I want to learn about Oracle...where do I begin??

A few of my clients at a present customer have stated that they want to learn more about Oracle but dont know where to start, so could I help them?

Its an interesting topic when you have been working with (and for) Oracle for a number of years you get used to having access to a variety of information sources that a customer may not

a) Know about
b) have access to

So where do you begin?

When I was a practice manager at Oracle I would always say to my Consultants to go to the following sites on a daily basis to get the latest information that was getting passed to Oracle's customers:

Oracle Technology Network - A fantastic source of information on the technology that Oracle has
Oracle Applications Network - Now called Ospace for packaged applications information

These two sites will give you access to a fantastic set of information.

For Product Documentation the following sites:

All up to date product documentation

If you are an Oracle customer and have a support agreement then the following two sites are also excellent:

Metalink - Oracle's support site with knowledge bases
etrm - E-Business Data Models (from 11.5.4 onwards)

An excellent site with links to a variety of very useful documents is Boat Consulting ran by e Business Suite technical guru Peter Jacklin. I have added his site to my links to make it easy to find.

Now, some people prefer a more tactile experience and there are some excellent books out there covering a variety of areas.

Oracle Press is always a good place to start and two books which are a little dated but very relevant still today(for anyone working 11.5.x of Oracle Apps)

E-Business Suite Financials Handbook
E-Business Suite Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management

Oracle Press also do a fantastic range of technology books and for anyone wanting to learn about the database, sql and pl/sql then Tom Kyte's books are a must have:

Effective Oracle By Design
Expert Oracle Database Architecture

In parallel with Tom's books is his website - Asktom where the man himself will answer your questions (if he has the time)

Alan Hornsby @ Phones4u recommended the following link as a good source for Oracle eBusiness Suite Technical Articles - http://oracle.anilpassi.com/apps-technology/index.php

I will pull together a useful list of blogs when I have a few mins and add it to this blog. In the meantime if you know of other good links, drop me a line...

Adding Intelligence to your SOA Architecture

Mark Rittman (Global Oracle Ace for BI and Director of RittmanMead ) has a great article published on otn at the moment which describes how Oracle BI EE can be integrated with Oracle SOA suite to provide increased insight into how an organisation is operating in real time.

The article got me thinking about the key stakeholders in an organisation for whom this would be important. The key buzzword here is really AGILITY. By Providing an effective SOA with integrated BI an organisation can increase an organisations agility:

• Reduced reaction time in response to the operational environment
• Reduction in Planning Horizon
• IT enablement of business strategy - not limiting
• Increased organisational capability to focus on business-oriented development projects
• Increased leverage of "legacy" data through the ability of SOA to cope with heterogeneous environments
• Evolution rather than revolution in the technology platform(s)
• Potential for smaller and shorter projects with reduced risk

As ever the question is - how much do I need to spend. The products that Mark discusses in his article are not cheap - but there are open source alternatives to some components.

What is great for me is the discussions are at last moving beyond the "implementing a SOA" and evolving into "How can leverage my SOA investment"

Have a read of Mark's article and pop by his website and blog too.

New Year Resolution - Spread the Blog....

Happy New year to all. Its 2008 and I am determined to do better on the blogging front than last year.

I also want to introduce you to some fellow former and current Oracle people who I would recommend you keep and eye on: Chris Reid and Angus Myles. I have added their respective blogs to my links.

Chris is an Oracle technology and development guru. Having worked with Chris for over 10 years (yup its that long!) there is no technology that he has not been able to master - and trust we have seen a few with Oracle!

Angus is a Java God. Its the only way I can describe him. Whatever you need to know about Java he is your man. I can remember hiring Angus into Oracle many moons ago and I am very proud to say he is still there, delivering outstanding solutions - and delivering minimyles V3.0 recently.

Pop by and say hello to the guys and keep them on your radar. They are good guys to know!

Its all about the method....

One interesting challenge for organisations implementing and integrating mixed technology and "suite" solutions is which method(s) to use. For many eBiz implementations the standard approach would be to use Oracle's Applications Implementation Method (AIM) and Conference Room Pilots. For Siebel implementations the standard approach is to use ePlan. For interfaces and integration a more "modern" approach of using community development and wikis can be employed.

Normally this is pretty simple - you look at what you are implementing and choose one approach - but one size does not fit all, and what if you have multiple work streams, implementing multiple technologies and with multiple suppliers (internal and external) delivering into the programme?

Here are some quick tips:

1. Ensure that the method(s) are agreed up front between all workstreams and suppliers and ensure that ALL parties have a common understanding of the methods, approaches and timelines. Sounds obvious but often these things are left open to "interpretation" and a supplier saying "yes I understand" does not always mean that they have the same understanding as you.

2. Get the business engaged right from the beginning. Again it sounds like project management 101 but with large, complex, multi vendor and technology implementations this is not always easy.

3. Get it on a blooming big picture so all can see how the methods and timelines join up. Visually representing the methods, approaches and milestones makes such a difference.

4. Get ready to coach and manage more than you expect. Not all suppliers are experienced in certain approaches. If you do not have lead consultants who are highly experienced in the methods you may need to coach more than you would like. Make sure you have someone who has practical (not theoretical) skills in a method and approach. Get a consultant on your side if you have done such a programme before.

