Blog entries

Amazon Web Services is Ready for the Enterprise

Brent Martin — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:49:46 +0100

Amazon has been steadily moving toward making their web service offering ready for the enterprise. Over the last year or so they've received certification for Oracle database, they've broken down the barriers that would prevent PCI certification, and they've improved their pricing structure to make it more corporation-friendly.

Today they may have finally broken the final barriers down to large scale enterprise adoption with the following announcements:

Virtual Private Cloud is now out of Beta and allows you to "provision a private section of the AWS cloud where you can create avirtual network that you control, including selection of an IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration or route tables and network gateways. you can connect your Amazon VPC directly to the Internet while also extending your corporate data center to the cloud using encrypted VPN connections."

But the announcement of Amazon Direct Connect might be my favorite. "Amazon Direct Connect is a new service that enables you to bypass the internet and deliver data to and from AWS via private network connection. With a private connection, you can reduce networking latency and costs, and provide a more consistent network experience while moving data between AWS and your datacenters. With pay-as-you-go pricing and no minimum commitment, you pay only for the network ports used and the data transferred out from AWS over the private connection."

There's also new functionality for AWS Identity and Access Management that lets you use your existing corporate identity management system to grant secure and direct access to AWS resources without creating a new AWS identity for those users.

I'm excited about the possibilities this opens up in terms of on demand computing capacity in the enterprise.

Managing Chartfields and Trees Across PeopleSoft and Hyperion

Brent Martin — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:07:04 +0100

If you’re implementing Hyperion applications to complement your PeopleSoft Financials application, one decision you’ll have to make relatively early is which tool to use to manage your core dimensions and their associated hierarchies. Here are the options:

Native Functionality
Hyperion EPMA
Hyperion Data Relationship Management

So which one is the right choice? Based on my research and discussions with Christopher Dwight, a member of Oracle’s Master Data Management practice, here’s what I have learned:

The native functionality basically means you’ll maintain your dimensions in each application separately. So if you want to add a department, you’ll have to add it to PeopleSoft, then Hyperion Financial Management, then Planning separately.

Hyperion EPMA provides a robust, single point of administration for EPM applications. It allows you to create a dimension library which allows several EPM dimensions to be centrally stored and re-used across multiple EPM applications. Basic dimension editing capabilities are provided. Individual dimension elements ("nodes" or "members") can be flagged for use within a specific application, supporting slightly different application requirements while promoting dimension re-use. Although this feature has potential, each member must be individually flagged, limiting the usability for large dimensions. EPMA is intended to support only Hyperion EPM applications, and to be utilized by system administrators, not the typical end user.

DRM is different in that it was conceived from the start as an agnostic enterprise dimension management platform, and not beholden to Hyperion EPM applications alone. As such, DRM can be deployed to support financial metadata and dimensions in a myriad of systems, ranging from PeopleSoft to GEAC to SAP to Cognos to Teradata to Hyperion and many more. It was also design to support not only system administrator users, but also to allow business users to become direct contributors into the dimension management process.
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Data Warehousing Made Easier

Brent Martin — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:05:32 +0100

I was talking to an Oracle sales rep this week about OBIEE. Since this is a PeopleSoft blog I guess I’d better explain. OBIEE is Oracle’s Business Intelligence offering. It’s solidly in Forrester’s leader’s quadrant and it has all of BI features you would expect (reporting, ad-hoc analysis, dashboards, alerts, etc). The question at hand was why we should implement it when we already have some perfectly good BI tools with committed users who truly believe in them.

We didn’t get into a deep discussion about BI features. Everybody knows what a BI solution should do by now, and the leading tools do it well enough that there’s not much differentiation (at least from how I interpret the Forrester recent report). So what difference does a BI tool make at this point?

I’m not sure what the Cognos or MicroStrategy reps would say, but Oracle laid out an interesting case. If your enterprise applications are built around Oracle applications like PeopleSoft, Hyperion, Siebel, or EBS and Essbase, you can get out of the box functionality that no other tool can match.

