AD Admin

Continuing our discussions on ad utilities today i will discuss about the most commonly used ad utility adadmin. Adadmin is a utility that performs a number of tasks required from maintaing and administering an Oracle Applications instance.

On a broad level the tasks performed by adadmin can be categorized into database activities and Applications filesystem management tasks.

In addition to these, adadmin in 11.5.10 onwards you can use adadmin to put the system in Maintenance Mode also. Maintenance mode is special mode introducted to facilitate maintenance tasks like patch application.

Before you run adadmin you must ensure the following.

Set your applications environment
Ensure that you have sufficient space in tmp disk.
For certain adadmin task you may require to shutdown your concurrent managers

You can run adadmin by typing adadmin at the command pront afdter seeting the environment.

$adadmin

At the time of execution adadmin prompts you to verify and enter several information pertaining to your applications installation like APPL_TOP location ,ORACLE_HOME.adadmin log file name,batch size etc.

Adadmin can also be run in a non interactive mode. This is accomplished by creating a defaults file.The defaults file must be place at the location $APPL_TOP/admin/[sid]/

You can create the defaults file with the following syntax

$adadmin deafultsfile=$APPL_TOP/admin/[sid]/samtask.txt

Next time you can run adadmin for the same task by specifying the interactive=no option.

adadmin \
defaultsfile=APPL_TOP/admin/vis/samtask.txt \
logfile=adadmin_091306.log workers=9 \
interactive=no

If your previous session of adadmin had encountred with problems adadmin promts you to either continue with your old session or start with a frest session as show below

Your previous AD Administration session did not run to completion.
Do you wish to continue with your previous AD Administration session [Yes] ?


The main menu of adadmin presents you with the following six choices

AD Administration Main Menu
--------------------------------------------------

1. Generate Applications Files menu

2. Maintain Applications Files menu

3. Compile/Reload Applications Database Entities menu

4. Maintain Applications Database Entities menu

5. Change Maintenance Mode

6. Exit AD Administration

First two options are related to maintaining applicvations file system the second twop options relate to database activities ,the fifth option here is used to put the system in maintenance mode and bring it back from maintenance mode.

Under the Generate Applications Files Menu you can perform the following tasks

Generate Applications Files
----------------------------------------

1. Generate message files

2. Generate form files

3. Generate report files

4. Generate graphics files

5. Generate product JAR files

6. Return to Main Menu


Under the Maintain Applications Files menu you can perform the following tasks

Maintain Applications Files
----------------------------------------

1. Relink Applications programs

2. Create Applications environment file

3. Copy files to destinations

4. Convert character set

5. Maintain snapshot information

6. Check for missing files

7. Return to Main Menu


Under the Compile/Reload Applications Database Entities menu you can perform the following tasks

Compile/Reload Applications Database Entities
---------------------------------------------------

1. Compile APPS schema

2. Compile menu information

3. Compile flexfields

4. Reload JAR files to database

5. Return to Main Menu


Under the Maintain Applications Database Entities menu you can perform the following tasks

Maintain Applications Database Entities
---------------------------------------------------

1. Validate APPS schema

2. Re-create grants and synonyms for APPS schema

3. Maintain multi-lingual tables

4. Check DUAL table

5. Maintain Multiple Reporting Currencies schema

6. Return to Main Menu

Under the Change Maintenance Mode you can do the following

Change Maintenance Mode
----------------------------------------

Maintenance Mode is currently: [Disabled].


Maintenance mode should normally be enabled when patching
Oracle Applications and disabled when users are logged on
to the system. See the Oracle Applications Maintenance
Utilities manual for more information about maintenance mode.


Please select an option:

1. Enable Maintenance Mode

2. Disable Maintenance Mode

3. Return to Main Menu

If you noitice the message this menu selection also shows the maintenance status (disabled in our case) of the system.

You can also forcefully exit adadmin at any point of time by typing 'abort',This will however result in a unclean exit of adadmin and the next time when you run adadmin you will be prompted with the option to start fresh or continue with the previous session as described earlier

To know more about the individual tasks performed by admin refer to the 'Maintaining Oracle Applications Documentation Set' at the applications documentation library.

Autoconfig

An Oracle Applications instance has its configuration details that are stored and used in multiple files. Managing these configurations manually would have been a night mare without autoconfig. My friends who have worked with 11.0.3 and earlier versions would understand the pain better than anyone else. Though in 11.0.3 the number of configuration files were numbered and could be tracked with a little effort.

But not so in the case of 11i.Thankfully we have autoconfig to do up the messy job for us now.

Autoconfig is a utility which is shipped with the latest releases of Oracle Applications that manages all the configuration files in oracle Applications.

Autoconfig has been defined by oracle 'as a tool which that simplifies and standardizes configuration management tasks in an Oracle Applications environment'.

