There are hundreds, if not thousands, of high tech computer jobs open for those with Oracle expertise. The highly reputable and popular Oracle products are used by firms in every part of the globe. As a result, experts who can walk in the door ready to start work on Oracle and keep the applications running efficiently are in great demand.

Knowing what employers are looking for when they seek to hire for high tech Oracle computer jobs helps students or would-be students and job candidates prepare their skills. So, let’s take a look at a few of these Oracle jobs available now.

In Phoenix Arizona, for example, we found 58 Oracle related high tech computer job openings. Positions included Windows Administrator II and III, business analyst and Oracle developer, database management senior specialist for Oracle 10g, Oracle DBA and senior Oracle DBA, business applications analyst, clinical applications support, Cerner PathNet support analyst, Oracle / Java developer, and database manager, among many others.

The high tech Windows administrator computer jobs were both senior level position in a OneNeck Windows administration group. Requirements were ability to administrate a medium to large environment of Windows server without supervision. The primary focus of these positions was work on projects directed by the firm’s customer management team.

The employer seeking the business analyst and Oracle developer wants someone with high tech computer knowledge whose job skills include writing functional specifications, analysis of programming activities and excellent team and communication capabilities. The candidate for this Oracle job should have a strong technical background including business analysis. Development of Crystal reports experience is a plus as well. This employer specifies that the firm does not seek DBAs.

A senior level data base management position including 10g RAC specialization requires two years of Oracle 9g RAC experience and five years of Oracle DBA. This is not a full time permanent position, but rather a contract position for one month, with responsibility for decision making critical to the database architecture, as well as the control and deployment processes to implement and maintain 10G databases using RAC.

Oracle DBA jobs at the senior level are abundant, full time and contract. One, a six-month contract position that might be extended to as long as one year, is a three-day week job. The work will be at two locations fifty miles apart, working with data services of the firm’s clients.

A more entry-level Oracle DBA computer job is as part of a high tech team environment that supports engineering and MIS groups within the firm. This employee will focus her or his efforts on product and service support both internal and external. The specific functions of this high tech Oracle computer jobs include maintaining the database as well as its applications. Requirements include technical expertise and user interface capabilities. User support will be a part of the job tasks too. Knowledge to qualify for this Oracle job include Oracle database in a Sun environment. At least two years experience with Oracle DBA is a must.

Additionally, this employer is looking for someone with excellent communication skills, autonomy, top-notch phone skills and vendor troubleshooting capability.

To land the advertised Oracle applications business analyst position, the candidate would need experience with Oracle applications and Order management.

For the highly specialized clinical applications support job in the medical field, the candidate would need to be an registered nurse who also has clinical application support training as well as Cerner clinical applications help desk proficiency.

A global provider of business solutions and information technology is seeking a Cerner PathNet support analyst to support the clinical departments’ business needs for project execution and enhancement. Application support and maintenance is the primary job task. Problem resolution will include system functions, operations, reporting, input and output, and general operations. This analyst will install patches, install vendor fixes to problems, create ad hoc reports and extraction of data and on call troubleshooting and system support.

The person who lands this high tech Oracle computer job will have knowledge of service operations in an acute care environment, experience in clinical applications support, as well as Cerner Classic PathNet and hospital acute care experience.

Familiarity with Cerner Millennium Lab application, Oracle database tools and VMS or AIX operating systems are plusses. Strong problem solving and analytical skills as well as effective communication skills both written and verbal are required.

www.oraclejobs.com
Copyright 2007 KC Dynamics Inc

There has now emerged a situation in ERP space, as experts started prophesying that the ERP giant Oracle will have to pack its bags to give way for software entrepreneurs increasingly pushing “On-demand” or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Oracle at the recently concluded Oracle Open World has announced its well-thought strategy to counter all such threats to its existence, has adopted the path of least coercion and confrontation. Oracle resoundingly established precedence of its ERP application by extending its technology prowess to SaaS vendors. It is not quick decision making, but smart business thinking that ensures successful businesses these days. Oracle seems to have proved that.

