SmartThinking || February 2017

SmartThinking || February 2017 Newsletter

Message from Wade

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It’s February — Right?  It’s hard to believe we have been outside running in shorts this month. Talk about things being different, is it global warming, is it just a weather quirk? Funny thing is I remember as a kid playing soccer in shorts in February at elementary school, so maybe, its nothing more than a warm weather pattern right now.
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So that leads to this months question. Are you identifying the patterns of today for your business and changing to meet those patterns or are you working with patterns of yesterday? Technology is changing so fast today if you are still working with plans that were laid out 5 or 10 years ago you are fast approaching a decision point that could be costly for you and your organization.

A good example is this months article about the little problem at Amazon this week. Some may think that problems in the cloud is a reason not to move to the cloud, however, ask yourself this, if your organization had a major hardware failure how would that impact your business? How long would your business be disrupted? Could you recover?  Not sure how to even answer?  Maybe you should Ask The Panda.

 

PeopleSoft – Some Users unable to open some pages

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PeopleSoft – Some Users unable to open some pages

PeopleSoft – PSAPPSRV crash when some users try opening some pages

PeopleSoft – Personalization Corruptions

Not really too sure what title to use on this one.  One of my users started to report a problem that only she could replicate.  Every other user was able to login and navigate and open the page in question. We ended up cloning the user and the clone user had no issue opening the page.  Trace actually did not show the problem, but with a little creativity I was able to find the following case on MOS:

E-PIA: When A User navigate to some application pages, the Application Server Crash with Unrecoverable Exception Error. However, a Cloned User will work correctly (Doc ID 2033430.1)

The gift of the story turned out that the user had changed their personalizations or the personalizations had become corrupt. So I executed the following SQL:

DELETE FROM PSUSEROBJTYPE WHERE OPRID = ‘{PROBLEMUSER}’ AND MENUNAME = ‘CREATE_PAYMENTS’ AND PNLGRPNAME = ‘PYCYCL_DATA_INQ’;

You can delete all the personalizations for the problem user, but if you know the menu and component name you can isolate the specific personalization that is causing the problem. In this cause it was the Accounts Payable Pay Cycle Management Details Inquiry that was causing the one user all the issues.

SmartThinking || January 2017

SmartThinking || January 2017 Newsletter

Message from Wade

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Finally! The newsletter is back. 2016 was an absolutely off the hook year. Things started off with going back on the road to help a major client get re-focused on implementing a huge ERP system which went live in October! Throughout the year, we helped many clients manage their systems with architecture reviews, migrations to the cloud, managed hosting solutions, maintenance (oh, the joy of PUM), upgrades in the lab and on-premise, and a slew of other items (even workflow) that when put together produced the best year ever for us and made many clients extremely happy. Do you need some help getting refocused? Click To ReFocus!

Last year, the new business OurOnline.Company was extremely well received, with hundreds of customers using the excellent domain management services, web hosting, email services, and custom hosting solutions. If you are tired of feeling lost in the world of the big providers with crazy weird fees, limited unlimited this or that, fast speeds that aren’t fast, or you just can’t shake that feeling that you aren’t getting good value for your money — It’s time to “Own Your Web” and get with a trusted organization that will work with you. Click If It’s Time!

 

Oracle 12c – TableSpace Maintenance

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Normally, I don’t get to worried about the size of TableSpaces, as they grow and shrink all the time. However, recently while setting up some automation scripts I was having problems with multiple databases being on the same server due to space issues.  So I decided it was time to take a review of the table spaces and see if there was some that I could easily do some quick maintenance to so that I could free up some space.

As always I found some guide examples out there using good old google.  The main item that I found that I could easily and quickly adjust was the undo tablespace.  Since  these scripts were for refreshing the environment and these environments are used by a very small subset of people, have a 32gb undo tablespace seemed a wee-bit excessive. So after the database clone is done I execute the following commands:

CREATE UNDO TABLESPACE undotbs2 DATAFILE ‘/u01/oracle/mynewdatabase/datafiles/undotbs02.dbf’ SIZE 2G AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 250M;
ALTER SYSTEM SET UNDO_TABLESPACE=undotbs2;
DROP TABLESPACE undotbs1 INCLUDING CONTENTS AND DATAFILES;

After a stop and restart of the database 30 gigabytes of space are instantly reclaimed. So for 3 databases that is almost 100gb of dead space that is now free!

