Oracle E-Business Suite 11i Links

Yeah, I know this isn't directly LDAP-related -- but sometimes it helps to know something about the apps your ID management infrastructure is protecting.

Anyway, I'm now well into the design phase of my company's ERP implementation (or should I say, (plural) implementations, which currently assumes we'll be going with 11i apps.

Here are some links to stuff that looks like it will be useful going forward:

Become an Oracle Apps DBA
Oracle Apps Blog
Shayam the Apps DBA
Oracle Applications DBA Blog

... and let's not forget the official Oracle doc:

Oracle 11i Virtual Documentation Library.

init script for Oracle infrastructure

I went crazy the other day looking for this, sure that I'd posted it somewhere. I was wrong, I had not. This script should be copied into /etc/init.d on a Red Hat Enterprise/CentOS system, given execute permissions and then enabled using chkconfig. This is a companion to another script I did that starts/stops the underlying database (this script still needs some code to test that the DB is live before it tries to start everything up, I'm working on that...).

#!/bin/bash
#
# chkconfig: 29 99 1
# description: init script to start/stop oracle AS 10g
#
#
# match these values to your environment:
export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/orainfra/product/10.1.4/inft
export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$ORACLE_HOME/opmn/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export JAVA_HOME=$ORACLE_HOME/jdk
export ORACLE_SID=inft
export ORACLE_USER=orainfra

# see how we are called:
case $1 in
    start)
    echo "Starting Oracle AS ..."
    su - ORACLE_USER << EOS
    opmnctl startall
    emctl start iasconsole

EOS
    ;;

    stop)
    echo "Stopping Oracle AS ..."
    su - $ORACLE_USER << EOS
    emctl stop iasconsole
    opmnctl stopall

EOS
    ;;

    *)
    echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop}"
    ;;
esac

Using an Existing Database for Oracle IDM

Oracle Identity Management can use an existing Oracle 10g database for it's Metadata Repository.

The instructions are in the Oracle Application Server Metadata Repository Creation Assistant User's Guide.

Oracle Identity Management Resource Library

The Oracle Identity Management Resource Library has some very interesting and useful stuff that warrants attention. It's all, of course, geared to sell you Oracle product, and therefore is for the most part very "high level". Having said that, the issues and strategies presented should resonate with anyone who has struggled with the mechanics of IDM (there, another acronym -- acronyms are good, they usually lead to higher salaries, in direct proportion to the obscurity of the acronym).

Give a listen (while you work, the slides can safely be ignored) to some of the webcasts, especially the customer discussion panel. If your management is impressed by such things, you might also want to grab the latest Gartner "Magic Quadrant" and some of the other analysts reports there (take what you read there with a grain of salt, most of these "experts" wouldn't know a code 27 from a code 28 to save their own lives -- which explains why many commercial products don't either).