But where does autoconfig get the configuration information from? For this autoconfig relies on a file called the context file.

The context file is an XML file in the format [sid]_[hostname].xml.This xml file stores all the configuration details of your oracle applications system like the web port number, database names etc.

There are separate context files for the database tier and the applications tier.

The [context_name] variable used here is an equivalent of [sid]_[hostname]

The location of the context file on the application tier is

$APPL_TOP/admin/[context_name].xml

The location of the context file for the databse tier is

$ORACLE_HOME/appsutil/[context_name].xml

Additionally if the applications is spread across multiple nodes each node will have its separate context file.

Autoconfig reads the information that is present in theses context files and updates the corresponding configuration files like appsweb.cfg, jserv.conf to name a couple.

But how do these context files get the information from? in previous versions of Oracle Applications we had a utility called the context editor which was used to update the context files. This has now been replaced by the Oracle Applications Manager.

Context files should now be edited only through OAM and never manually.

In case the context file is lost, you can regenerate your context file using the adbldxml.pl script

Once a particular context value is updated in OAM and saved, the changes are not propagated across the configuration files till you run autoconfig.

Apart form the context file autoconfig also makes use of the template files. Each configuration files that is going to be updated by autoconfig had a corresponding template file. Autoconfig compares the value from the context file with the template file before writing into the corresponding configuration file.

Driver files are also used by autoconfig, the driver files contain specific commands that may be required to be executed to update certain values at the database level.

Autoconfig is run by executing the shell script adautocfg.sh which in turn calls for the adconfig.sh which calls the perl script adconfig.pl.

The applications environment must be set before executing autoconfig, also since autoconfig will require a connection to your database you must ensure that the database and listener is up before running autoconfig.

Autoconfig is enabled in all latest releases of 11i,in case you want to implement autoconfig to an earlier 11i instance you can follow the instructions given in metalink note 165195.1

Oracle Diagnostics.

Oracle diagnostics is one of the tools that aim at achieving enhanced supportability for your Oracle Applications instance.

Oracle diagnostics provides a series of predefined test that can be run against your ebusiness suite to determine any performance or configuration bottlenecks. The diagnostics tests are divided into various categories ranging form technical and functional areas. Separate test groups are created for each application with oracle applications like General Ledger, Applications DBA etc. For each product the tests are further categorized into problem areas like installation issues, data issues customizations etc.

A periodic execution of these test is recommended by oracle to check the sanity of your Oracle Applications instance over a period of time.

Oracle diagnostics test are mostly written in JSP,JAVA or PLS/SQL with the user interface mostly being web based in the form of HTML or JSP.(Though there is also a command line interface available).

The web based interface for Oracle diagnostics can either be launched from Oracle Applications Manager or via the CRM administrators console (http:///OA_HTML/jtflogin.jsp).

The web base interface can be launched either as standalone HTML user via the URL http://:/OA_HTML/jtfqalgn.htm or as an administrative -level user through the CRM administrators console or Oracle Applications Manager Console.

The command line interface can be used by the following command

java -DJTFDBCFILE= -Dframework.Logging.system.filename=
-Dservice.Logging.common.filename= oracle.apps.jtf.regress.qatool.QAConsole

Apart from the predefined test Oracle diagnostics also allows for creating custom test and unit test cases. You can also create most of these test using user Interface also that is without any coding involved.

Oracle diagnostics tools are come as a product within Oracle Applications with the product name IZU. In case your Oracle Applications instances does not have this product, you must first install this product using AD Splicer.

The results of the diagnostics test can be viewed as a report in a web based user interface for a particular diagnostics test session. This output can be saved to the local PC and uploaded to metalink for further support. The diagnostics test results and the associated statistics are also available at the database level in the following tables JTF_DIAGNOSTIC_LOG and JTF_DIAGNOSTIC_STATS.

Further you can also use Oracle Applications Manager to schedule automatic execution of diagnostics tests.

Since the results of the diagnostics test might contain potentially sensitive data segregated diagnostic roles are available to restrict the type of test available to a particular user. Diagnostic roles include Super User, Application User, End User and Anonymous user.

The latest release of Oracle diagnostics is 2.4,once you have installed/available IZU in Oracle Applications you can apply the latest Oracle diagnostics 2.4 test using adpatch. However its important to note that Oracle Diagnostics can be installed only on systems 11.5.4 and higher. Also JDK 1.3.1 or higher is recommend to use oracle diagnostics.

This current version of Oracle diagnostics tools are launched directly within Oracle applications. Once you have completed the installation of Oracle diagnostics you can assign the seeded responsibility 'Oracle Diagnostics Tool' to any valid ebusiness suite user.

You can refer to metalink note 358831.1 for details instructions on doing this.