5. Be strong and prepared to stay the course. It can become too easy sometimes to move from an approach because things get tricky. Joining up testing for example: System, Link, Integration, Conference Room Pilots, UAT, OAT etc can be a very complex and painful process if you have multiple workstreams and multiple technologies that may need data, test harnesses, users, environments etc. Dig deep and push on. It will be worth it. Make sure you have a good test team!

What methods work well when integrating a multi-vendor, multi-technology fabric in an organisation? Well there is no silver bullet solution. From experience I rate conference room pilots and iterative development on most technologies (including Siebel!) as it gets the user community engaged right from the start, and gets them 'owning' the solution early on - and that is invaluable, indeed a must have, for any organisation wanting to put a large enterprise solution in place.

Let me know your thoughts on this one.....

Rules, Rules, Rules

One area I have been spending a fair bit of time on recently is around rule engines.

Rules engines provide real seperation of business logic from the software coding. There are two key entities: the rules themselves and the facts that the rules work on.
The rules themselves can infer new facts from the facts that they are given which can lead to further rules being fired. This "inference engine" approach is amazingly powerful and the "chaining" of rules can lead to very powerful results with just a few simple rules.

For more about Business Rules Engines see the following article in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_engine

I have been developing solutions on 3 different engines recently, which I wanted to share a brief view on:

• Jess (http://herzberg.ca.sandia.gov/)
• JBoss Rules (Drools) (http://labs.jboss.com/drools/)
• Oracle Rules (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/business_rules/index.html)

Each of these platforms essentially offer the same general problem solving approach using inference engines and the ability to seperate business logic from coding. I have been involved in the Artificial Intelligence arena for over a decade in one shape or another and these types of technologies used to cost £100k+ and be used a variety of high end applications for big business and the military. Now however the technology is essentially free (well it is through JBoss Drools at least).

I am majorly impressed with these platforms now.

I have know of Jess for many years (and indeed Oracle licenced this technology) and for those of you who still like to use LISP and reverse polish notation you will be right at home. Jess is a fantastic environment for doing RAD rule development - but you need a bit of technical skill to get anything out of it. What has dissapointed me about Jess - and think this was such a missed opportunity from Scandia labs - is it never developed a decent (or any really) UI that would take it mass market... and that is a ral shame because I really do think it is the best core inference engine out there in this space. It performance is absolutely fantastic.

JBoss Rules(Drools) on the other hand has both a performantengine and has been putting a significant amount of effort in the UI side and is coming on leaps (no pun for those in the know) and bounds in this space. From being a new kid on the block I think that this will be the one to watch closely in the coming months. It is getting more akin to the Intellicorp rules platforms of a decade ago which was a dream to use to develop Knowledge based systems (but which is sadly no longer available).

Oracle Rules is an odd one that I both love but at the same time frustrates me in that Oracle I feel has missed a trick with this which could have seem them corner this part of the market. It appears to me that Oracle are not 100% convinced in this markspace so have launched something to test the water and have put just enough effort to make a decent effort and see what the customers say. That said, what Oracle have provided should be enough for most organisations to get started. As it is built on the JESS platform it has a fantastic pedigree, however Oracle being Oracle, they have bastardised the Jess platform (I dont know why - maybe commercial reasons) and you cant access the full power of Jess but some mixed/limited set of the stack. I am about to start a proper implementation of Oracle Rules in the next few weeks so I will let you know more.

Rules Engines to me are a fantastic addition into any organisations operational platform. They can, if deployed correctly, provide increadible organisational agility and power and critically real business advantage when used within an SOA. To me these are the unsung, underutilised but future heroes of the technology fabric that all major organisations will be deploying in the near future.

Fusion and the information fabric

Firstly apologies for not doing anything with this blog for so long. I have been so busy with work and trying to setup a new business that I did not continue with the blogs.

I have been working as the solution manager for the past 9 months with a major retailer putting in a new end to end Oracle platform: Siebel for the call centre, Oracle eBiz for the finance and fulfilment, Analytics for the MI, a new J2EE website all joined up using SOA suite (ESB being key). We are doing pretty well and are moving into testing now.

One question that arises around this stack is how the heck Oracle are going to implement fusion applications in reality.

From a technical standpoint Siebel has been a dissapointment for me. Maybe this is because I have been working too long with Oracle technology, but when it comes to utilising open standards Oracle is light years ahead. It appears to me that its adoption and utilisation of XML is very poor indeed. In a SOA world this is crazy. For me Siebel has been more of a case of "form over function".

I have also been (so far!) pleasantly surprised by the SOA suite components. The ESB has been fairly robust and I look forward to seeing it in action when we move into Operational Testing and failover.

The solution we have put together is essentially Oracle Fusion - joining the suites with the SOA technology. Is it possible - absolutely. I look forward to seeing how Oracle are doing it in more detail.... but for now I am confident that it can be done... as we can see it in action today.... more on this later..

Cheers to Mr Price

I have to say a big thanks to Mr Nick Price for his many kind words on his blog: http://www.nick-price.co.uk/ . I have known Nick since .... well lets just say he got me my first job in Oracle, so you can all blame him!

Nick is one of the outstanding leaders in the Oracle recruitment space. His company, Bright Purple (formally CareerCare) is one of the leading IT recruitment specialists in the UK.

Keep an eye on Nick and BrightPurple - 2007 is going to be a very good year for them both!