Quotable Quotes

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.  –Oliver Wendell Holmes

We have more ability than will power, and it is often an excuse to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible.  –François de la Rochefoucauld

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds you down or polishes you up depends on what you're made of.  –Jacob M. Braude

It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required.  –Ivan Goncharov

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.  –Robert Louis Stevenson

The only correct actions are those that demand no explanation and no apology.  –Red Auerbach

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Quotable Quotes

Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely, and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world.  –Charles Eames

Don't fight forces; use them.  –Buckminster Fuller

A day of worry is more exhausting than a week of work.  –John Lubbock

To be prepared is half the victory.  –Miguel de Cervantes

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.  –William Ellery Channing

All of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon—instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.  –Dale Carnegie

The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally new development.  –Alfred North Whitehead

Life is full of obstacle illusions.  –Grant Frazier

We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.  –E. Merrill Root

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How do you "roll your own" Tax Updates for HR and Financials?

Besides being able to upgrade at some point in the future and production support insurance, getting regular Tax Updates is one of the reasons companies give for not cancelling their support.  I’ll bet it’s not all that hard.

If I was a new college IT grad, would I want to learn PeopleSoft?

Okay, I really do like the PeopleSoft products.  But I got a call today from a recent college grad wanting some help with installing the PeopleSoft CD’s.  She asked how long it would take to learn PeopleSoft, because she noticed there were a lot of PeopleSoft jobs posted and thought it would be a good thing to know.  After explaining how PeopleSoft is a very broad and deep application and how she’d have to pick an area and specialize in that, I felt like I needed to give her the bigger picture.  PeopleSoft’s product line has a finite future.  The language is proprietary and specific to PeopleSoft applications.  Oracle isn’t investing in it the way PeopleSoft used to.  Applications Unlimited notwithstanding, the state of the art ERP application will be Fusion in the foreseeable future.  As much as I hated to, I told her she might look at SAP if she wanted to learn a product that’s likely to be in demand 10+ years down the road.

How much downward rate pressure (if any) are you independent consultants seeing out there?

What I've heard so far isn't too encouraging.

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So you are tasked with a maintenance pack install, or worse yet, a full blown upgrade.  You follow the upgrade procedures as best you can understand them.  You are at the step where you have run the compare reports, and are waiting for the developers to look over the reports.  Sure, they cursed at the fact that you wasted five hours of the print queue and half the trees Johnny Appleseed managed to plant, but the real fact is they have to shift through 1000’s of pages of compare reports that are meaningless due to their size.

What your developers need is a simple Excel list of all objects changed, which ones were custom work, and who the last developer was who touched the object.  This last point is crucial.  The work can be divided up quickly, if only we knew who last touched the object.  This becomes paramount when the system is shared by multiple development teams (as in HRMS and Campus Solutions).  Fortunately, it’s possible to write an SQL to give the developers what they need because the majority of App Designer objects have a field called “lastupdoprid” which holds the user who last saved that object in the current environment.  The delivered compare reports utilize this field as follows: if the userid is not equal to PPLSOFT, then the object has been updated by a customer site (and the asterisk will be used to indicate the delivered object has been modified).

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Tim Jones is an IT practitioner with many years of experience, and a good friend of mine.  He puts together a monthly newsletter about trends and interesting stories surrounding software development and testing.  I finally got around to asking him if I could republish it here for the benefit of the PeopleSoft Corner community, and he graciously agreed.   I hope you find it as valuable of a resource as I do.  Please click the Read More link to see the complete newsletter.  If you would like to see more, back issues (back to 1999) are available at http://swtest.workshopmultimedia.com/.

May 2009 Newsletter

Quotable Quotes

 Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else.  –Ivern Ball

 Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.  –Jonathan Kozol

 The person who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.  –Chinese proverb

 The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.  –Nikola Tesla

 Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.  –E. Stanley Jones

 Never neglect details. When everyone's mind is dulled or distracted, the leader must be doubly vigilant.  –Colin Powell

 There is only one you... Don't you dare change just because you're outnumbered!  –Charles Swindoll

 Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.  –Aesop

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Charles Phillips announced today at Collaborate 09 that Extended Support fees would be waived for the PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9 releases through June 2011. Extended support adds about 10% to the Premier Support, so that'll bring a bit of relief to IT budgets.

I believe that Extended Support is for products that have been released for five years or more.  It's interesting that after five years release 8.9 is only one release back from being current.  From a consulting perspective it's been nice to relax a bit from the biennial task of getting up to speed on a new release, but I have to wonder if PeopleSoft customers are getting as much value from their support dollars as they used to.  Either way I think Oracle is doing the right thing by not charging extra for supporting this not-so-outdated release.

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Sun Microsystems today has agreed to be bought by Oracle in a $7.4bn deal, just two weeks after IBM’s bid for Sun fell apart.  The acquisition gives Oracle some powerful assets to attack Microsoft and IBM on new fronts.

This deal will give Oracle control of MySQL (the “M” in the LAMP development platform”), and a lower-end competitor to Oracle’s flagship database product.  Oracle also gains control of Java, which is the software platform that Oracle’s Fusion Enterprise Applications due to be released in 2010 will run on.  Open Office, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, is now owned by the world's largest Enterprise Applications company. 

Sun manufactures servers based on the SPARC chips and the Solaris operating system.  I have been told that in the past Oracle has built its database on Sun servers, and ported it to other platforms.  Oracle may be looking to achieve more vertical integration with the hardware that it runs on.  That thought seems to be supported by this quote from Larry Ellison:

The acquisition combines best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems. Oracle plans to engineer and deliver an integrated system—applications to disk—where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Customers benefit as their system integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.

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Well, another project is getting ready to go live.  This one has kept me consistently busy as evidenced by my lack of postings since the end of last summer.  But it’s been good and I’ve learned a lot, and much of what I learned is eventually going to make it to the blog.  For example, I figured out a fundamental concept of Jakarta JMeter and now I can make it work predictably as a performance testing tool (and all around scripting tool for that matter).  The performance testing gurus out there will wonder how I got anything to work without it.

The 3rd party batch scheduling integration concept I blogged about last November is getting ready to go live.  So far all systems are go, I’ll post a follow up and let you know what worked and what didn’t.

Another thing I want to write about is how to replace PeopleSoft’s PostRpt daemon with a custom one to get away from the XML files and read the parameters from the database.  There are some advantages to doing it this way that I’d like to share.   Besides, there might be some folks interested in just how to use the API to get external content into Report Manager.

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Have you guys ever tried to do business with Microsoft where you actually buy a product off their web site and have it shipped to you?  I was recently forced into exactly that scenario when I purchased a new laptop from Sams.  It was ugly. 

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In my experience, scheduling tools like Autosys are really good about creating schedules with dependencies, firing off notifications, and working with your trouble ticketing system.  But how they kick off these jobs is very simple:  They execute commands from the Operating System command line.

Here’s something I’ve been working on to allow my client to use a 3rd party tool like Autosys to drive the batch schedule, but do it in such a way that lets process scheduler run the individual processes so we can see the status & logs in process monitor and restart app engine jobs through the front end when they fail.

Before we get started, let me just say that I realize that 3rd party scheduling tools like Autosys sell a PeopleSoft plugin that will do this.  But these days not every company is willing to spring for the extra cash for nice-to-have functionality like this.  If you’re reading this article chances are you’re not the guy in charge of your IT organization’s budget and you know what I mean.

Usually to set up your batch schedule, you come up with a generic script to fire off an app engine job based on certain parameters like run control id and process name.  Then you create the same script for SQR’s, COBOL’s, throw in some FTP scripts to move files around, spend like 10,000 hours debugging, and viola you’re done.

Now there’s no reason why the scripts that launch your AE’s, SQR’s or COBOL’s couldn’t schedule the process inside of process scheduler instead of launching it directly.  Except for the fact that you probably don’t want to do all of the required inserts to the process scheduler tables manually because you never know when you’ll screw up process scheduler, either now by getting the next PRCSINSTANCE wrong or in the future when you do a PeopleTools upgrade.

But PeopleCode has a ProcessRequest API that takes care of all of the details regarding how to schedule a process.  And you can write PeopleCode in an Application Engine program which can be called from a command line by Autosys.  If we write our code so that our AE program keeps running until the job it scheduled completes and returns a response of Success or Fail so that Autosys can go to the next job or handle the exception as required, we’ll have something pretty cool.

Sound like fun?  Great, let’s get started!

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