go-to first step after patching or configuration changes that aren’t giving me what I expect.

My process is as follows:

1. Bring down Apache with adapcctl.sh in $INST_TOP/admin/scripts

[appldemo@demoR12 ~]$ $INST_TOP/admin/scripts/adapcctl.sh stop

2. Clear the cache directory by renaming it and recreating it.

[appldemo@demoR12 ~]$ mv $COMMON_TOP/_pages $COMMON_TOP/_pages_07DEC09 [appldemo@demoR12 ~]$ mkdir $COMMON_TOP/_pages

3. Start ojspCompile with the parameters –flush –compile -p [number of parallel processes]

[appldemo@demoR12 ~]$ $FND_TOP/patch/115/bin/ojspCompile.pl –flush –compile -p 8

4. Confirm the process completes successfully

starting…(compiling all) using 10i internal ojsp ver: 10 synchronizing dependency file: loading deplist…7983 enumerating jsps…7983 updating dependency…0 initializing compilation: eliminating children…5894 (-2089) translating and compiling: translating jsps…5894/5894 in 10m29s compiling jsps…5894/5894 in 44m27s Finished!

5. Almost Done! – Just Restart Apache!

[appldemo@demoR12 ~]$ $INST_TOP/admin/scripts/adapcctl.sh start