We just completed 10 years of blogging with WORDPRESS & it was a great experience! Although we’ve started the blog ONLY to vent out our frustrations with Windows 7 OS, over the years we’ve discussed many other technology areas.
Well…err hmm, about many things those WERE not significant at all, however many of you have seen them ;) . Now you may ask why switching from a life long free blog to a COM (commercial site). Answer is simple, WE are going to have few advertisements running over the blog, which might fetch us some income!
We’ve been enthusiastically doing many charities and currently planning to setup an educational fund for under privileged expat students in Kuwait. We will utilize every penny that comes through the ads for this purpose.
So if you find an interesting ad on our pages, please check them out. We’ve never commercialized any of our efforts & will remain to provide you the hacks/solutions free.
I’m always using FireFox browser with no history saved. This potentially helps me from the browser “Remembering” my “hostile” activities.
As I live in Kuwait, this has a downside. Google decided to launch the local language page (Arabic) as soon as I try any of the Google applications like search or email.
I don’t pretty much care about the search part, as soon as the results are loaded, I am given an option to switch the language to English.
However, the email thing is NOT that easy. I have scroll few kilometers down, do a guess work with the language drop down and again on the login page, have to select English as language.
Recently I did some minor adjustments with the URL & figured out a short link that will definitely load the English Gmail logon screen ;)
Recently one of our accountants forwarded me a screenshot, that was showing “FRM-40735 WHEN-VALIDATE-ITEM trigger raised unhandled exception ORA-01403” while he was trying to enter invoices against a “NEWLY” created vendor/supplier.
Our Oracle Application R12 (12.0.6) is considered 99.99999% stable, without a single technical or functional issue that really become a show stopper throughout last many years.
Well, this particular issue looked perplexing as it was not dealt by Oracle Application’s error reporting & slowly we started dwelling Oracle support documents those were dealing with the given forms error “FRM-40735 WHEN-VALIDATE-ITEM trigger raised unhandled exception ORA-01403”
Most of the documentations where mentioning about IBY duplicate pay party, which was not our case. Hence, I decided to open the associated form APXINWKB.fmb & located the WHEN-VALIDATE-ITEM trigger associated with the column “Purchase Order Number”. I couldn’t find any irregularities between an order that didn’t raise the error and this particular Purchase order did raise the exception, which was unhandled.
After two days of continuous attempts, I remembered that such errors happen in other forms modules when we had missing information for new vendors/suppliers. Must be due to a bug, there were times when site level details were NOT populated to organizations level details for a vendor/customer & I decided to go through all mandatory elements those were expected while creating a new vendor/supplier.
I sat with my colleague and we reached to “Payment Method”, and realized that the default payment method was not set for this particular vendor against the organization where we were getting this unhandled exception.
Once the payment method was set, the invoice was posted for the vendor successfully! So, if you come across these kind of unhandled exceptions across Oracle’s proprietary forms those deal with payments/invoices, prior exhausting yourself with cloning and patching, make sure you have all the mandatory elements for customer/vendors are properly filled in and assigned to all the organizations.
Hope this finding helps few consultants out there!
I know the subject title is not very professional this time. Yet, I want to make a claim that I figured out something, for which I spent more than couple of years time and have followed up few Oracle community threads (without much interesting results)
We had to retired a hardware that was recommended by the Oracle EBS implementation partner, within 2 years once after we went online with the R12 instance. We had 10g 10.2.0.3 with the instance, things were getting messy and slow & the new support partner recommended for a better hardware.
I always had eyes on this retired server. It had Linux, hence we couldn’t come up with a practical requirement to integrate the Linux server with our Windows domain environment and it was kept switched off until the virtualization project came online.
We needed “something” to hold a copy of the EBS instance while it was being virtualized.
So, I cloned this machine & before continuing let me describe what this is hardware is like:
Processor:
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Architecture: x86_64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 8
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-7
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 4
Socket(s): 2
NUMA node(s): 1
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
CPU family: 6
Model: 23
Model name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5420 @ 2.50GHz
Stepping: 6
CPU MHz: 1992.000
BogoMIPS: 4987.29
Virtualization: VT-x
L1d cache: 32K
L1i cache: 32K
L2 cache: 6144K
NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-7
in addition to the local disks this server have partitions mounted from a IBM SAN.
