07 December 2011

Two (no three) tips from Oracle Support

Introduction or who am I, anyway?

I like things that come in threes.  Perhaps my OTN handle should be “RD” instead of “CL”.

By the way, Rene Descartes had three dreams that drove him to pursue science.  FWIW, I had dreams (all too real) of working in a mainframe Adabas shop (that was subsequently off-shored) forever – I ran to the tender embrace of OLAP just as fast as I could.  I wasn’t always an idiot as a recent college graduate – just mostly.  As for what I am now I leave it for you to decide.  Good grief, what a digression that was.  Okay, the rest of this post is actually useful stuff.

Information Center

Would you like to have all of your EPM (and related BI) Support goodness wrapped into one package so you didn’t have to chase hither and yon, looking for specific articles?  How about a single location that’s even more consolidated than the Master Note Indexes and Oracle Advisors? What, you like searching through Support?  Uh-huh, you were only joshing me.  

There is now one single place to get:

And there’s more than the above, a lot more.  I think I could easily spend a month (or maybe more like a quarter) exploring all of the goodies on this page.

Pretty nifty, eh?  And how do you find this treasure trove, that is, by the by, updated every quarter?

Go right here to find out more:     
EPM and BI Support Newsletter Current Edition - Volume 2 : December 2011 (Doc ID 1347131.1)

ODI is left out, but there’s still great stuff for it

I’m working on a Special Project using ODI right now and it has been an interesting experience.  I’m pretty sure productivity in ODI = being beaten down by the product’s obtuseness, arbitrary nature, and just plain weirdness and then getting built back up by its awesomeness.  I guess it’s sort of like the Army’s BCT except we ODI developers don’t run around to a cadence march or yell Hooah!  I digress yet again. Regardless, ODI really is very powerful but anyone who doesn’t use it as part of his "normal" (can normal be used with me?) job can use all the help available.

ODI isn’t part of the EPM and BI newsletter, but here are three articles for you to obsess about.  What, you don’t do that when I post this stuff?  For shame.

There is a lot of good information in these notes – I wish I had known about them before I began my Journey of Pain that is ODI 11.1.1.5.

HTML rules, Flash, not so much

Oracle Support has this whiz-bang, super-duper web site full of all kinds of nifty interface functionality.  This is good.

If you are on a slow PC or a slow internet connection, it is S-L-O-W.  This is bad.  Do it on a laptop tethered to your mobile phone as an internet gateway and it is beyond slow.  Pouring molasses on a cold New England’s winter morn comes time mind as a barely-adequate analogy.

There is another way to get into Oracle Support’s web page and if you clicked on the above link, you’ve already experienced it – it is https://supporthtml.oracle.com.  All of the same great content, 100x (it is possible I am employing hyperbole to make the point, but it is fast) the UI speed.  What’s not to like?

And that’s it, for now

Yet again, Oracle Support does their very best to make our lives a little bit easier.  I for one am thrilled that this kind of consolidated information is making its way to us.  These products are complicated sophisticated and poor old implementation consultants like me need all the help they can get.  

I don’t know who in Support is responsible for supporthtml.oracle.com, but whoever that is – thanks, you are a life saver.

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