What I expect from Oracle Open World 2010

Brent Martin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:16:04 +0100

I’m going to Oracle OpenWorld again this year, and I just finished building my schedule. Wow. This year there are so many sessions I want to attend in the same time slots that I won’t be able to see a fraction of what I want to. Guess I’ll have to skip the session on how to author blue-ray disks using Java in favor of a product roadmap session I need to attend. You see, I’ve started a new project and I have a whole laundry list of stuff I need to come up to speed on. I’m sure it’ll be an informative but exhausting week – it always is.

Gazing into my crystal ball, I’m expecting to hear more about the Fusion applications that were introduced at the end of the 2009 OOW. I think Oracle isn’t re-inventing all of the functionality in their mature ERP/CRM product lines like PeopleSoft, JDE, EBS, and Siebel. But all the same I’m expecting to see some products that are ready for launch and looking snazzy with the deep integration with BI and other apps that Oracle has invested so heavily in.

Speaking of BI, I’m looking forward to seeing the new release of OBIEE. BI apps just look cool, and their functionality makes things like PeopleSoft Matching functionality seem boring in comparison. I'm hoping to see support for a ton of data sources and the ability to publish interactive reports to latest generation mobile devices. Unfortunately I think I missed the BI boat at some point in my career, so bring on the 3-way match!

The True Cost of a Core

Brent Martin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:21:11 +0100

Servers are becoming more powerful as manufacturers are finding new ways to get more cores into a CPU. Today it’s not uncommon to see hexa and octa-core processors shipping at the same price points the dual- and hexa-cores shipped yesterday. Where manufacturers once got their performance improvements through raw CPU speed, they are now getting their getting the majority of performance improvement through more cores in their processor chips.

Unfortunately the economics of additional cores for performance aren’t the same as improvements through improved clock cycles because software manufactures have largely tied their technology licensing to the number of cores on a system, and their pricing isn’t decreasing as the number of cores on these new servers increase.

For example, say you buy a basic server with two hexa-core processors, so you’re looking at 12 cores on the box. Now let’s suppose the list price for Oracle Database is $47,500 per core. So your list price to run an Oracle database on your new server will be $285,000. And that’s not counting tuning packs, diagnostic packs, management packs, or even maintenance -- which is calculated as a percentage of the base price. It turns out the cheapest part of this equation may be the hardware!

So if you’re planning on running software from the big vendors, conduct a solid sizing exercise and be sure to buy just the number of cores that you need. Leave empty sockets for growth, but you might want to choose models that let you scale with fewer cores to avoid breaking the bank. Avoid sharing servers with more than one software package that is licensed per core (i.e. Informatica and Oracle DB), or you could end up paying double for server capacity that you’ll never be able to fully realize. And when you DO add cores, be sure to also purchase the additional licenses to stay in compliance. I’ve heard that software vendors’ compliance teams occasionally check up on you, and running with a few extra cores could break more than your annual budget.

Cheap Cloud Based Backups and Disaster Recovery for your Enterprise Apps

Brent Martin — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 10:12:03 +0100

Remember the old days (circa 2006) when doing disaster recovery involved shipping tapes to an off-site storage facility and provisioning emergency hardware at a disaster recovery facility? Well, fast forward to 2010 when virtually unlimited hardware and disk storage are cheap and plentiful. Making real-time backups to the cloud (with the right software) is not only doable but almost a no-brainer. But once your backup is in the cloud, the next logical step would be to launch a virtual instance of the server that you backed up. But that’s like, Star Trek futuristic stuff, right?

Well no more. CloudRepica has a Software as a Service offering that does just that. Their enterprise-grade replication software is capable of creating real-time disk images of any server. Then they combine that with the unlimited disk resources and phenomenal reliability of the cloud to create a real-time disk backup and recovery service. This offering is packaged and delivered in a Software as a Service model where you pay only a monthly fee. There are no upfront costs, no licenses, no hardware, no media, no consulting labor and no facilities costs.