Oracle has now teamed with Amazon and Intel to boost its cloud computing offerings through what is described now as “Cooptition” strategy where a business firm coordinates with rival firms for mutual gains in the market. Oracle for itself, finds another avenue (Amazon’s Elastic Compute Service) for license deals for some of its ERP applications; Amazon stands to gain by running Oracle’s portfolio, and there by gaining immeasurable credibility for its Cloud services. Intel also walks away as an equal gainer, by extending its technology to Oracle and its partners to run programs and store data for access by large number of users via the Internet.

Oracle has emerged from an infrastructure company focusing on databases and middleware to an applications company as of now with focus on ERP, CRM, SFA etc., Oracle could suitably counter its rivals either way – acquisitions or by cooptition. Now, Oracle faces a new threat and challenge from the fast emerging on-demand or software-as-a-service (SaaS). The process of countering the SaaS challenge adequately has begun, and Oracle is pretty sure it would sustain its hold over the ERP space.

There are many equations that are sure to influence Oracle’s global business thought and catalyze Oracle to redraw its progress and development in the ERP domain.

I. It is time consuming effort for Oracle to evolve as SaaS/Cloud player. Too expensive for Oracle to build a new SaaS based application along with the already existing and in-development ERP applications
II. At stage one, what was hinted at Oracle Open World 08, it would open- up its ERP product line for utilization by SaaS vendors. The Oracle-Amazon Cloud initiative is a beginning in this direction. For the time being Oracle’s endorsing of Cloud platforms whisperingly echo its “Customer’s interests” who may already be availing SaaS Vendor services. This brings cheers to Oracle’s vendors and customers. With customers having greater liberty to use Cloud computing platforms, and vendors freed of a significant barrier of “support and licensing” for using Oracle applications on the cloud, which now stand to be removed.
III. Oracle has its graded and phased strategy well in place it has countered many a challenge successfully in the past, and will do so even at the face of SaaS. Next stage of Oracle’s strategy in countering SaaS challenge will be to safeguard the interests of its shareholders, by buying-off progressing and well-off SaaS vendors. So, all well, ends well. It will be a win-win game for Oracle, vendors and customers.
IV. But certain serious issues remain to be addressed. Oracle’s business strategists have to decide on how much to spend on what? Should current applications (non-SaaS based) be given precedence over new applications (SaaS based)? Oracle’s leadership was suggestive, saying that certain investments in the next five years may not yield substantial revenues. Oracle seems to be left with no choice by resorting to its acquisitions strategy, to early negate a sizable impact on its revenues.

Possibly pertinent is the pressure mounting on Oracle, which will keep it on its toes, and forcing it to think of every possible way to survive and keep itself ahead of its competitors. More fundamental issues that have been chronic to its ERP applications, the high costs of implementation and the long time durations to take off, unless addressed effectively by Oracle and its partners, the SaaS challenge is sure to emerge as a threat and question the very existence of the Enterprise giant.

Sanjay Nannaparaju

Accessing Data of Non-Oracle Databases from Oracle

Introduction:

This document gives an overview of the Heterogeneous connections and the steps for configuration to access the data of non-oracle databases from Oracle database environment.

ACCESSING NON-ORACLE DATABASES FROM ORACLE

There may be some requirements to access the Data residing in different flavors of Databases like MS-SQL, Access, and Sybase from the Oracle database. This can be achieved with the help of creating Heterogeneous Services to connect to non-oracle flavors of the database and also integrate the data residing in them. The HS (Heterogeneous Services) is created with the help of the ODBC drivers for that particular flavor of the database (e.g. For MS-Access we need MS driver for Access). Generic Connectivity is implemented by using a Heterogeneous Services ODBC agent. An ODBC agent is included as part of the Oracle system and is installed in the same ORACLE_HOME and resides in the folder HS.

The following steps needs to be performed in order to configure a Heterogeneous connection in the Oracle Database:

1. Preparing the Non-oracle environment from where in the data needs to be integrated into the Oracle database.

2. Creation of the ODBC connection.
3. Test the ODBC drivers to ensure that connectivity is made to the non-Oracle database.
4. Ensure the Global_names parameter in Oracle database is set to False.
5. Configure the Heterogeneous services. This is done with the help of creating an initodbc.ora.

 7. Modify the Listener.ora and the TNSNAMES.ORA file so that to connect to the Database.

 8. Restart the Listener or START the listener if a new one has been created specific for the new connection.
9. Creation of the Database Link to connect to the HS connection.