Once the clone was done, I realized that the instance was extremely slow & our part time DBA started making excuses like “See that’s why we are changing the hardware” (He had 2G SGA and 1G PGA with 20 job_queue_processes against nearly 1TB database)
I opened few discussions with Oracle communities and was pointed towards a tone of documents suggesting me how to fine tune the hardware and database for better performances. Actually nothing were applicable as I didn’t have much hands on experiences with a database & I couldn’t find a person who could really HELP me.
Then I started taking interest about database technology, which I should have years back & came across SGA/PGA and JVM etc & as I had an idle instance, started trying out whatever I have “learned” against it.
While doing the 11g R2 the hard way I realized that I can use AMM and forget about tuning different parameters for memory optimization. Well, still the goddamn instance lagged like hell & I was almost done with it!.
Few of the persistent issues were:
After a cold boot
The login form would load at client end after waiting almost 3-4 minutes, which gets faster during consecutive attempts.
It takes ages for to open the concurrent programs window
Our custom forms & LOVs lag to extremes and so on..
Even shutting down the instance for anything was turning into a nightmare as the database always took more than 15-20 minutes and I had to kill multiple processes manually in order to bring it offline!
Then on a different note, while trying to learn SQL learning I landed against an ask Tom thread, where the asker says “I have setup both SGA and PGA 3GB”, still the SQL runs slow…
I did a fresh clone. Our database was upgraded to 11g almost year back. The default clone had 1G for both SGA and PGA. I altered them with 3G and 3G & bullseye
I went back and altered the SGA and PGA with 4G which was 40% of the total physical memory available for the hardware. I did three shutdowns and restarts of the physical server, did a dozen application and database startup to confirm that what I am experiencing is NOT a once in bluemoon phenomena. Each of my attempt to shutdown the database gracefully were completed within few seconds, not a single time I had to kill the Linux processes to bring it down!
I modified one of the main forms for a custom application and changed few VIEW calls with better logic & I can’t be happier!
Now, said that, don’t rush to me saying “I also did 4G for SGA and PGA and moron I still have a slow instance”. There are many factors affecting the performance of your database and application & most important few are:
Age of your hardware, especially the spinning disks. The aged they are, the worse the performance is going to be as there is hell loads of I/O happens when you are accessing/processing the data from a database.
Recently I was going through a MS SQL discussion about Multi-Tenant architecture and one of the contributors were discussing about a hosting firm that keeps on changing their hardware once in 6 months. I think he was just BLUFFING! ;)
I hope someone gets benefitted by the minor finding I have made YESTERDAY (6th May 2018)!
The good thing is I found a “solution” myself after wasting almost a working day, just because I was stupid enough not to read my own POST dealing with it :/
I will publish a new POST detailing what has changed & how you could avoid getting into a mess with WLS LAMP installations & configurations in a day or two.
Update: 18th April 2019
Although I was able to successfully install LAMP on multiple Windows 10 stand alone machine WLS, yet to figure out a way to install MySQL on a Windows machine running WLS that has already joined a domain. I am not sure whether it is due to some domain policy related issues, access issues or due to a corruption with my Windows. I will definitely try to find out the root cause (hopefully).
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Usually I prefer a virtual machine for all my Linux/Development requirements. Well, Microsoft is “trying” to setup a Linux subsystem within Windows 10 from a while, which is “yet” to be fully functional in many means. Many benchmarks proven that Microsoft Subsystem for Linux for has the poorest I/O which Microsoft claims, will be addressed in the future releases.
So, why someone will choose WSL against a VM which has better functionalities? From an eager inquisitive person’s perspectives, I will choose WSL for just couple of reasons and they are:
WSL could access the full hardware, when a VM has limited resources. Ie, say your computer running has 4 cores and 8GB memory, you will be limited to 2 cores for your VM (anything beyond that would cause unexpected issues) and maximum of 4GB memory. Here WSL don’t have such limitations, it could access all your 4 cores and the maximum memory & could be launched like just another win32 application!
I’ve been trying to setup WSL using both Ubuntu & OpenSUSE Leap 42.3 over my Windows 10 1709 & I had better results with Ubuntu. OpenSuse has many issues those were beyond my skills to address and resolve. Hence, I chose to stick with Ubnutu for now.
So, installation of WSL on Windows 10 recent versions were made pretty easier compared to the previous releases. A seasoned Windows user could install Ubuntu for WSL very easily by following the instructions below
Once rebooted, from the Windows store, search for Ubuntu or OpenSUSE and just install it! That simple it is.