So here’s how it works: CloudReplica installs their replication software on one of your Microsoft servers. This isn’t any run-of-the-mill software either. It’s an industrial-strength, lightweight, flight-level replication software that’s been in use by large enterprises for 16/17 years. Technically, it uses a non-blocking filter/driver which listens for changes at the byte-level, which means only the portions of the files that change are replicated and there are never any locks because of the replication. The changed bytes are compressed, encrypted and transmitted to one of their cloud hosting providers, such as Amazon or Teramark, where the identical disk image is maintained. Features within their replication software insure that you can always bring your system back to a good known restore point.

Single Pay Vouchers - Let Excel Key Them In For You!

Brent Martin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 10:05:40 +0100

Suppose you have a spreadsheet full of invoices that you want to load to PeopleSoft. If you’re running PeopleSoft 8.9 or later, that’s easy. You use the voucher load spreadsheet to get them into the system and then run Voucher Build to turn them into vouchers. But what if you want to load Single Pay vouchers? That’s something that the spreadsheet voucher load won’t handle.

Okay, so maybe use the ExcelToCI spreadsheet to populate the VCHR_EXPRESS component. Good luck with that. If you’ve ever tried then you’ll know all about the "First operand of .null" error. I spent some quality time with a component interface built off of that component and the PeopleCode debugger. Unless you’re ready to change some PeopleCode -- maybe a lot of PeopleCode -- I don’t recommend it.

I had one client create a couple of SQR’s to upload single pay vouchers as regular vouchers, then change them to single pay vouchers after voucher build runs. That solution works well (and if you want to know the details let me know), but if you’re not looking for a high-volume solution it might be overkill.

I recently stumbled across a way to do spreadsheet uploads with a simple spreadsheet macro that doesn’t depend on component interface. Basically you make an Excel macro open up a browser and key the data in for you.

Before I explain how it works, I just want to let you know that you need to be familiar with Excel macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code. You also need to know a little about Application Programming Interfaces (API’s). And a little knowledge about the HTML Document Object Model (DOM) wouldn’t hurt. But if you meet most of these qualifications you shouldn’t have any trouble at all in making this work – no special PeopleSoft App Designer access or knowledge required.

And one more caveat: This was built on PeopleTools 8.48 and Financials 8.9. Due to how the script works it’s likely it won’t work for PeopleTools releases beyond 8.49.

Consider the following Excel VBA macro:

Securing Enterprise Data in AWS

Brent Martin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:00:27 +0100

Sure, Amazon Web Services is great for geeks and small companies with nothing to lose, but what if your company is in the Fortune 1000? Can you really trust Amazon (or any cloud provider for that matter) with your employees, vendors, customers, and all of the associated confidential data like credit card numbers and tax ID’s?

That’s something I’ve been struggling with lately. We have successfully used AWS to spin up demo environments of PeopleSoft Enterprise, Hyperion, GoldenGate. We used demo data as opposed to any customer-specific data which has been fine so far. And I must say that AWS is an incredible tool to get the software up and running and build a sandbox for evaluation purposes. But the next logical step would be to use AWS to host conference room pilot and prototyping environments to support our initial requirements gathering efforts. Beyond that we’ll want to build Dev and Test environments. And all of these environments will need real data from existing systems.

We can certainly procure the hardware and host these environments in house, but I’m thinking about AWS because we could postpone our hardware purchases until closer to the end of the requirements gathering phase when we can be more precise about our needs. So I did some research and here are some of the things I’ve learned.

PeopleTools 8.50 Upgrade Issues To Avoid

Brent Martin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 09:56:16 +0100

In my recent podcast I interview Karen from Chesapeake Energy about Chesapeake's PeopleTools 8.50 Upgrade. She was generous enough to share their issue list, and so I wanted to pass it along. I hope you find it helpful!

The new auto-complete functionality does not allow you to select using the mouse. You must use your up and down arrows and the ‘Enter’ key.

* Oracle supposedly has this fixed in 8.50.05.