10. Test the connection using thee DB Link.

Let us see the above steps in a brief fashion. Here we can consider of having a MS-Access Database from where in the data needs to be accessed into Oracle database:

Create the MS-Access database or copy the same to the local server where in the Database is hosted.
Create the ODBC connection. This can be done as follows:

Click on START à Control Panel à Administrative Tools and then open Data Sources (ODBC)

Click on the SYSTEM DSN Tab and then click on the ADD button.

Select Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb) and then click on FINISH.

After that, enter the Data source name using which you would like to connect to the MS-Access Database (here in our case it’s ChryslerMDB). Also, select the MS-Access file by clicking on SELECT button and then click on OK to complete the configuration.

Check for the connectivity and confirm whether the ODBC connection is working fine.
Once this is done, Check for the GLOBAL_NAMES parameter in the Oracle database and make sure that it is FALSE. The following query can be used for the same :

********************************************************************************

SQL> select name,value from v$parameter where name like ‘global_names%’;

NAME

—————————————————————-

VALUE

—————————————————————————-

global_names

FALSE

SQL>

*******************************************************************************

Once this is done, we need to create the INIT.ORA file for the HSODBC connection that needs to be created. This needs to be done in %ORACLE_HOME%\ oracle\ora92\hs\admin folder. (In UNIX, it will be $ ORACLE_HOME\ oracle\ora92\hs\admin). Create a file saying init<sid for non-oracle database>.ora file with the following contents : In our case the file should be named as initchryslermdb.ora

HS_FDS_CONNECT_INFO = chryslermdb

HS_FDS_TRACE_LEVEL = 0

In the above chryslermdb id the non-oracle database connection string or the DSN name that we created in Step 2.

Once this is done, the next step is to update the Listener.ORA file. We can use the same listener that is been used by the database to access the ODBC connection or a different one can also be configured. Here we will create a new listener for the ODBC connection.

Edit the Listener.ora file in ORACLE_HOME\ora92\network\admin folder and add the  following entries :

LISTENER_MSACCESS =

  (DESCRIPTION_LIST =

    (DESCRIPTION =

      (ADDRESS_LIST =

        (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = <HOST NAME>)(PORT = 1522))

      )

    )

  )

SID_LIST_LISTENER_MSACCESS =

  (SID_LIST =

    (SID_DESC =

          (SID_NAME = PLSExtProc)

          (ORACLE_HOME = C:\oracle\ora92)

          (PROGRAM = extproc)

        )

        (SID_DESC =

              (ORACLE_HOME = C:\oracle\ora92)

              (SID_NAME = chryslermdb)

              (PROGRAM = HSODBC)

    )

  )

In the above SID_NAME ChryslerMDB is the SID name that we have given for non-oracle database (e.g. MS-ACCESS or MS-SQL). Once this is done start the Listener by executing the following command at the command line .

C:\Documents and Settings\impactadm\Desktop>lsnrctl start listener_msaccess

LSNRCTL for 32-bit Windows: Version 9.2.0.7 – Production on 15-AUG-2007 13

55

(c) Copyright 1998 Oracle Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Starting tnslsnr: please wait…

Then the following message will be seen :

STATUS of the LISTENER

————————

Alias                     listener_msaccess

Version                   TNSLSNR for 32-bit Windows: Version 9.2.0.7 – Pr

tion

Start Date                15-AUG-2007 13:05:56

Uptime                    0 days 0 hr. 0 min. 0 sec

Trace Level               off

Security                  OFF

SNMP                      OFF

Listener Parameter File   C:\oracle\ora92\network\admin \listener.ora

Listener Log File         C:\oracle\ora92\network\log\listener_msaccess.log

Services Summary…

  DEV           has 1 service handler(s)

  IMPACT02              has 1 service handler(s)

  IMPORT_access         has 1 service handler(s)

  PLSExtProc            has 1 service handler(s)

The command completed successfully

C:\Documents and Settings\impactadm\Desktop>

Note : If you are using the same listener, then just execute lsnrctl reload command at the command prompt. In case of windows machines, you can just go to SERVICES and restart the listener.