Once installed, as mentioned with the first image, one can start the WSL either from command prompt or by clicking the tile that is available with the start menu.
As a developer, I would take the pain to setup the WSL for ONLY few reasons like testing PHP application(s) those are based on MySQL database (and outta curiosity)
So next, let us see we can setup LAMP server (LAMP is an archetypal model of web service stacks, named as an acronym of the names of its original four open-source components: the Linux operating system, the Apache HTTP Server, the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), and the PHP programming language. The LAMP components are largely interchangeable and not limited to the original selection. As a solution stack, LAMP is suitable for building dynamic web sites and web applications) on our new WSL
You may refer to this post for a detailed information about how to install individual components like apache, MySQL and PHP. Please note, the link that I provided deals with PHP5, which is not anymore available from Ubuntu repositories, hence I chose to go ahead with PHP7.0 for my WSL instance
Issue the following command(s) to install Apache, MySQL,PHP and phpMyAdmin
During the installation, you will be prompted for setting up MySQL root credentials, which is mandatory in order to access the MySQL server at later stages using phpmyadmin module
For PHP, you must install libapache2-mod-php, else you would experience php pages being blank when functions like phpinfo(); are called.
Once the packages are installed (without errors) you can restart apache to verify everything is working fine
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sudo service apache2 restart or sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
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If your windows box already has IIS listening to port 80 and a Windows instance for MySQL is listening to port 3306, then you must change the ports for both apache and MySQL before restarting the services.
MySQL installation will GET IN TO a number of undocumented errors if you have another instance of MySQL listening to 3306 (ie, on your Windows box). Hence make sure that you shutdown the instance before attempting to install MySQL on WLS. Please remember, WLS is not another virtual machine, so if a port is open on your “HOST”, that is definitely a conflict for the WLS.
For changing the port of Apache server edit the following file
During the installation you will be prompted for selecting the http server stack and password for MySQL root account. You must provide the root password that you have set during the MySQL installation at this prompt
Once the phpmyadmin is installed, you need to manually enable couple of extensions and they are dealt like following:
(I did a fresh WLS instance on 17th April 2019 & the phpmyadmin installation has changed a little bit here and there, asking for the webserver & an additional setup that helps to setup the phpmyadmin user passwords etc)
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sudo service apache2 restart
sudo service MySQL restart
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Example:
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rajesh@rt04:/etc/apache2$ sudo service apache2 restart
* Restarting Apache httpd web server apache2 [ OK ]
rajesh@rt04:/etc/apache2$ sudo service mysql restart
* Stopping MySQL database server mysqld [ OK ]
* Starting MySQL database server mysqld [ OK ]
rajesh@rt04:/etc/apache2$
[/code]
Now you can see that there are no errors or warning while starting both apache and MySQL. So let us go ahead and check phpmyadmin
That’s all folks!
There is no shutdown for WSL, just type “exit” and you are good. I am yet to test whether mere exiting does anything harmful to running instances of apache and MySQL. Until I find them…
Finally
I don’t really understand why, yet, many users are asking for a “way” to ssh into the Linux subsystem. The pre-installed openBDS ssh server doesn’t allow a connection from clients like putty. Hence a re-installation of SSH server is required.
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sudo apt-get remove --purge openssh-server
sudo apt-get install openssh-server
sudo service ssh --full-restart
Create a firewall inbound rule if required
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Now you should able to connect to WSL instance using a client like putty.
Not your everyday task, yet, when nothing else you could do with a database that won’t start, give it a try. If you have valid Oracle support, then execute only after Oracle confirms.
Please note, there are no guarantees that using the “_ALLOW_RESETLOGS_CORRUPTION” hidden parameter will bring your database up and running. For example, I have made several attempts to duplicate a database in the same machine, few of the exercises were like following:
At home, I copied .dbf files from a live database and created a new database using the “_ALLOW_RESETLOGS_CORRUPTION” which was successful, when the same approach failed without any hopes on my work laptop where I have the same 10.2.0.3 to 11.2.0.4 upgraded instance.
Other hand whenever I copied the .dbf files from a shutdown database and tried to create a standby database, it always succeeded with “alter database open resetlogs”
So, don’t be over confident about recovering a database using “another” hidden parameter. If you are lucky, you may, on the other hand ONLY a proper backup will help you to recover from a significant crash.
So, start backing up your database on regular intervals. I suggest RMAN with archivelogs which helps you to backup the database without downtime.