External URLs – No longer work the same way they did before. Previously, URLs on content references that contained escape sequences would function correctly, but now PS replaces the “%” in the escape sequence with another escape sequence, “%” which breaks the URL. To work around, it was necessary to replace the escape sequence with the value it replaced (e.g. replacing with an actual space character).

ViewURL and ViewContentURL Functions – Similar (and likely related) to issue 1, the PeopleCode functions used for transferring a user to a specific URL no longer work as they previously did. The issue does not seem to be related to escape sequences in the URLs, but rather with how PS is transferring the user. To work around, we instead transfer the user to an iScript which uses the Response class method RedirectURL to do the transferring, which behaves as expected.

Old-style Outer-joins in PS Query – Because PS query has been modified to utilize ANSI standard inner joins for row-level security (and perhaps some “standard” joins as well), any queries against records for which row-level security was implemented that also used old-style outer-joins (with the “(+)” indicator) failed because any select statement cannot contain both styles at the same level of the query. To work around, we have been fixing queries with the problem on a case-by-case basis. In some cases, the query can simply be re-written using an ANSI standard outer-join, but in others (such as queries with multiple outer-joins), this either cannot be done or is impractical to do because of the fact that PS Query only allows outer-joins against the last record in the query. In these cases, views have been created that handle the outer-joining themselves.

* Oracle targeting tools 8.51 for fix on this issue

PS Query Prompts – Prompts with prompt table edits do not function correctly when ran by clicking one of the direct links (“HTML”, “Excel”, etc.) in the Query Manager or Query Viewer search results. When the magnifying glass for the prompt is clicked and the user enters Advanced search mode or chooses an alternate search key for their search, the search results table in the modal prompt window gets garbled and is unreadable. To work around, users have been prompted to use Query Manager, click “Edit” on the query and go to the “Run” table instead. The prompts function correctly using this method. For users who previously only had Query Viewer access, the same workaround is possible by giving them Query Manager access, but only granting access to the Search and Run pages in that component.

* Oracle targeting tools 8.50.08 for fix on this issue

XMLDoc-based XML Publisher Reports – On a small percentage of existing XMLDoc-based XML Publisher reports, the Report Definition became inaccessible after the Tools upgrade (user would receive a hard error trying to open it). Case was opened with Oracle and they provided a workaround that involves creating a schema for the Data Source associated with the Report Definition. They utilized Visual Studio to create the schema based on the sample XML. I tried creating a schema myself, and although it was valid for the sample XML, that did not fix the problem, so apparently reports that have this problem are “finicky” about the schema they need. They have been unable to give me a reason as to why this is a problem on some reports but not others, or why my hand-made, valid schema did not work.

Recurrences – Processes that were scheduled to run on a recurrence prior to the upgrade began having problems after the upgrade. In most cases, none of them had any “PS_CDM%” table entries created when they ran and no temporary directories were created for content to be written to while the process ran (prior to posting to report repository). Many processes look to PS_CDM_LIST specifically to obtain this temporary directory location stored in the PRCSOUTPUTDIR field, and thus failed when trying to write files to a non-existent, undefined location. Even those that didn’t would get stuck in a “Posting” status after running to success because the content to be posted did not exist. Cancelling current recurrences and rescheduling seemed to remedy the issue.

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PeopleSoft 8.9 on AWS Installation Videos

Brent Martin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:13:50 +0100

Here are the long-awaited videos from our PeopleSoft 8.9 Installation Exercise from February 15th. You'll remember that was the day I needed to install PeopleSoft 8.9 on to an AWS instance, and I decided to do it in a GoToMeeting session so whoever wanted to could "look over my shoulder", ask questions and participate. It was more of a collaboration than a training session, and there were plenty of times I hit issues that the group bailed me out on. So I learned a lot, especially about SQL Server. Hopefully everybody else did too.