I also found a excellent bit of SQL for Oracle to show usage of the tablespace from Oracle-Base:Smart Panda - Idea

SELECT tablespace_name, size_mb, free_mb, max_size_mb, max_free_mb, TRUNC((max_free_mb/max_size_mb) * 100) AS free_pct,
RPAD(' '|| RPAD('X',ROUND((max_size_mb-max_free_mb)/max_size_mb*10,0), 'X'),11,'-') AS used_pct
FROM (SELECT a.tablespace_name, b.size_mb, a.free_mb, b.max_size_mb,a.free_mb + (b.max_size_mb - b.size_mb) AS max_free_mb
FROM (SELECT tablespace_name, TRUNC(SUM(bytes)/1024/1024) AS free_mb
FROM dba_free_space GROUP BY tablespace_name) a, (SELECT tablespace_name,
TRUNC(SUM(bytes)/1024/1024) AS size_mb,
TRUNC(SUM(GREATEST(bytes,maxbytes))/1024/1024) AS max_size_mb
FROM dba_data_files GROUP BY tablespace_name) b WHERE a.tablespace_name = b.tablespace_name ) ORDER BY tablespace_name;

For Temporary Tablespaces:

Maintenance on Temporary Tablespaces is a little easier than working with regular table spaces, you can use the following to easily shrink a temporary space:

ALTER TABLESPACE temp SHRINK SPACE KEEP 40M;

or:

ALTER TABLESPACE temp SHRINK TEMPFILE ‘/u01/oracle/mynewdatabase/datafiles/temp01.dbf’ KEEP 40M;

If you don’t specify a KEEP option it while shrink to the smallest possible size it can.

For Regular Tablespaces

I am simply going to refer to guide I was using from Oracle-Base.  There are many ways to do maintenance on these tablespaces, and since I was looking for quick and simple ideas, the temporary and undo tablespace shrink was by far the easiest to do, but it is always a good strategy to do tablespace maintenance.

Panda + Community Year in Review 2016

Panda + Community Year in Review 2016

What a truly amazing year 2016 turned out to be. One of the main reasons for this was we gave back. In all the business coaching over the years, the most successful people/groups all give back in some way. Simple enough concept, but this past year we stepped it up, and not surprisingly the success that followed has produced outstanding results.  Here are just a few things that were done:

  • Rotary Foundation – Paul Harris +1 & +2 – Helping Communities through the Annual Fund & Polio Plus
  • Animal Aide – 2 Years worth of Rent for its Thrift Store.
  • MS Bike Ride – London to/from Grandbend – Team Butt Ugly raised over $35,000 to end MS.
  • Christmas Care St Thomas – Provided 5,000 lbs of Apples for the Christmas Hampers.
  • Helped Local Hospital Raise over $60,000 at its annual gala.
  • Provided hundreds of meals at local missions and through financial support.
  • Supported The Canadian Wildlife Federation & World Wildlife Fund.
  • Title Sponsorship of Big Brothers Big Sisters St Thomas Elgin – providing mentoring opportunities for amazing kids.
  • Worked on several projects with St Thomas Railway City Rotary Club.
  • Worked on several projects with Christmas Care St Thomas.
  • Support of Local Legion, Salvation Army and Local Hockey.

2016 has been a huge year for us in the community.  Seeing the smiles on families and kids faces is such a reward. The impact of even the smallest thing is sometimes hard to quantify, and it’s amazing knowing that The Smart Panda Team is out there making a difference. We are really excited about working with our Local Big Brothers Big Sisters program again this year, and setting up a program with our new local STEAM center.

For Rotary 2017, in May we have the Rotary District Conference being hosted by our Rotary Club, it will be a fantastic opportunity to show off our community to all the members of Rotary District 6330. In June a large group of us are heading to Atlanta Georgia to attend the Rotary International Conference.  Combine that with Wade being Rotary President of the Railway City Rotary Club starting in July, it is going to be exciting year working with Rotary!

All the best in ’17.

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