Scaning through the list there are only 258 ACEs worldwide across all specialisms (this includes ACEs for Database Management, Java, Linux etc as well as Applications).  The list of all the ACEs and their profiles can be found here.

Of the current ACEs there aren’t many I recognise from the PeopleSoft world, namely David Kurtz (profile | blog), Nicolas Gasparotto (profile | blog) and Judi Doolittle – whose name I recognise as the author of my most recently purchased PeopleSoft book (profile | book).  I’ve also discovered Todd Sheetz who has a blog covering various topics including PeopleSoft (profile | blog).  (If you’re on there and I’ve missed you, my apologies.)

It would be nice to have a larger PeopleSoft presence in the ACE scheme, so if you work with PeopleSoft and participate actively in the community (whether it’s blogging, presenting at conferences, being helpful on discussion forums etc) then get involved!

More detail on the Oracle ACE program can be found here:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/community/oracle_ace/nominations/oracle-ace-faq.html

He muses over a comment on the article concerning whether the skills shortage is independant of experience, or whether it’s only the more experienced end of the spectrum that has a shortage.

My first reaction is to agree with this.  From the consultants I know here in the UK there are those that seem to skip from project to project, only having gaps in between where it’s by their own volition.  Pondering this further though, are these the best consultants or just those that are better organised or with better networks?

It’s difficult to tell the difference, because the most experienced consultants are likely to have a wider network of contacts, and will have changed projects many times so will be well versed in the traps novices may fall foul of.

So which is it?  I’d like to think it was the former.  A talented and experienced consultant will always get work.  However I fear it’s the latter as I’ve come across a few that have succeeded by being barely adequate developers but expert schmoozers.

And is the comment on the article correct?  Is there a surplus of inexperienced consultants around, but a dearth of their experienced colleagues?

What are your experiences?

There are two pieces of content that I’ve come across in the last few days:

Firstly, there’s a mention for Floyd Teter who has seen Fusion Apps in the flesh.

Secondly, it seems that Oracle’s “Mr Fusion” has left the company.

To reduce the likelihood of developers accidentally deleting some data that they shouldn’t it would be quite normal to remove their access to the environment altogether. However if they need access for troubleshooting purposes then (at least on projects I’ve seen) it’s quite normal for developers to be told “OK, you can have access, but be careful not to do anything destructive”. Occasionally – as with everything – things can go wrong. Either someone forgets which environment they’re in, or does something with unintended consequences. An alternative to the “just be careful” approach would be to create an entirely read-only user profile (i.e. one that has display only privileges to every component system-wide).

A read-only user profile is shown in screenshot below, where no fields are editable and the save button is inactivated:

Also, on Run Control pages the ‘Run’ button is inactive. It’s going to be pretty difficult to alter data in this environment.

Here’s how to do it quickly and easily …

1. Create User Profile

First, craft your perfect ‘read/write’ user profile. I’ll call this ‘DMD’. Now clone it using the ‘Copy User Profile’ functionality in the PIA. This creates a new user profile (in my case ‘DMD_R’) with the same Roles, and this is the one we’re going to turn read-only.

2. Create new Read-Only Permission Lists

First create the Permission Lists by cloning those that are currently against the User Profile:

INSERT INTO PSCLASSDEFN
(CLASSID, VERSION, CLASSDEFNDESC, TIMEOUTMINUTES, DEFAULTBPM,
STARTAPPSERVER, ALLOWPSWDEMAIL, LASTUPDDTTM, LASTUPDOPRID)
(SELECT CLASSID || '_R'
      , VERSION
      , CLASSDEFNDESC
      , TIMEOUTMINUTES
      , DEFAULTBPM
      , STARTAPPSERVER
      , ALLOWPSWDEMAIL
      , SYSDATE
      , 'DMD'
   FROM PSCLASSDEFN
  WHERE CLASSID IN (
      SELECT DISTINCT CLASSID
        FROM PSROLECLASS
       WHERE ROLENAME IN (
           SELECT ROLENAME
             FROM PSROLEUSER
            WHERE ROLEUSER = 'DMD_R')))

Don’t forget to add the sign-on times:

INSERT INTO PSAUTHSIGNON (CLASSID, DAYOFWEEK, STARTTIME, ENDTIME)
SELECT CLASSID || '_R'
     , DAYOFWEEK
     , STARTTIME
     , ENDTIME
  FROM PSAUTHSIGNON
 WHERE CLASSID IN (
     SELECT DISTINCT CLASSID
       FROM PSROLECLASS
      WHERE ROLENAME IN (
          SELECT ROLENAME
            FROM PSROLEUSER
           WHERE ROLEUSER = 'DMD_R'))

We add the pages to the new permission lists, but set Display Only to 1:

INSERT INTO PSAUTHITEM (CLASSID, MENUNAME, BARNAME, BARITEMNAME, PNLITEMNAME, DISPLAYONLY, AUTHORIZEDACTIONS)
(SELECT CLASSID || '_R'
      , MENUNAME
      , BARNAME
      , BARITEMNAME
      , PNLITEMNAME
      , 1 DISPLAYONLY
      , AUTHORIZEDACTIONS
   FROM PSAUTHITEM
  WHERE CLASSID IN (
      SELECT DISTINCT CLASSID
        FROM PSROLECLASS
       WHERE ROLENAME IN (
           SELECT ROLENAME
             FROM PSROLEUSER
            WHERE ROLEUSER = 'DMD_R')))

4. Create the new Read-Only Roles

INSERT INTO PSROLEDEFN
(ROLENAME, VERSION, ROLETYPE, DESCR, QRYNAME, ROLESTATUS, RECNAME, FIELDNAME, PC_EVENT_TYPE, QRYNAME_SEC, PC_FUNCTION_NAME, ROLE_PCODE_RULE_ON, ROLE_QUERY_RULE_ON, LDAP_RULE_ON, ALLOWNOTIFY, ALLOWLOOKUP, LASTUPDDTTM, LASTUPDOPRID, DESCRLONG)
(SELECT SUBSTR(ROLENAME, 1,28) || '_R'
      , VERSION
      , ROLETYPE
      , DESCR
      , QRYNAME
      , ROLESTATUS
      , RECNAME
      , FIELDNAME
      , PC_EVENT_TYPE
      , QRYNAME_SEC
      , PC_FUNCTION_NAME
      , ROLE_PCODE_RULE_ON
      , ROLE_QUERY_RULE_ON
      , LDAP_RULE_ON
      , ALLOWNOTIFY
      , ALLOWLOOKUP
      , SYSDATE
      , 'DMD'
      , DESCRLONG
   FROM PSROLEDEFN
  WHERE ROLENAME IN (
      SELECT DISTINCT ROLENAME
        FROM PSROLEUSER
       WHERE ROLEUSER = 'DMD_R'))

5. Add the read only permission lists to the read only roles

INSERT INTO PSROLECLASS(ROLENAME, CLASSID)
(SELECT SUBSTR(ROLENAME, 1,28) || '_R'
      , CLASSID || '_R'
   FROM PSROLECLASS
  WHERE ROLENAME IN (
      SELECT DISTINCT ROLENAME
        FROM PSROLEUSER
       WHERE ROLEUSER = 'DMD_R'))

6. Update the user profile with the new read only rolenames

UPDATE PSROLEUSER
   SET ROLENAME = SUBSTR(ROLENAME, 1,28) || '_R'
 WHERE ROLEUSER = 'DMD_R'

And that’s it, although you may well also need to perform the following:

• Run Portal Security Sync (to sync security up).
• Bounce the App Server and clear cache (my App Server didn’t pick up the signon times from the cloned permission lists until I did this).
• Run SJT_OPR_CLS (Refresh the Security Join Table that contains the Operator and Classid data)
• Close and reopen your Web Browser and clear it’s local cache.

a) how you haven’t found out about it before

b) how much time it’ll save in the future

This is related to taking only a portion of a string using Oracle SQL, and in particular the right hand side of a string.  In other programming languages I’ve been spoilt with the RIGHT(x,num_chars) command, which we don’t have in Oracle.

