Category Archives: Art of BI
Oracle EPM 11.2.6 Has Hit the Stands – What’s New?
Oracle EPM 11.2 hit the market with a fair amount of pomp and circumstance (and lots of anticipation) in December 2019. With it came continuous innovation – the promise of no more major technology upgrades. Instead, the on-premises applications would combine technology stack updates, bug fixes, and new features into one patch set – a simple in-place update.
Oracle has held to their promise, releasing six updates since the release of 11.2. This month featured the sixth version update of Oracle EPM: 11.2.6. As with previous releases, this one comes with new features, automations, certifications, and procedures that will make Oracle EPM more effective and streamlined for EPM administrators and users. It comes on the heels of the Oracle EPM Cloud July monthly update, which comes with even more functionality and fixes. You can read about the new developments in EPM Cloud here.
What Came with Oracle EPM 11.2.5?
Let’s take a quick look at the highlights of the April release of EPM on-premises, EPM 11.2.5, as published on the Oracle EPM blog:
- Delivery of Fusion Middleware 12.2.1.4 (certification matrix) and Java version 1.8.0_251.
- SQL Server 2017 certification
- Certification of Essbase 21c for:
- Oracle Smart View for Office
- Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting
- Oracle Hyperion Shared Services.
- Certification of upgrades and migrations from Solaris to Linux or Windows.
- Certification of the ability to upgrade Java to the latest patch level.
This release also included a new Hyperion Financial Close Management feature that allows you to configure a content management system. Instructions for implementation are available in this section of the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Installation and Configuration Guide.
New Features and Fixes in EPM 11.2.6
Release 11.2.6 continues the path to additional SQL certifications as well as the rumored removal of Oracle Essbase Studio. Here’s a shortlist of the changes in the latest release, as documented in the Oracle EPM Blog:
- Certification of SQL Server 2019.
- Removal of Oracle Essbase Studio from EPM System Installer.
- Automation of the process of uninstalling or updating Fusion Middleware patches as needed during Apply Update.
- Delivery of updated HTTP client.
- Support for any identity management product that supports header-based authentication.
- Certification of Oracle Hyperion Planning Release 11.2.x with OGNL 3.2.18.
- Documentation of database password change procedure in the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Deployment Options Guide.
There are also new defect fixes applicable to EPM System Configurator, Essbase installations on Linux, Fusion Middleware, EPM Workspace and Hyperion Shared Services, Calculation Manager, and more in the new release. Be sure to review the entire 11.2.6 readme to better understand how these fixes will benefit you.
Profitability and Cost Management and Planning received some new features as well:
- In PCM, the “Enable Native ML Application” and “Create ML Application Using Native Method” REST APIs can now enable or create any native application.
- Planning now supports custom grid spread functionality.
What is Expected for EPM 11.2.7?
There are two anticipated changes and updates coming in EPM 11.2.7 (and beyond) that Oracle has released so you can prepare for what’s coming down the pipe. More detail is available in the 11.2.6 readme, but in summary, Oracle Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management will lose Visual Basic Support. (You can prepare by switching to Jython) In addition, SAP ERP and BW adapters will be certified for FDMEE for companies needing to integrate these platforms.
Final Thoughts
Oracle continues to improve EPM 11.2 for companies that rely on these critical applications. If you haven’t upgraded from an older version yet, new features and releases are a good jumping-off point for making the case. Be sure to check out our content about EPM 11.2, what’s new, and upcoming end of support for EPM 11.1 by visiting our EPM Resource Center.
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3 Tactics for Modernizing Your Legacy Applications
Modernizing legacy applications is one of the most rewarding ways for your organization to enact digital transformation.
According to research by Vanson Bourne, senior IT decision-makers believe that modernizing legacy IT systems can reduce their business operational costs by an average of 13 percent, while boosting revenues by 14 percent.
Businesses that continue to use legacy IT systems face significant challenges related to supporting outdated computer systems, programming languages or application software. The ripple-effect manifests into missing modern features and functionality to difficulties hiring the right in-house talent. Although most organizations can agree on the need to modernize legacy IT systems, too many of them aren’t sure how to evolve or put this into practice.
In this article, we’ll discuss three methods of moving away from legacy IT systems and modernizing your legacy applications to help you along your digital transformation journey.
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The Cloud
Today, cloud computing has become a well-established platform for businesses of all sizes and across all industries. According to Flexera’s 2021 “State of the Cloud” report, 99 percent of companies report using at least one public or private cloud.
Although nearly every organization is using the cloud in some form or fashion, many of them still have a significant on-premises legacy IT system footprint. Migrating these legacy applications from on-premises to the cloud is one of the most common, and most fruitful ways of modernizing your enterprise IT.
For example, major cloud providers such as Microsoft and Oracle have taken a decidedly “cloud-first” stance: new features and functionality are rolled out to cloud software before they reach their on-premises equivalents. The cloud also offers benefits such as lower costs, greater flexibility, fewer maintenance obligations, more uptime, and increased business agility.
