ERP Associates, Inc.

This HR technology manager's blog provides an executive-level perspective of PeopleSoft/Oracle and Fusion.

Comment (0)

There was a presentation at Wednesday's RSA Conference about using Google to uncover passwords, Social Security Numbers, and other things that your organization probably wants to keep hidden. Silicon Valley Sluth had a nice write-up about it.

I was wondering how much effort it would take to find some sensitive PeopleSoft information. So using the information gleaned from the article, I started searching.

On my second search, I uncovered a spreadsheet with a username and password that would allow me to upload budget information to a major University's server. I didn't have the server name, but I wasn't too determined either.

A few queries later I uncovered results of PeopleSoft queries that users had saved. I found a document that contained employee e-mail addresses and another that contained employee ID's.

Besides the obvious privacy and security considerations, the exercise reminded me that universities and state governments put a lot of PeopleSoft collateral out on the Internet.

For example, I found a great HRMS Query training exercise manual. I ran across a comprehensive set of GL test scripts. Maybe on my next assignment if I need an updated coding standards document, I'll just pull one off of the Core-CT web site instead of recreating it from scratch.

I guess my conclusion is that Google can be a force for good or evil. People need to be aware that anything they place on the Internet can and will be found and used for any purpose. The price of a free Internet is eternal vigilance.

Update 2/27/2006: There's an expert from Google Hacking for Penetration Testers on The Ethical Hacker Network entitled 10 simple security searches that work. It does a nice job of detailing penetration searches and describing why they work.

Comment (0)

PS-GUY has an interesting vision of the future of ERP.

Comment (0)

Rich Manalang's web log. While not a strictly PS blog, it has advanced tips and other great technical info.

Comment (0)

PeopleSoft analysis and technical tips.

Comment (0)

Ketan Kothari's PeopleSoft Blog. It contains helpful technical tips.

Comment (1)

Ever since I started working with Oracle version 6 back in the 90's, I've been looking for Oracle to release a decent SQL Developer tool. I'm happy to say that after only 11 years of waiting, Oracle has released a tool called Oracle SQL Developer (a.k.a. Project Raptor).

Many of my friends have settled on Quest's Free Toad product. I used it for a while but I found the incessant re-installs whenever the license expires to be too big of a headache, and I’m too cheap to purchase a permanent license. As a result, I’ve pretty much stayed with the tried-and-true SQLPlus tool for the same reason a lot of UNIX people stay with the VI editor. I know about every set command there is and I even have quite a collection of @-scripts to show me everything from database environment information to how to navigate to a component.

But when Oracle offered a stable early adopter release of their Oracle SQL Developer I decided to download the Raptor from Oracle's website and give it a test drive.

It's all Java based -- no surprise there if you've seen JDeveloper or their other Fusion Architecture tools. The installation process was a simple matter of unzipping it to any directory you like, and running sqldeveloper.exe. No InstallShield wizard, no registry entries, very clean.

My first impression was that the program had a nice, intuitive looking interface. It uses JDBC Thin Layer for database connectivity, so you don't need an Oracle Home or a TNS entry to access your database.

Setting up a database wasn't hard as long as I knew the server the DB was on, the port # and the SID. When I tried to make it use my TNSNAMES.ORA file though, the drop-down list only showed the first 10 databases, and my DB wasn't there.

Once the database connection was established, the standard database navigation folder appeared on the left. I noticed that when I expanded the Tables folder, it showed the first 40 or so tables and at the bottom was a "Show More" link. Clicking the "Show More" link brought up a pop-up window that allowed me to enter filter criteria. I really liked this feature since a typical PeopleSoft database can have over 40,000 tables, and even more indexes.



There is good amount of right-click functionality from the navigation window. From the navigation menu you can do things like rename tables, export to XML, create indexes, compute statistics, and grate priviledges.

One limitation I noticed was that if you have multiple connections opened, and several objects expanded within these connections, you'll be doing a whole lot of scrolling across the navigation tree to get to the objects you need. I didn't see that as a show stopper, but Toad has more navigation options to make that a nicer process.

Running a query was pretty much as you would expect. Enter the query into the SQL Worksheet window and click the Run button. You can also commit, rollback, explain and view your SQL History from the same window.







Viewing objects takes a long time to come back, but when they finally do you can see the information you’d expect – columns, data, indexes, constraints, grants, stats, dependencies, etc. You can even add, update or delete data in the table from the provided grid. It will also generate the DDL necessary to recreate an object in case you’d like to compare it to what App Designer builds.

You can switch from a database navigation view to a report navigation view. Adding reports is as easy as naming it and pasting SQL. To make the queries with substitution variables work, I had to change the &1 and &2 parameters to standard bind variables like :1 and :2.





Since it’s an early adopter release, there are still some bugs to sort out. Here are some of the issues I stumbled across:

• Performance isn’t the greatest,


• The close button didn’t work for me,


• When I opened an SQL file, I wasn’t able to run it unless I then copy/pasted it into an SQL worksheet.

So the original question: Is Raptor going to gobble up Toad, RapidSQL, and other of those third-party tools? At the moment I don't think so. Quest et al have a big jump on Oracle with mature products and a lot of installed customers. But I have a lot of confidence that Oracle will close the features gap, and the interoperability between Oracle SQL Developer and the rest of the Fusion Architecture components will eventually sway PeopleSoft, JDE, Siebel and Oracle developers toward Oracle SQL Developer.

The price is right, so when the production release is out I'll add it to my list of standard applications that go on a PeopleSoft Developer's workstation, which currently includes App Designer, UltraEdit, and BeyondCompare.

Comment (2)

If you want a warm fuzzy about Oracle Fusion applications, don't read this post about Oracle's "Halfway to Fusion" event that took place at the end of last month.

I haven't understood why my clients didn't seem more worried about what Fusion entails. Some features won't make the cut, customizations won't be automatically handled during an upgrade, you will have to retrain your support staff and users, and Oracle hasn't even announced if Fusion will support non-Oracle databases. It's nice to see there's some other critical (if not paranoid) folks out there in the blogosphere.

Comment (3)

Oracle's blogging index.

Comment (0)

I wanted to share my UNIX script to start and stop all of the web servers, app servers, process schedulers, and EM Agents defined under a PS_HOME directory. The command line is pretty simple:

ps.sh start|stop|kill|restart [cc]

where
 start - Starts all web/app/process scheduler/PSEMAgents
 stop - Stops all web/app/process scheduler/PSEMAgents
 kill - Kills all web/app/process scheduler/PSEMAgents, and cleans up IPCS
 restart - Executes the Stop then the Start commands
 If cc is specified on the command line, the script will clear all of the cache and reconfigure the application server and process scheduler.

I've used this script to give Veritas control over the PeopleSoft application so it can shut it down on one server and bring it up on another server if a service failure occurs. It's also a handy tool if you need to shut down or start up all components of an environment quickly.

Feel free to modify it to suit your unique needs, and use at your own risk. I'm sure the script can be improved, so please let me know your comments, feedback, or enhancements.

Comment (1)