Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts

Friday, December 2, 2011

Oracle Information Integration, Migration, and Consolidation - book review

Recently I read interesting book about data migration and consolidation published by PACKT Publishing titled “Oracle Information Integration, Migration, and Consolidation”.

Whole book is split into 9 chapters covering different areas of this complicated topic. In my opinion this book is intended for architects or anyone who want to have a general overview of data migration and integration based on Oracle tools. You can find some details there as well but this book is covering too many tools to do a deep dive into each of them.
 
Chapter 1: Getting Started with Information Integration
This is a overview of data and process integration challenges and general approaches. Some high level use cases are presented as well.

Chapter 2: Oracle Tools and Products
This chapter is describing all major tools created or acquired by Oracle Corp. and used for  consolidation, migration or data exchange. It is a general overview and can be used as easier way to go thought all application owned by Oracle.

Chapter 3: Application and Data Integration Case Study
Proof of Value (POV) for insurance company is a case study described in this chapter. This project include process and data integration using Oracle BPEL between mainframe VSAM, flat files, COBOL application, MQ Series and Oracle database. Author is presenting his findings and solutions to migrate one of business process in organization. Using step by step approach and Oracle SOA Suite project achieve all goals and bring some more benefits for organization.

Chapter 4: Oracle Database Migrations
There are many way to migrate data from one database to other and between versions of this same database. A few ways are mentioned here but author focused on migration from non-oracle database to Oracle database using SQL Developer. All important steps are presented and everyone can try to reproduce it on his own test environment.

Chapter 5: Database Migration Challenges and Solutions
Database migration is a tough projects and list of well know problems described in this chapter is a good point to start thinking about it. Most of RDBMS systems have their own ways to tread null/not-null columns, objects names have a different rules and procedural language running inside database is not a standard neither. Addressing most of these issues before starting a project is a good way to avoid unexpected results at the end.

Chapter 6: Data Consolidation and Management
Trusted data sources are one of base requirements in every enterprise application or reporting tools. Oracle solutions like Oracle Master Data Management Suit is presented here as an answer to these needs. Beside that some other solutions like data centric consolidation solution using in-memory TimesTen database or application centric data consolidation using Oracle Coherence are presented as well.

Chapter 7: Database-centric Data Integration
Database centric data integration is based on continuous data exchange process in heterogeneous database environment. Two very powerful products are presented here: Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator. In addition to that Oracle Gateways (Heteregeneous Services Agent) is presented as well. This chapter together with chapter 4 are most technical and detailed ones.

Chapter 8: Application and Process Integration
This chapter is presenting history of Oracle application and process integration solutions over the years. Starting with basic export / import tables for Oracle Apps and ending with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle SOA Suite.

Chapter 9: Information Lifecycle Management for Transactional Applications
Last chapter is covering problem of data and application retention. How and how long data have to be kept in database, how to managed them and how to deal with application retirement process.
 
I can recommend that book for every one who want to have a general overview of Oracle approach to integration problems. As I said before one book can’t cover all technical problems/issues but it is good starting point to enter integration world.

regards,
Marcin

Monday, October 3, 2011

Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management - book review

This is my second review in short time frame but totally different from first one. It is not about Oracle DB and I’m doing it from newbie position. This is my first experience with Oracle PeopleSoft from business perspective. Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management 9.1 Implementation is covering following topics from business perspective:
1. Financials Fundamentals
2. PeopleSoft Security
3. PeopleSoft Billing Module
4. PeopleSoft Accounts Receivable Module
5. PeopleSoft Asset Management Module
6. PeopleSoft Accounts Payable Module
7. PeopleSoft General Ledger Module
8. PeopleSoft Expenses Module
9. PeopleSoft Commitment Control

Whole book is covering one example based on Automotive company and every chapter is describing other business requirements.
All topics are explained in details and every topic has a short introduction from functional perspective. There are also implementation challenges for most common issues. Every chapter is guiding user though module configuration and typical actions. Examples have slides and description of all actions.

I can recommend this book for all for people without financial background like me as a starting point into PeopleSoft application world.

regards,
Marcin

Monday, August 29, 2011

Book review - Oracle 11g R1/R2 Real Application Clusters Essentials

Recently I have read a new book “Oracle 11g R1/R2 Real Application Clusters Essentials” by Ben Prusinski and Syed Jaffer Hussain.. First of all I would like to thanks both authors for good lecture for few days. Whole book is divided into a few parts:
  • introduction to Oracle Real Application Server including High Availability concepts, various storage options and overall Oracle RAC architecture - chapter 1 and 2
  • installation of Oracle RAC components - Clusterware, Automatic Storage Management - chapter 3
  • overview of Oracle ASM - chapter 4
  • cluster components troubleshooting - chapter 5
  • Oracle Database installation  - chapter 6
  • Day by day topics including administration, backup, performance tuning and upgrade of Oracle Real Application Cluster - chapter 6, 7, 8 and 9
  • Real life examples including implementation of Oracle EBS using Oracle RAC - chapter 10 and 11
  • Oracle Maximum Availability - Chapter 12
  • Overview of Oracle tools for more experience users - Appendinx
In a first part authors are presenting High Availability options for Oracle and describing all main hardware components required for Oracle RAC implementation (server, network and storage options). Next chapter is covering an Oracle RAC architecture and it is covering mostly 11g Release 1. There is some information about a 11g Release 2 as well but due to number of changes between both version I would like to see two chapters instead of one - some additional information about a 11gR2 is covered at the end of appendix.

The next part is a guide how to install whole an Oracle RAC infrastructure - Clusterware and Automatic Storage Management in case of 11g Release 1 or Grid Infrastructure in case of version 11g Release 2. It is well documented and I will help new users to go though this process.

The next chapter is covering all topics related to Oracle Automatic Storage Management. Authors are presenting concepts and overview of this component as well as basic administration options. There is also separate part about new features of Oracle ASM 11g Release 2 covering ACFS file system.   

Chapter 5 is about managing and  troubleshooting Oracle RAC components. Some tools and common scenarios based on typical clusterware issues are presented there together with solving tips.

The next chapters (6,7,8 and 9) describe installation of database as well as new features of an Oracle 11g Release 1 and Release 2. In subsequent paragraph we can read about Oracle RAC High Availability features like - Load Balancing, Transparent Application Failover and Fast Connection Failover. After that backup and recovery strategy for database and whole clusterware comes to play. From management perspective this part is very important and should be study carefully. Next part is a overview of performance tuning tools, wait event and statistics important any performance improvement work.

Real life examples is in my opinion most interesting part of the book. All readers can go though typical scenario like adding or deleting node from cluster or converting database from single instance to RAC database. Configuration of Oracle EBS with Oracle RAC is also very well documented.

When I went though whole book I have to say that it was a good lecture and I can recommend it for everybody who want to do first dive into Oracle RAC world. Furthermore I think that more experience users will find this book interesting and worth to read too.

regards,
Marcin