a.myPlayer { display:block; width: 300px; height:240px; }
a.myPlayer img { margin-top:0px; border:0px; }
a.myPlayer:hover { border:1px solid #000; }

flowplayer("a.myPlayer", "http://www.erpassociates.com/plugins/content/flowplayer/flowplayer-3.1.5.swf", {

clip: {
autoPlay: true,
//scaling: "scale",
//bufferLength: 3,
provider: 'rtmp'
} ,
plugins: {

rtmp: {
url: "http://www.erpassociates.com/plugins/content/flowplayer/flowplayer.rtmp-3.1.3.swf",
netConnectionUrl: "rtmp://video.erpassociates.com/cfx/st",
}

} ,
canvas: {

} ,
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} ,
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});

Installing PeopleSoft Today

Brent Martin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:00:09 +0100

I'm going to do a PeopleSoft Install today. It'll be PeopleTools 8.48, Financials 8.9 on SQL Server 2005 and Windows 2003 to a server in the Amazon cloud. I know these are old versions but I need a machine that matches a client's current state config, and the installation basics haven't changed that much anyway.

I set up a Go To meeting that you can join if you'd like to "look over my shoulder" and ask questions. Feel free to drop in and out as you get time. I'll record it for posterity in case you miss it.

Connection info is:

1. Please join my meeting.
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/532050768

2. Use your microphone and speakers (VoIP) - a headset is recommended. Or, call in using your telephone.

Dial 312-878-0207
Access Code: 532-050-768
Audio PIN: Shown after joining the meeting

Meeting ID: 532-050-768

Software Testing and Development Newsletter - February 2010

Tim Jones — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:23:55 +0100

Quotable Quotes

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances. –Thomas Jefferson

Patience with others is love. Patience with self is hope. Patience with God is faith. –Adel Bestavros

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want. –Margaret Young

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. –William James

Oracle Finalizes Sun Acquisition

Brent Martin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:58:32 +0100

Well, it's final -- I got the e-mail from Charles Phillips and Safra Catz this morning. Oracle has finally satisfied the regulators and now is the proud new owner of Sun Microsystems. What can we expect from Enterprise Software going forward? Well, according to the e-mail:

Performance levels will be unmatched. Oracle’s software already runs faster on Sun SPARC/Solaris than on any other server or operating system. With Sun as a part of Oracle, each layer of the stack will be engineered to further improve performance, reliability and manageability so that IT will be more predictable, more supportable, and more secure. Customers will benefit as their system performance goes up and their system integration and management costs go down.

In addition, our open standards-based technology will give customers choice. Customers can purchase our fully integrated systems, or easily integrate our best-of-breed technologies with their existing environments. Our open technology also enables customers to take full advantage of third party innovations. Oracle also plans to extend its partner specialization program to include Sun technologies to better enable partners to deliver differentiated and value-added solutions to customers.

Congrats guys. Feel free to cut out a couple of hours early. You've earned it.

Error when running PeopleTools 8.50 from a file server

Brent Martin — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0100

If you try to run PeopleTools 8.50 from a file server, or if you copied the directory to your home directory and tried to launch it, you may get the following error:

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail.

This happens because PeopleTools 8.50 is developed using the Microsoft Visual C++, and the C run time files must be installed on your workstation or the PeopleTools client programs will not run.

Here's how to fix it:

Go to PS_HOME/setup/vcredist
Run vcredist_x86.exe

Tracking PeopleSoft usage with Google Analytics

Brent Martin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0100

I’ve been using Google Analytics to track how users use my web site for years now, but it just occurred to me that Google Analytics would be a powerful way to track usage in a PeopleSoft system as well.

Turns out it’s not all that hard to put the Google Analytics code on your Peoplesoft component pages. Here’s how to do it:

1) Launch App Designer

2) Pull up HTML Object PT_HNAV_TEMPLATE

3) Scroll to the bottom, and just after the closing tag but before the closing Body tag, add the Google Analytics code.

4) Save.

That’s all there is to it. Let this run for a day or two, and pretty soon you’ll see URL’s like this in your “Content Overview” section of Google Analytics:

Here are a few points to bear in mind: