We recently ran into an issue in a customer configuration where rewriting URLs using pass-through didn’t function as expected with OC4J-deployed applications. As it turned out, there’s a bug in the OC4J container and a relatively easy workaround for some.
The situation was this (names changed to protect the innocent):

An existing Java application deployment existed using [...]

We encountered an “interesting” challenge recently where some, not all, OC4J containers in an Oracle Application Server 10.1.3.1.0 installation would “crash” (they would stop running). There was no apparent pattern to the “crazy” crashing containers. The system administrator was actively doing application (re)deployments at the rate of 3-4 per week. The containers seemed to be [...]

Oracle 11g Database is now available on Windows. Get it while it’s hot :).

Oracle finally closed the deal with Bharosa that I wrote about several weeks ago. They haven’t posted it yet on OTN, but it’s on edelivery.oracle.com under the name “Oracle Adaptive Access Manager”. The documentation isn’t quite up to normal Oracle documentation standards, but it’s enough to get the install up and running. I’m getting my [...]

I spent the past three days at Oracle’s office in downtown Chicago working on the Oracle Identity Manager Advanced Workshop. Ananth Kini and Sid Choudhury from Oracle did a fine job explaining the product and it’s various use cases to us. Most of the time was allocated to working though extensive and applicable lab exercises [...]

Tonight I took another Oracle certification beta exam, Oracle Application Server 10g: Administration II (1Z1-312). Since it was a beta, the fee was only $50 and I knew some of the topics to be covered, so I figured I’d wing it and see how I did. I doubt I passed as I wasn’t well-prepared–especially for [...]

I was catching up on my reading this fine Chicagoland morning and found some interesting articles that are definitely worth a short post.
First, there’s a strong endorsement for Rich Niemiec’s new book Oracle 10g Performance Tuning Tips and Techniques. I’m still waiting for my copy, but Mary Ann Davidson doesn’t dish out endorsements every day, [...]

I’ve had time this week to get familiar with our test server environment which is a rather old Dell server running VMWare ESX Server 3.0.1. After creating a new VM and getting a base linux OS configured, I wanted to clone it for later use. I’ve used VMWare Workstation and VMWare Server before and the [...]

I’ve been doing a lot of testing with Oracle Database 11g lately and I’m a big fan of using oraenv to set the environment. For many releases, it seemed that Oracle had completely ignored oraenv and dbhome, but they’ve made some changes in 11g that aren’t quite so helpful it seems. I’ll probably file an [...]

I was just catching up on my reading and found an excellent post on Kirk McGowan’s blog discussing Oracle Clusterware’s fencing mechanisms. As Kirk details, there are many theories regarding the effectiveness and safety of Oracle’s fencing approach and he provides his usual no-nonsense responses to those theories.
Incase you are lost, a little background may [...]