License Manager in oracle applications

License Manager:

After purchasing a license for an Application Product/Module, the first thing is to use license  manager to register that the product/module is now licensed.

·         Register Products

·         Register Language

·         Register Country specific functionalities

·         Create Reports about the Products, Languages, Country specific functionalities already registered

NOTE: License Manager does not set up license agreements or determine pricing.  It only registers products etc

How To License A New Product in Oracle Applications

Step 1 :  Login to  oracle applications home page as SYSADMIN user.

Navigate through --- > System Administrator-- >Oracle Applications Manager--- >License Manager--- >Site Map

Then click on License Manager in Administration Tab to get the below screen,

License Manager is a web based utility in Oracle Applications Manager .It consists of License  Manager home page , a group of licensing pages and report pages, as shown in below screenshot

Step 2:-Click on Products link to get below screen

License E-Business Suite: Select this option to register the predefined E-Business Suite of products.

License Component Application: Select this option to register products by component applications.

License Applications Products: This option becomes visible when Show More Options is selected. Select this option to register Oracle Applications products individually.(This option is under SHOW MORE OPTIONS)

Step 3:-Click on License Component Application and Click on Continue to get below screen

In this screen License Manager displays the list of Application modules. To see individual components of each module click on module name.

Notice that component Applications that are already registered are grey in color  and checked. Applications that are grayed without a check are for display only and cannot be selected.

Step 4:-Now click on Products what you want register and click next and click on submit to get below screen

Click on ok to complete registering product

Step 5:- The Products are now licensed but not ready to be used as none of the Forms/Packages etc would have been compiled and loaded into the Database for these new Products. Use adadmin to generate the files for the new Product

a)Run adadmin and select Generate Application Files Menu and run all the options for the product.

b) Select Compile/Reload Applications Database Entities menu and run all the options for the product.

Overview of Inventory

The inventory is a very important part of the Oracle Universal Installer. This is where OUI keeps all information regarding the products installed on a specific machine.

There are two ypes of inventories

1)Global or Central Inventory:- The Global Inventory records the physical location of Oracle products installed on the machine, such as ORACLE_HOMES (RDBMS and IAS) or JRE. It does not have any information about the detail of patches applied to each ORACLE_HOMEs.

The Global Inventory gets updated every time you install or de-install an ORACLE_HOME on the machine, be it through OUI Installer, Rapid Install, or Rapid Clone.

Note: If you need to delete an ORACLE_HOME, you should always do it through the OUI de-installer in order to keep the Global Inventory synchronized.

If  Global Inventory  is lost or corrupted we can regenerate it using runInstaller tool .

There will be only one Global Inventory per machine. Its location is defined by the pointer file

Pointer File:-Pointer File is user to know the location of Global Inventory.Location of pointer file is /etc/oraInst.loc. By looking into the contents of pointer file we can know the  location of global inventory.

2)Local Inventory:- Local inventory contains information of installed softwares which are specific to single ORACLE_HOME.There is one Local Inventory per ORACLE_HOME. It is physically located inside the ORACLE_HOME at $ORACLE_HOME/inventory and contains the detail of the patch level for that ORACLE_HOME.

The Local Inventory gets updated whenever a patch is applied to the ORACLE_HOME, using OUI.

If the Local Inventory becomes corrupt or is lost, this is very difficult to recover, and may result in having to reinstall the ORACLE_HOME and re-apply all patchsets and patches.

What is Oracle Goldengate?

After Oracle corp. acquiring Goldengate software there is a lot of buzz about Oracle Goldengate and it is one of the hot topics at Oracle open world 2010.

Oracle Goldengate can be used as a replication tool, ETL, and even as a DR solution.

Oracle Goldengate (GG) is probably the best replication software and it is very easy to configure and deploy it in large scale environment. Here are some of the things you need to be aware of:

1) All GG configuration files are ascii text based files. Very easy to make changes but it is prone to human errors in an environment having many DBA's working on it.

2) In order to use parallel apply threads, GG breaks down the database transaction into multiple transactions based on the hashing key defined for range split of the data. So, transactional consistency will not be guaranteed during real time but there won't be any data loss, but make sure that your application can tolerate this.

3) If there is no primary key or unique index exists on any table, GG will use all the columns as supplemental logging key pair for both extracts and replicats. But if you define key columns in the GG extract parameter file and if you don't have the supplemental logging enabled on that key columns combination, then GG will assume missing key columns record data as "NULL", which is a huge deal, and this will introduce logical data corruption on the target.

4) GG started supporting bulk data loads with their 11.1 release but any NOLOGGING data changes will be silently ignored without any warning.

5) GG doesn't support compression on the source database.

6) GG does support DDL replication but it is not easy to do selective DDL replication, it replicates every DDL that happens on the source database which is not desirable for some customers.

7) Tables being replicated to on the target can also be written to by any other application or DBA's.

8) GG supports ignoring data conflicts for updates after the first instantiation of the target database until it catches up. But it is very easy to forget turning off that parameter and any updates being lost will not be alerted by GG.

9) GG still works by reverse engineering the Oracle redolog. This may not be totally true with GG 11, but I expect GG to interpret Oracle redo more directly in later versions of 11 or 12.

10) GG dynamically decides to change the key columns that form the supplemental logging based on the state of primary key (i.e. in VALIDATED or NONVALIDATED state), which can introduce data corruptions on the target databases as the expected key columns data is missing in the trail files and they will be set to NULL. They now have the patch available for this, you can set "_USEALLKEYCOLUMNS and ALLOWNONVALIDATEDKEYS" parameters in GLOBALS file to get around this problem.

Use cases:

I think Oracle is not promoting logical standby as much as they should have. Oracle logical standby guarantees data consistency, data integrity, maintains order of transactions, and doesn't let target database tables to be modified by others which by itself offer great confidence in data quality.

Oracle Xstreams offers greatest flexibility and superior performance in extracting data from the source database and applying the same to the target database.

For Oracle database upgrades or having a logical DR standby it is better to use Oracle logical standby, use Xstreams if you want more flexibility and high performance in moving data across databases, and use GG for keeping the downstream database up to date for reporting, ETL purposes, or to move data across hybrid databases.

There are many replication products available in the market like shareplex, Data Mirror(called as Infospere Change Data Capture from IBM). The real beauty of this software is it supports replication between various databases like MS SQL Server, DB2, Sybase, Teradata etc. It supports multi master, bi directional data replications.

Now Oracle has multiple products which are related to replication/data protection.

Oracle Streams
Oracle Golden gate
Oracle Active Data Guard
Oracle Data Integrator

Considerable number of customers using Golden Gate Software and it is too costly(worthy if you need to replicate real time with multiple vendor databases)!!!

While Oracle has similar products when to use what product?

Oracle Active Data Guard:

-- Full protection, Read only copy of primary - only with Oracle Databases
-- Serves as Disaster recovery purposes
-- Entire database replication (synchronous, Asynchronous)

Oracle Golden Gate

-- Heterogeneous database replication
-- Subset of data replication
-- Zero downtime upgrades

Oracle Steams

-- Existing replication customers are supported
-- No new feature additions
-- Oracle steams/Oracle Golden gate to merge to have new era replication software.
Oracle Data Integrator

-- High performance bulk data movement
-- Load Data warehouses, Integrate heterogeneous data
 

 source:-http://sai-oracle.blogspot.in/2010/09/what-is-oracle-goldengate.html

             http://applicationsdba.blogspot.in/2010/05/oracle-golden-gate.html