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OracleAS 10g Patch Set 3 (10.1.2.3.0) May 18, 2008

Posted by Manpreet Johal in Oracle Application Server, Portal.
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Oracle has released OracleAS 10g Patch Set 3 (10.1.2.3.) – ML Patch#5983622 in April ‘08.

This patch set can be applied to following releases of OracleAS 10g:

  • OracleAS 10g Release 2 (10.1.2.0.0, 10.1.2.0.2, 10.1.2.1.0, 10.1.2.2.0)
  • OracleAS 10g Release 2 Standard Edition One (10.1.2.0.1)
  • OracleAS Forms and Reports Services (10.1.2.0.2)
  • OracleAS Portal 10g Release 2 (10.1.4, 10.1.4.1)
  • Oracle Developer Suite 10g (10.1.2.0.2)
  • Oracle BI 10g Release 2 (10.1.2, 10.1.2.0.2)
  • Oracle BI Tools 10g Release 2 (10.1.2, 10.1.2.0.2)

This patch set will also upgrade Portal version from 10.1.4.1 to 10.1.4.2.

Oracle Applications 11i or R12 customer must check the certification matrix before upgrading standalone OracleAS 10g instances which are integrated with Oracle Applications environment.

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Search in Oracle Portal May 10, 2008

Posted by Manpreet Johal in Oracle Application Server, Portal.
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Oracle Portal provides a deployment framework for applications based on industry standards e.g. J2EE, JSR168, WSRP etc. Oracle Portal is also used as a document management or content management solution, as a centralized store for corporate documents. This feature offers more enhancements than storing documents in network share e.g. at NTFS drive located in Windows environment. I will dedicate a separate post for comparison between Oracle Portal based document management solution and network share based document storage. One of the major enhancements is the option to search the documents or content uploaded to Oracle Portal based document repository.

In this post, I would like to highlight the options available to search the content in Oracle Portal. Following are the options to search content in Oracle Portal:

  • Basic Search – Item and Portlet: This is available as a built-in item type and portlet for Page Designer/Developers. It does not provide an option to provide search operators while performing search.
  • Advanced Search – Portlet: It provides additional search operators for search. It also provides an option to search based on item/document attributes e.g. search based on Author of the item/document.
  • Custom Search – Portlet: In addition to features available in Advanced Search portlet, it provides an option to define the layout of Search Form and Results Page. It also allows Portlet Publishers to use separate Search Results page for each of the Custom Search portlet. Another useful feature of Custom Search is that it provides an option to automate the search action based on search term specified i.e. whenever user will access the page, Custom Search portlet will perform the search and will display the results in portlet region. For example, end user can create Custom Search portlet to show list of documents uploaded to Oracle Portal in last 7 days.

Oracle Portal search options mentioned above, provide an interface to perform search on item/document uploaded to repository. Oracle Portal Search crawls and index the content/document in Portal repository at regular interval. Oracle Portal Search uses Oracle Text for indexing of items/documents uploaded by default. Administrators can enable/disable the option to use Oracle Text for Oracle Portal search. However, if Oracle Text is disabled in Oracle Portal, search will only return results based on terms found in item/document metadata only. In order to search the content of the documents uploaded e.g. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF etc. Oracle Text must be enabled.

Oracle Portal Search perform the search based on permissions available to end user i.e. users will be able to search the content/document for which he/she is authorized. Thus, it will not violate the security policy by searching the un-authorized content and returning results to users.

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SQL Developer 1.5 – New Features May 4, 2008

Posted by Manpreet Johal in General.
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Oracle has released SQL Developer 1.5 (1.5.0.53.38)  last month. I tried that version recently, and found couple of new features that are worth mentioning. Following are the few of the new features that I found useful:

SQL Worksheet

  • Flashback. For 10g and 11g, you can use flashback on your data. See the Flashback tab on Tables.
  • Separate unshared worksheet for connections for long running queries. Use the keystroke ctrl+shift+N. This will create a separate, unshared worksheet.

Navigator

  • Run Manage Database report ( as SYS) to shut down and rest rat database
  • Generate DB Doc (right-click for context menu on connections) for all objects in a schema. Open the generated index.html file in a browser to review objects.

Generate DB Doc

Figure 1: Sample output generated using Navigator: Generate DB Doc option

Connections

  • Support for LDAP and Authenticated Enterprise users
  • OS Authentication

Tuning

  • Open *.trc file in SQL Developer for a formatted trace file.

Reports

  • ASH and AWR reports

It seems that Oracle is continuously extending the functionalities available in SQL Developer with every new release. However, I am definitely looking for a dashboard kind of reporting for specific or multiple databases. Hope we should be able to get that feature in future from Oracle or via 3rd party extension.

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