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Microservices
Software applications have traditionally been built with a “monolithic” architecture that acts as a single, indivisible unit. Monolithic software typically consists of a client-side user interface, as well as a server-side application and database.
However, monolithic applications have several significant disadvantages. In particular, a monolithic codebase can be highly complex, making it difficult to implement changes or scale the application. For these reasons, many organizations are decomposing their monolithic software to use a microservices-based architecture instead.
As the name suggests, software using the microservices architecture consists of many smaller independent components, all communicating with each other using APIs (application programming interfaces). Thanks to this independent nature, microservices architecture offers advantages such as ease of development, less downtime, and greater scalability.
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DevOps
DevOps is a software development methodology that seeks to foster closer collaboration and tighter feedback loops between your development and IT operations teams. DevOps is closely connected with CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment), a set of development practices that encourage small, incremental changes to the code base. Other techniques associated with DevOps include the heavy use of automation and “shifting left,” i.e. identifying ways to perform testing earlier in the development process.
According to a 2019 survey, more than 60 percent of DevOps practitioners said that they had seen benefits such as faster time to market, greater productivity, and higher product quality. While the methodology has many benefits, successfully bringing DevOps into your organization will require a cultural shift, especially when it comes to modernizing legacy IT.
Conclusion: How to Modernize Your Legacy IT
Cloud migrations, microservices and DevOps are just three examples of how to go about legacy application modernization. But if you aren’t already using these tactics, how can you start to bring them into the organization?
Businesses that want to modernize their legacy IT systems are increasingly joining forces with managed services partners like Datavail. As a Microsoft Gold Partner that has been with many of our clients for 10 years or more, Datavail has both the skills and the experience to help with your next IT modernization project.
To learn more about how we helped a recent client modernize their IT portals using DevOps, microservices, and the Microsoft Azure cloud, check out our case study “Public College Modernizes Online Application Process with Azure.” You can also get in touch with our team of application development experts for a chat about your business needs and objectives.
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Oracle to Amazon RDS Migration Best Practices
An Oracle to Amazon RDS migration is an extensive process that requires significant resources. Thoroughly planning each step ahead of time and gathering the right information to answer critical migration questions sets your organization up for success.
Evaluate Your On-Premises Oracle Database Performance
Many organizations opt to migrate databases to the cloud to improve overall performance, but you need a way to evaluate how much of a boost it brings. You need to gather a variety of data on your current Oracle performance under different conditions to make a fair comparison to Amazon RDS. Keep an eye on your high and low usage numbers, performance bottlenecks, storage requirements, and other metrics.
This information is also important for choosing the right scale of services for your Oracle databases. You don’t want to be significantly under- or over-provisioned following your migration. While scaling your resources is not difficult in the cloud, it adds extra work on top of an already complex process.
Visit Your Disaster Recovery Strategy
Disaster recovery processes for on-premises Oracle databases may use drastically different solutions than the cloud. Explore the potential changes that may need to occur in your disaster recovery technology, procedures, and policies to account for the post-migration environment.
Study Your Workload Security Requirements
How are you currently protecting your Oracle databases on-premises? How much of your data is categorized as sensitive information or otherwise subject to data regulations? What are the biggest threats facing your database workloads currently?
Answering these questions gives you greater clarity into the security measures that would benefit your databases the most in Amazon RDS. AWS offers a robust set of security features that often exceed what organizations have available on-premises, especially for smaller businesses.
Identify Current Database Points of Failure
What scenarios could result in database downtime or loss with your on-premises Oracle databases? You may be able to completely eliminate these points of failure following an Amazon RDS migration. For example, if you have all of your servers in the same data center, a local outage could cause unplanned downtime for all your systems. A cloud-based infrastructure gives you greater flexibility for distributing your databases in different locations.
Understand the Oracle to Amazon RDS Migration Risks Ahead of Time
Data migrations may fail, especially for organizations that lack technical specialists with experience in this area. Cover potential failure scenarios to see whether you can plan around these issues, or minimize the impact so the project can continue.
Get more details about the Oracle to Amazon RDS migration process. Download our white paper “Why You Should Consider an Oracle to Amazon RDS Migration.”
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How to Successfully Migrate from Oracle EBS to Microsoft Azure
So you’ve weighed your options and decided that you want to migrate Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to Microsoft Azure.
The good news is, you’re in good company. According to RightScale’s 2019 “State of the Cloud” report, 94% of companies now use cloud computing in some form or fashion. And Microsoft Azure is one of the top contenders among cloud platform companies. With high availability, hybrid flexibility, and the option to use its infrastructure, platform, or software as a service capabilities, Azure is an easy choice for companies large and small.
Now that you know what platform you’re using, it’s time to think about how to get there. To help you understand the intricacies of executing an Oracle EBS to Azure migration we’re going to do a brief review of a migration we completed for a Fortune 500 fast food chain.
The fast-food chain reached out to Datavail’s team due to our long-standing relationship as their support partner for Oracle EBS. They knew the migration would not be simple and would necessitate Datavail’s deep understanding of their EBS environment to make the project a success. Together, the teams built a Proof of Concept and found that Azure could meet the requirements of the project.
