The Incident Archive

So I have had a little trouble in the past finding the right person when it comes to thinking at scale and considering the breadth of a problem. Also it is difficult to determine maturity of thinking for me. Beside the obvious what, how and did you design your previous project or how would you build a search engine type questions. Explain how you would plan a <insert project here> here are a growing list of questions that I feel help me: Have you ever had to compromise you design if so why?  What is design thinking and how can it help? Drill into the minor details of a solution the person who was in the trenches so to speak will be well acquainted with the details. Ask it how difficult decisions where to make (Situational awareness questions something like) How would you handle it if your team resisted a new idea you introduced? I look out for honest heartfelt answers without jargon. With the proliferation of tools these days hiring for a technology is needless it is really just

 So now that we have two Exadata machines and have gone through the process of migrating all our applications to Exadata was it worth it. Notes: Learning curve - this was significantly greater than expected. The solution keeps evolving and the rate of change is sometimes staggering. Pros: Multi-tenant and RAC by default Speed - we had an enormous increase in performance (after tuning our queries for Exadata) It is great to have some of the hardware issues abstracted away from us. Oracles monitoring of the hardware on our system is great Cons: Cost - the solution is more expensive than what we had but you get what you pay for Loss of control in some areas and then dealing with Oracle support. What happens after a refresh cycle. All things considered it was a good move for us. Looking forward to our new move to Gen 2 and a true hybrid cloud experience.

So a while back we moved off WebCenter Content and WebCenter Portal because we where not using an features of the product and we had no need to use them. We removed WebCenter Portal that we where using for two Dashboards and our menu. We wrote a custom menu using ADF and the database, this took us about a month of work and testing but has saved us many man months of development time. We also have custom built dashboards in the same vain which was about two month work of effort. We removed WebCenter Content that we where using as a pure data store. We built a microservices based implementation for our document repository and store which is working very well and take little to no maintenance and is very easy to scale. I do believe these are very viable products now that they have sorted the versioning out (we where trapped on 11.1.1.7 for a while because of this) but we where really not using enough of the features to make them viable for us.

The move to Exadata and Cloud at Customer - Database:  Why Exadata:  Performance - Exadata is engineered to run the Oracle database, and we can now eliminate hardware as a cause of performance problems, eliminate storage latency issues. Every feature of the Oracle Database - enough said. Why Cloud at Customer:  Alleviates problems with hardware and avoiding patching and hardware problems seems like a big win to me. Data security: Unfortunately we have some very important information stored in our system and the cloud was not an option Scalability: With PAAS we will be able to meet our horizontal scalability needs. Interesting findings and other notes: 1) Maximum 8 VM's on the Exadata 2) Active / Active and RAC Database conversion: 1) Character Set Conversion:  https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/NLSPG/ch11charsetmig.htm#NLSPG983  there is a document and a utility ( DMU ), color me surprised. ( https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/database-technologies/g

After a two year of blogging break I am back to blogging. What has changed: in a nutshell new stuff and exciting new challenges, Why the break: I really can't say I have done any ground breaking work in the last couple of years and although I was still solving hard problems they seemed like the same pattern repeated. Also I have been quite disillusioned with ADF, Solaris, java and the general direction of the products I was using. What is to come: We will be moving off our current T5-8 Solaris hardware onto Oracle cloud @ Customer. This means a move from SPARC to x86. The initial plan was SPARC to Dell server on-prem. JCS and Exadata for now until we can do a port of our ADF applications onto a more cloud native platform.

Caused By: oracle.webcenter.doclib.internal.model.presenter.conf.PresenterConfigurationException: oracle.webcenter.content.integration.cmis.query.ParseException: Jan 21, 2016 8:46:48 AM oracle.webcenter.content.integration.cmis.query.VcrExpressionSearchDelegate registerOrderBy SEVERE: Not an orderable property: Login to your Webcenter Content application as an administrator. Goto Administration > Admin Applets Click Configuration Manager, then click the Advanced Search Design Button Find the field in question and Double Click Mark it as sortable (NOTE: only some fields and custom fields can be changed)