In the past I’ve made do using something like:

SUBSTR(<character_field>,length(<character_field>)-4,4)

if I wanted to take the 4 right-most characters from a string.  This gets cumbersome pretty quickly when you have multiple substrings etc.

Today – to my delight – I discovered that you can include negative numbers and Oracle will count back from the right hand side.  So this will take the 4 right-most characters from a string:

SUBSTR(<character_field>,-4)

When I posted a year or so ago that I’d heard Jesper Andersen say that the Fusion Applications suite wouldn’t GA until 2009 there was a fair bit of feedback (to put it politely – I even had to edit one comment for profanity), but now it seems more likely that Jesper was correct.

How much we read into this Gartner report is up to our own faith in Oracle, but statements like

‘Oracle plans to only sell Fusion to new customers and that “migrating the installed base to Fusion is no longer a near-term goal”.’

and

‘the 2008 Fusion applications will not include any core ERP products’

don’t fill me with confidence that we’ll see clients implementing Fusion any time soon.

It’s great news though for anyone hoping that the PeopleSoft product line remains around for a long time.

I must admit that I haven’t listened to the WebCast myself (to be honest I didn’t think there’d be much there that affects PeopleSoft in the short term) but after reading summary posts on a couple of other blogs it seems I was wrong.

The most surprising announcement for me was that going forward

“BEA WebLogic Server is now Oracle’s strategic JEE container and will be integrated into Fusion Middleware stack immediately; OC4J dev to continue though”

This was a bit of a shock as I expected Oracle App Server to be slowly pushed as the Web Server of choice. It’s a change of tack too as in many ‘prepare now to get a headstart for Fusion’ presentations I’ve got the impression that clients should be implementing what they perceive to be Fusion middleware components now, and I’d have had Oracle App Server down as one of those applications.

Antony Reynolds also says:

“But the surprising bit was the emphasis that Thomas Kurian made on Tuxedo. It seems as though the Tuxedo guys are being rehabilitated after years in the wilderness at BEA since the WebLogic acquisition. I was amazed at the increase in connectivity and functionality that has occurred in Tux since I last came into contact with it some ten years ago.”

I’ve tried to view the webcast to find out exactly what’s behind this but can’t seem to view it. I’ll post more if I can get it working …

EDIT: Mulling this over further, I think the decision to use WebLogic over Oracle’s own product is good news for the other acquisitions. If Oracle is willing to use a product that it deigns is superior instead of just using its own product ‘because it’s Oracle’ then that bodes well for any areas of functionality within PeopleSoft, Siebel etc that may be better than corresponding areas of eBusiness suite.

VMWare Server is great for creating the VMs, and you need it while you’re adding virtual disks etc. However once the VM is in place it may be worthwhile switching to VMWare Player. The Player is slightly faster but you can’t perform maintenance like add disks when using it. Also, they don’t co-exist on the same client machine, it’s either one or the other. To be honest, I just uninstall and install as it doesn’t take that long.

The issue I faced, and the reason for this post is that VMWare Server lets the user configure the IP Address assignments and DHCP ranges from within the application, while VMWare player doesn’t. This is a bit of an issue if you have a VM that you’ve configured with a static IP address in a non-default range, then when you switch to VMWare Player the static IP isn’t in the default range.

The secret to know is that the ability is still there, you just have to go looking for it. The utility you need is ‘vmnetcfg.exe’ and it’s under the VMWare Player install directory (i.e. ‘C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Player’). From here you can configure the IP Ranges to be whatever you wish.

The first portion of the presentation is more of an introduction so will be familiar to many of you, from slide 32 onwards however it got more interesting.

• XBRL Publisher?
• Excel Templates (finally!)
• Master Templating (like the slide master in Powerpoint, or CSS in HTML)

The presentation can be found on Tim’s post here:

http://blogs.oracle.com/xmlpublisher/2008/04/17#a930