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Monday, May 25, 2020

Oracle Cloud Development for Free!


Let's explore some Oracle Cloud Development capabilities! Some of which are free! I will cover the OCI Marketplace and Free Offerings there in a separate post, but there's an introduction to it at the end of this article. hashtag#oci hashtag#oracle hashtag#clouddevelopment hashtag#oraclecloud hashtag#backendwebdevelopment




I wrote this blog post in LinkedIn, so go to the link below to read it:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oracle-cloud-development-free-julio-lois/

Sunday, May 24, 2020

EBS Integration Repository and eTRM


As a lot of companies and users shift their focus towards the Cloud Products, sometimes it's easy to forget that an enormous number of customer still utilize EBS and will continue to do so for years to come. As such, those customers will continue to integrate their EBS environments with other systems, like early payment engines, OCR engines, tax engines, third party SCM systems, other ERP's and more. The following two resources are extremely powerful when planning integration work for EBS, and I have leveraged them countless times.

First, I wanted to remind everyone that the Integration Repository responsibility in EBS is a great resource to see whether there is already an Oracle API to accomplish a specific task. Please make use of it when building solutions to address customer needs or if you have doubts in regards to whether the vendor you are working with for your project, or your own development team, is building a custom function for an existing standard function or procedure, as you always want to leverage seeded functionality that will be supported by Oracle and doesn't break when upgrades happen.

For those that are not familiar with the Integration Repository, you simply need to add it as a responsibility under your user and browse the different modules to drill down to the specific service interface you want to look at. Once you drill into a specific API, you will see a list of the details including function names, parameters, rules, and much more.

Browsing the repository:



  • I am showing Projects related API's in the screenshot.

Additionally, remember the Oracle eBusiness Suite Electronic Technical Reference Manual (eTRM), is also available to us with our Oracle Support accounts.

This one is especially useful to see EBS database design and dependency information, you can also browse the FND model and the Data Dictionary with it! This is an extremely powerful tool to see what happens to those database objects that you rely on when upgrades occur, as those changes will likely impact your custom concurrent programs, reports, alerts, and other extensions.


EBS Seeded Comparison Reports

Hello everyone, I haven’t written about EBS in a while since I’ve been focused on the Cloud products, but I wanted to bring to your attention the below seeded reports provided by Oracle which can be used to compare environments with different patch sets, to better assess the impact of applying those patches/upgrades and see differences at a low level. This is as relevant as ever since EBS patching hasn’t slowed down, and many new features continue to come in.

Below are descriptions of each report with the respective Oracle notes with all the relevant information. Most of the content and report description come straight from Oracle Support, the idea is to consolidate them here for your awareness.

They are all very useful, and one of them specially is of interest to me and I have used it extensively in order to compare different ATG versions to assess impact and help build a test plan. The ATG patch family is important because EBS continues to enhance through different avenues like enhanced Mobile support and the Enterprise Command Centers, and these rely heavily on your ATG readiness.

The EBS File Comparison Report provides a comprehensive comparison of file system artifacts between different Oracle E-Business Suite releases for important file types. As part of Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade planning, this report can assist customers to get a clear idea of "what is different in a new release" (additions, removals and modifications for Oracle E-Business Suite delivered files).

The report also covers some special artifacts that span the file system and database (for example, Oracle E-Business Suite delivered Oracle Application Framework (OAF) personalizations, Oracle Application Framework (OAF) based pages, Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher reports and so on).The EBS File Comparison Report is intended to complement other already available reports such as EBS Data Model Comparison report and EBS ATG Seed Data Comparison report.

The EBS data model comparison report provides the static database object definition changes between two EBS releases to help users to preview the database object definition changes before upgrading their instances from one release to another and understand the impact of the database object changes that may affect the customization or business flows. Users can select a product and navigate the database object definition differences for each supported database object type.

The EBS ATG Seed Data Comparison Report provides a static delta between different EBS releases by documenting the seed data changes delivered by the product data loader files (.ldt extension) based on EBS ATG loader control (.lct extension) files.

The below Oracle Notes cover how to install and navigate the reports. All of these Oracle docs continue to get updated as releases occur and support up to 12.2.9 has been delivered for each of the below:

o EBS Data Model Comparison Report Overview (Doc ID 1290886.1)
o EBS File Comparison Report [VIDEO] (Doc ID 1446430.1)
o EBS ATG Seed Data Comparison Report (Doc ID 1327399.1)