Oracle FMW on 12c Container Database with a Pluggable Database

Oracle FMW 11.1.1.7 (aka PS6) is certified to run on Oracle Database 12c Container with a pluggable database.

To run the rcu (or Repository Creation Utlity) you have to connect to the service of the container created to contain your FMW repository.

For example, I have created a database container called orcl, with a container called pdborcl. If you I run 'lsnrctl status', I get the service orcl.domain.com (root container) as well as pdborcl.domain.com. In my case I would connect to pdborcl.domain.com service.

The other thing to remember is that the 'well known' 'sys' user is a root container based user, and thus you have to grant dba rights to the sys user on the pdborcl container. This is achieved by connect to the service pdborcl as sys and run the command 'grant dba to sys'.

64-Bit & OID RCU Issues

If you try to create FMW repository running on 64-bit, and you run into the following error:

oid schema rcu fails ERROR rcu: oracle.sysman.assistants.rcu.backend.action.SQLPlusAction::perform: Error initializing SQLPlusEngine

Set the SQLPLUS_HOME to point to your existing 64-bit Oracle 'sqlplus' installation:

export SQLPLUS_HOME=$ORACLE_HOME

then run RCU.

Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPM Topics - a must have

I am very honored to review the new book from Mark Nelson and Tanya Williams, Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPM Topics, Packt Publishing, 2012. The book is due to be release the 25th October 2012.


The nature of BPM to be cross company, division and with multiple process stake holders brings a new set of dimensions to the definition, design and implementation of BPM. Mark and Tanya set out to address these hurdles, amongst others, in their book.

The book will give you a solid foundation to use Oracle BPM 11g Suite to its fullest capability, to short circuit your understanding of sub-processes, instance correlation, exception, error handling and inter-process communication. With the addition of working with arrays, you will be well equipped to achieve the most advanced BPMN techniques within your Oracle BPM 11g Suite environment within in a couple of days.

The authors explain the concepts and advanced techniques with detailed explanations, diagrams and hands-on exercises to confirm the techniques. The techniques are also enriched with best practice and “gotchas”.

I wish I had the valuable knowledge contained in the book earlier in my career, as it would have saved me a lot of time, reading through technical forums, product documentation and debugging BPMN models, trying to understand correlation and process communication. It also cleared a couple of misconceptions I had.

I would suggest the book to anybody embarking on an Oracle BPM implementation and anybody who wants to enrich their current understanding of BPM with the Advance Topics covered in Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPMN Topics.

The book is available at Packt Publishing

JDeveloper network issues under JDK1.7

If you run into 'Permission denied' exceptions trying to connecting to Weblogic, and you are using JDeveloper and JDK1.7, add the flag 'AddVMOption -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true' in jdev.conf.

The issue stems from the fact that JDK1.7 implements IPv6, and the prefered method by default for any connection is IPv6.

If you want to set it system wide, export the _JAVA_OPTIONS flag in .bashrc or .bash_profile:

_JAVA_OPTIONS=-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Djava.net.preferIPv6Addresses=false

Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c

If for some reason during the configuration step, the configuration keeps on failing on the 'MDS Schema Creation' step run the following command, without exiting the Configuration Assistant:

$ORACLE_HOME/sysman/admin/emdrep/bin/RepManager localhost 1521 orcl -action create -dbUser sys

With ORACLE_HOME set to your 'Oracle Middleware'/oms directory.

It will create the repository and when you try the 'Retry' button in the Configuration Assistant, it will pass the MDS Creation step.

If you still run into issues, under the Oracle Middleware home, there is a temporary directory '.gcinstall_temp' created, with a couple of useful log files under '/emprereq/LATEST/', which might give you a hint of what is wrong.

Interacting with Nodemanager

Nodemanager is a network daemon, which you can connect to and interact with. The basic functionality can be tested using a connection to Node Manager, using telnet, or in the case of SSL, ssh.

Commands which can be issued to Node Manager includes the starting, stopping and querying the state of servers.

Example:
telnet nodemanagerhost port

domain soa_domain    <- Set the current working domain, as specified in the nodemanager file
+OK Current domain set to 'soa_domain'
server AdminServer   <- Set the current working server AdminServer
+OK Current server is now 'AdminServer'
start AdminServer      <- Issue a start command to AdminServer
+OK Server 'AdminServer' started
getStates                        <- Get status of the servers
+OK AdminServer=RUNNING soa_server1=RUNNING AdminServerTag=UNKNOWN domain_bak=UNKNOWN

Other commands include: kill (server), getLog (last command issues, kill, start), execscript (server migration script)

Complete list of commands:
VERSION

DOMAIN
SERVER
COHERENCESERVER
USER
PASS
STAT
QUIT
START
STARTP
KILL
GETLOG
GETNMLOG
HELLO
CHGCRED
GETSTATES
EXECSCRIPT

How to disable RCU requirement testing

I had to install the Oracle SOA/BPM/Webcenter metadata schemas into an unsupported SQL Server environment, and was struggling to bypass the tests in RCU.

To disable the tests, go to the directory where rcu in installed and edit the specific component's xml file:

For example 'SOA Infra' would sit under rcuHome/rcu/integration/soainfra/soainfra.xml, and change the requirements in the file to either a valid test or delete the test, which is expressed between the

<DBPrerequisite></DBPrerequisite> tags.