Complete reference on Oracle Diagnostics is also available in the Oracle Applications Supportability Guide in the applications documentation CD.

Ad Relink

Continuing my series on the AD Utilities in todays post i will blog about AD Relink.

AD Relink is a utility that is used to Oracle Applications Executables the Oracle8 Server product libraries contained within the Oracle Applications Technology Stack ORACLE_HOME.

In other words AD Relink is used to regenerate an Oracle Applications executable using the Oracle Applications Tech Stack libriries.

A unique feature of AD relink is that it is not a executable like other Ad utilities it is in fact a shell script that uses the UNIX 'make' command. In windows environment therefore its important to have MKS Toolkit or CYGWIN in the path before using AD Relink.It does this by reading the product definition from the {prod}.mk file. This file is located at PROD_TOP/lib location. AD Relink will fail in case the files are missing, courupted or a newer version of the file is required.

Relinking may be required under various scenarios like an executable getting corrupt or lost. Relinking is also recommended after cloning upgrades and patching. But mostly Auto Patch will take care of the relinking process at the end of the patching.

The following is the syntax for AD Relink

adrelink.sh force={y | n} [optionalargs]

Force here is used to specify wether to relink regardless of the status of the library or object files.

Optional Args include back_mode used to specify to backup the executable before relinking.
The values for this are 'all','file'(backs up the executables metioned in the adrelinkbk.txt,this is also the default value) and 'none'.

Eg: adrelink.sh force=y “ad adpatch”

AD Relink is run after logging into the system as the 'applmgr' user and setting the environment.
The following environment variables must be set properly before using AD Relink
PATH, ORACLE_HOME,APPL_TOP, ORACLE_SID or TWO_TASK, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and SHLIB_PATH (HP specific)

Also you must use AD Relink to relink only AD executables to relink other executables it is recommended to used ADADMIN instead. Eg if you wish to Relink your FNDLIBR (Your concurrent Manager executable) you should use adadmin and choose the 'Maintain Applications Files' option, though you could do the same with AD Relink also.

By default AD Relink creates a log file of the actions performed and the errors encounterd in the linking process at the location from where the AD Relink command was run.

It is recommended that you shutdown services of the tier for whose executables you are relinking.

You cannot relink non Oracle Applications executable using AD Relink for that you must use the make command manually.
eg: make -f ins_rdbms.mk install.

AD Splicer

Oracle Applications provides quite a few utilities which are aimed at effective maintenance and monitoring an Oracle Applications instance. In my next posts i will talk about these UNIX utilities which are also referred to as AD utilities.

Today i used AD Splicer so i will start with this one.

AD Splicer is a utility used to add an off-cycle product into Oracle Applications.

Products which have been released between the base releases of 11i are referred to an off-cycle product. Once AD Splicer is used to splice these off-cycle products into Oracle Applications they are recognized by other AD utilities like AD Patch as a valid Oracle Applications product for a given release.

In a multi node environment adsplicer should be used on all the APPL_TOPs.It is recommended to run AD Splice on the Admin node first.

Before using AD Splice you are required to add the new tablespace for the new products that are going to be added. In case you have migrated to the Oracle Applications new tablespace model you would require to create a new tablespace APPS_TS_TOOLs manually before using AD Splicer.

Ad Splicer makes use of the following control files to add the new off-cycle product into oracle applications.

[prod]prod.txt : This is a product definition file which contains the language independent information about the product.

[prod]terr.txt : This is also a product definition file containing language-specific information about the new product.

Both these product definition files should not be edited manually.

For example the product definition files for the off-cycle product Web ADI are bneterr.txt and bneprod.txt

newprods.txt : This file is also know as the product configuration file. You can edit this file optionally. This file acts as a template for configuring the new product that would be added. It comprises of a list of parameters which include

product- The product being added eg.bne .This must not be changed.

base_product_top - This is the base path where the files for the new product will be places using the Oracle applications filesystem architecture. the default value for this is APPL_TOP.

oracle_schema - This parameter refer to the oracle schema which is the owner of the new product to be added.

sizing_factor - The sizing factor which is to be followed for table and index creation.

main_tspace - The tablespace for product tables

index_tspace - The tablespace for product indexes

temp_tspace - The tablespace for Oracle schema’s temporary segments

default_tspace - This refers to the default table space for the of the Oracle Schema owning the product.

All the above mentioned control files namely the prod.txt,terr.txt and newprods.txt must be placed in $APPL_TOP/admin so that adsplce is able to read them.

Like other Ad utilities AD Splice will also require to make a connection to your database instance using SYSTEM and APPLSYS accounts as a result your database and listener must be running while using AD Splice.

An important fact to note is that products that are added through AD Splice are visible to other AD Utilites except autoupgrade.

The metalink Note 76708.1 contains further details and instructions on using AD Splice.