Datavail immediately brought together teams and technology to execute the planning phase in preparation for migrating the data and building the environment in Azure. The organization was running Oracle EBS 12.1.3 and needed to build two environments and four servers for EBS Financials in Azure cloud.
The second major challenge was a matter of complexity and innovation: few Oracle EBS environments have ever been migrated to Azure. It was up to the Datavail team to pave the way by applying expertise and decades of experience to find the best way to execute the migration. With Oracle EBS being one of the crucial enterprise applications for financial operations, the company relied on the system to operate predictably both during and after the migration. Performance issues, latency, and downtime needed to be kept to a minimum and the new cloud environment needed to operate as seamlessly as the on-premises one did.
To prepare for the migration, Datavail followed five important steps:
- Understand the current on-premises footprint. We created a comprehensive list of the IT environment including applications, integrations with other applications and systems, interfaces, feeds, databases, and operating systems.
- Understand the availability and performance SLAs. We designed the cutover around the uptime and downtime requirements and financial close schedules to ensure the applications would be available when necessary.
- Understand the need for software integrations. We identified the third-party applications that either needed to maintain their connection points, or be re-platformed and ported over to the cloud.
- Understand the current growth and peak utilization cycles. Our EBS experts gathered data from the peak window, super peak window, and other utilization cycles and compared them against the capabilities of the Azure VM to ensure application performance would be maintained across the year.
- Understand the security requirements. We fully educated ourselves on the security and privacy requirements of the chain so that the cloud platform would deliver exactly as their on-premises environment had.
For a complex and business-critical environment like this, the devil was in the details. The Datavail team worked with the customer applications team and third-party resources to ensure every connection point of the environment would perform as expected. Additional migration preparation steps included:
- Preparing and cleansing the data (e.g. removing scratch files and backups, or archiving and compressing large amounts of relatively small files).
- Validating data integrity by checking for corruption and usability after the migration.
- Optimizing network transfer speeds.
- Testing and confirming data flow to integrated applications.
- Preparing the data for use once it’s in the cloud.
The Azure migration was a resounding success. Oracle EBS and every backend solution was migrated to the cloud while meeting the performance requirements of interface jobs and downtime. With less than six hours of cutover time – much lower than the two-day average for an environment of this size – the applications went live in Azure.
The Fortune 500 fast food chain now has a fully-functional Oracle EBS environment running in Azure that has enabled them to reduce their infrastructure costs, give their users greater access and flexibility in the applications, and enable the business to function with greater agility.
Are these the results your organization is looking for? For more details on how we executed this Oracle EBS to Azure migration, download the full case study here. You can also reach out to our experienced Oracle EBS and Microsoft Azure team to discuss how we can help you with your migration.
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Instance Classes & Storage Options for Oracle to Azure VM Migrations
Choosing the right instance class and instance storage for your Oracle to Microsoft Azure VM migration is essential for getting the most out of your technology investment. The correct choice depends on your use case, current and future capacity requirements, and the specific Oracle workload you’re addressing.
Database Instance Classes for Your Oracle to Microsoft Azure VM Migration
When you set up Azure VM, you select a database instance class for specifications that include the virtual CPU and RAM.
Burstable B1
The most affordable instance class is the B-series. It comes with one vCPU and one GB RAM, with pricing that begins at $0.008 per hour. The ideal use cases for this option are workloads that are not typically resource intensive, but they may require burst capacity every so often. The B-series is also a good choice if you want to test Azure VM without a significant financial investment.
Compute Optimized F
Resource-heavy Oracle workloads find an excellent match with Azure VM’s F-series. When your primary focus is on getting the most compute power possible, you’ll want to use this instance class. You get access to two vCPUs based on Intel Skylake, along with 4 GB RAM, with pricing starting at $0.085 per hour.
General Purpose D
Oracle database workloads are rarely at one extreme or another when it comes to resources. When you have databases that need a good balance between CPU and RAM to accommodate a flexible range of workloads, the D-series comes into play. You get two vCPUs and 8 GB RAM with costs starting at $0.096 per hour.
Memory-Optimized E
Are you working with a lot of analytical workloads or other use cases that demand significant memory? The E-series gives you access to a massive 16 GB RAM with two vCPUs for $0.126 per hour.
Instance Storage Options for Your Oracle to Azure Migration
The storage you choose for your Azure VM instance is just as important as the database class.
Magnetic: Magnetic hard disk drives are the most affordable option, but they’re also the slowest. Use these for test environments and other Oracle database experiments.
General-purpose SSD: Solid state drives provide a good mix of performance and pricing, allowing you to use this option for a wide range of use cases.
Provisioned IOPS: Microsoft Azure VM allows you to provision IOPS based on your workload’s requirements. This storage option is excellent for your production workflows.
Get started on your cloud journey today by downloading our white paper, “Getting Your Organization Ready for Your Oracle Database to Microsoft Azure Migration.”
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