7. The next step is to update the TNSNAMES.ORA file.

Update the TNSNAMES.ORA file with the entries similar to the following :

#ACCESS DB for Chrysler

Chryslermdb.world =

  (DESCRIPTION =

    (ADDRESS_LIST =

        (ADDRESS =

          (COMMUNITY = tcp.world)

          (PROTOCOL = TCP)

          (Host = <hostname>)

          (Port = 1522)

          )

    )

    (CONNECT_DATA = (service_name = chryslermdb)

    )

   (HS=ok)

  )

Once the entire configuration is done, check the connectivity by doing a tnsping command.
The next step is to create a Database link to this ODBC connection. This can be done by as follows:

Login to the database and execute the following query :

CREATE DATABASE LINK TEST1 CONNECT USING ‘CHRYSLERMDB.WORLD’;

Here TEST1 is the DB Link name and CHRYSLERMDB.WORLD is the name of the DSN entry in the TNSNAMES.ORA file.

Once this is done, we can do any operations on the Non-oracle database by executing the commands from Oracle database. For e.g.

SELECT * FROM DUAL@TEST1;

Note : We have to make sure that the SID name in the TNSNAMES.ORA and LISTENER.ORA and the one in the USING clause of the Create Database Link matches, otherwise we will not be able to connect to the database and will get some errors.  Also, the init.ora file at the %ORACLE_HOME%\ oracle\ora92\hs\admin should be created with the correct SID failing which will lead to errors.

*****************************************************************************************

Voting disk is a file that manages information about node membership.
It is located on the shared cluster system or a shared raw device file.
Its primary purpose is to help in a situation where the private network communication fails.

CSS (Cluster Synchronization Service) is the service that determines which nodes in the cluster are available via communication through a dedicated private network and with a voting disk used as a secondary communication mechanism. CSS service is sending heartbeat messages through network and voting disk.

In a situation, when due to private network failure, nodes are not able to synchronize I/O to the shared disks, Therefore some of the nodes will be go to offline stage. At this time VOTING DISK used to communicate the node and trace information, which nodes is in offline stage.

Without the voting disk, it’s difficult to know, whether nodes are facing network problem or nodes are no longer available.

If we are not using voting disk, then due to network failure, nodes are neither able to communicate with each other nor synchronize with database, this situation is called as cluster SPLIT-BRAIN problem.

When any node is not able to send heartbeat to voting disk, then it will reboot itself.
To list currently configured voting disk

Go to $ORA_CRS_HOME/bin directory

[oracle@rac1 bin]$ ./crsctl query css votedisk

0. 0 /apps/oracle/oradata/votingdisk

located 1 votedisk(s).

Backup voting disk :

Run the following command to back up a voting disk. Perform this operation on every voting disk as needed where voting_disk_name is the name of the active voting disk and backup_file_name is the name of the file to which you want to back up the voting disk contents:

dd if=voting_disk_name of=backup_file_name

[oracle@rac1 bin]$ dd if=/apps/oracle/oradata/votingdisk of=/home/oracle/vote/vote.dmp bs=4k

1309289+1 records in

1309289+1 records out

( vote.dmp is the name of backup file of voting disk)

Recovering Voting Disks

Run the following command to recover a voting disk where backup_file_name is the name of the voting disk backup file and voting_disk_name is the name of the active voting disk:

dd if=backup_file_name of=voting_disk_name

[oracle@rac1 bin]$ dd if=/home/oracle/vote/vote.dmp of=/apps/oracle/oradata/votingdisk bs=4k

1309289+1 records in

1309289+1 records out

Management of voting disk:

If you have multiple voting disks, then you can remove the voting disks and add them back into your environment using the crsctl delete css votedisk path and crsctl add css votedisk path commands respectively, where path is the complete path of the location on which the voting disk resides.

Changing the Voting Disk Configuration after Installing Real Application Clusters

You can dynamically add and remove voting disks after installing Real Application Clusters.Run the following command as the root user to add a voting disk:

crsctl add css path

Run the following command as the root user to remove a voting disk:

crsctl delete css votedisk

Note: If oracle clusterware is down on all nodes, then use –force option.

#crsctl add css votedisk -force

#crsctl delete css votedisk -force