APEX 4.0 EA Released

Something to do now during my holidays is to explore APEX 4.0.

I am using APEX extensively and recommend it to my customers when ever required.

I am currently running few production application in APEX , some are form & reporting based and others are basically plain dashboards.

One critical application is an intelligence application where it required few features which were missing in APEX 3 , some are better & complex graphs and better printing.

To achieve better charting , I have recommended AnyChart which has the advanced features and complex charting. One of the common feature that was looked for was saving the chart to some suitable format so that it could be directly used in Microsoft Office application.

To achieve better printing , I had to use BI Publisher as the printing engine.

To get all this in APEX we had to spend some money even APEX is free of cost.

In my case AnyChart and BI Publisher are two areas were licensing was involved.

My first look into APEX 4.0 was these two areas and I found it quite satisfactory

Try this one release by Oracle in Amazon Cloud http://tryapexnow.com

Other topics you might be interested in

APEX and BI Publisher Integration

R12 with Oracle Application Express

Oracle Application Express Software on 11i

Security Alert after SSL

With Oracle Application Server 10.1.2.3.0, SSL is enable with the SSO page.
Portal is running on HTTP, while SSO is secured with HTTPS. After clicking on the Login link on the secured SSO login page, the Internet Explorer raises the following Security Alert:
"You are about to be redirected to a connection that is not secure. The information you are sending to the current site might be retransmitted to a nonsecure site. Do you wish to continue?"

This alert is even raised when the following Advanced Internet Option is unchecked:
Warn if changing between secure and not secure mode setting

To implement the solution, please execute the following steps::
Solution 1:
1. Upgrade your Windows XP installations with the Service Pack 2.
2. Make sure that the registry has the following DWORD entry set to 0:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\InternetSettings\WarnOnHTTPSToHTTPRedirect

See more information in the following Microsoft Support article:
You receive the warning "You are about to be redirected to a connection that is not secure." in Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1
at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/883740/

Solution 2:
1. Obtain from Microsoft Support and install the hotfix of the following Microsoft Support article:
You receive the warning "You are about to be redirected to a connection that is not secure." in Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1
at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/883740/
2. Make sure that the registry has the following DWORD entry set to 1:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet
Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_NO_WARN_ON_HTTPS_TO_HTTP_REDIRECT_KB883740\iexplore.exe

You might also be interested in other topics

Overview of Oracle Application Server

Oracle Application Server Installation

Oracle Application Server : J2EE and WebCache

Oracle Application Server : Infrastructure

Oracle Application Server : Portal and Wireless

Oracle Application Server : Business Intelligence and Forms

Oracle Application Server : Secure Deployment

Oracle Application Server : Need of a Firewall

Oracle Application Server : Load Balancer

Oracle Application Server : Internet-Firewall-DMZ-Firewall-Intranet

DBUA0 Instance during 11g Upgrade

Recently when upgrading to 11g Release 1 , I found an unknown instance DBUA0 running on the server. I could not connect to the DBUA0 Instance to check further.

oudbtst 24771 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_pmon_DBUA0
oudbtst 24773 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_vktm_DBUA0
oudbtst 24777 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_diag_DBUA0
oudbtst 24779 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_dbrm_DBUA0
oudbtst 24781 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_psp0_DBUA0
oudbtst 24783 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_dia0_DBUA0
oudbtst 24785 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_mman_DBUA0
oudbtst 24787 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_dbw0_DBUA0
oudbtst 24789 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_lgwr_DBUA0
oudbtst 24791 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_ckpt_DBUA0
oudbtst 24793 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_smon_DBUA0
oudbtst 24795 1 0 15:16 ? 00:00:00 ora_reco_DBUA0

Raised a ticket with Oracle Support and found that DBUA0 is an Instance created by DBUA when upgrading the database and the presence of the DBUA0 process does not indicate a problem with the upgrade or that any action is required.

DBUA shuts down the instance after the upgrade is completed but for some reasons it did not.

So I had to reboot the server to make sure every thing with the upgrade is fine.

DataPump Incompatible version number 2.1 in Dump File

Recently did a migration task of some data from 11.1.0.6 to 10.2.0.4 using DataPump and hit this specific error "ORA-39142: incompatible version number 2.1 in dump file" during import process.

This means that the exported version was higher and the imported version cannot understand it.

So the import dump cannot be used any more in 10.2.0.4 , workaround to redo the export process with the option "version=10.2" to the expdp command.

What about when you cannot request another dump , may be the other source is a partner and they bill you for additional effort ?

Yes you can still get it done , by creating a local 11.1.0.6 dummy environment and then importing the dump into it. Now you have the dump inside a 11g environment , export it from the dummy environment with the option "version=10.2" and try importing into the 10.2.0.4 environment.

It worked for me and I hope this help.

Database Instance failed to turn on Flashback Database

ORA-38760:This database instance failed to turn on flashback database

Recently starting up a database reported ORA-38760. On this database I had flashback on. The error message indicates that the database flashback is on but the database failed to start generating flashback data. Checking the alert log found that there was no space in the disk group.

ORA-38701: Flashback database log 1442 seq 1519 thread 1: "+FB1"
ORA-17502: ksfdcre:4 Failed to create file +FB1
ORA-15041: diskgroup space exhausted
Can not open flashback thread because there is no more space in flash recovery area

Measures would be to add more disk space or free some space in the Disk Group so that the database can start.

I decided not to use the flashback any more and so determined to stop the flashback.

SQL>aler database flashback off;
SQL>shutdown immediate
SQL>startup

Again it resulted with the same message "ORA-38760:This database instance failed to turn on flashback database" which means the flashback is still not switched off.

Reason was flashback was not opened to close it. It still reported "Can not open flashback thread because there is no more space in flash recovery area" in the alert.log.

So it would be to review v$restore_point to see if there are options and I found that there was a restore point created with option guarantee which means the flashback is maintaining logs that are relevant for the guaranteed restore point. I do not need this restore point and so removed it. Database was then able to release a huge amount of space and my system was back again.

Handy Script to CleanUp WFERROR Workflow Item Type

There was a request to cleanup 100's of WFERROR in Workflow. This simple script can help to do it at the backend;

DECLARE 

     CURSOR wf_error IS 

     SELECT item_key 

     FROM wf_items 

     WHERE item_type = 'WFERROR' 

          AND end_date is null; 

BEGIN 

         FOR i IN wf_error LOOP 

               WF_ENGINE.abortProcess('WFERROR', i.item_key); 

         END LOOP; 

COMMIT; 

END;