Texas Technocrat

LINUX to Windows Project

Our DBA transferred this past summer and I found myself performing the unexpected role as interim DBA. We were in the middle of converting our Oracle Applications suite from Windows to Oracle Enterprise LINUX. Luckily, we has a great consultant to do all of the heavy lifting. The project was a success but we have had a few minor bumps along the way. Anyone that has worked with both Windows and LINUX will know what the major issues will be. I was planning to develop this topic as a presentation to an Oracle User’s Group but the lack of Oracle/Windows organizations does not make this topic popular.

The three major areas that required effort were interfaces, printers and security. I will cover each of these areas in future posts.

Overall, the project was a success and we have only had one outage since our October 2011 conversion date. I am a strong Microsoft advocate but I believe this was defiantly the right move. I don’t believe that Oracle or Microsoft was to blame for the instability but it was the interaction of the two. I would compare this phenomenon to a bad drug interaction. Specific drugs behave differently if combined with one another. We experienced a similar issue when we tried to run Oracle on Windows.

Vertex Converison from Windows to LINUX

 

The Oracle Applications conversion from Windows to LINUX is still moving along, a bit slower than anyone anticipated. There are three main issues that remain to be fixed. Actually, make that two remaining issues. We were able to fix the Vertex tax issue. Vertex is a tax engine that is an integral part of Oracle Payroll. This is not a major issue for a school district since our employees typically live in a small geographic area. However, Oracle Payroll must have these tables in order to work correctly. The primary Oracle support note for Quantum/Vertex is 224273.1. Our migration DBA ran into issues when installing the patch. He fixed the patch with a combination of upgrading to 11.2.0.2, applied two database patches (10149223 and 10229719) and re-ran the adctxprv.sql script. The SGA was apparently too large as well, this one seems a bit strange to me. But the product installed and that hurdle was overcome.

The next issue we ran into involved the configuration. I suspect that few Oracle shops are on Windows so speicifc conversion issues are not usally documented. By reviewing the Vertex stack on Windows and LINUX, it appeared that Windows placed its execution code in %PAY_TOP%\vendor\quantum\utils while LINUX placed the code in a differnt folder: $PAY_TOP/vendor/quantum/lib. The Vertex stack of folders was archived and moved becuase the concurrent program Quantum Program Update does not update the existing Vertex/Quantum folders. Once the folders were clean, the program worked its magic. I was able to run the Quantum Data Update with June 2011 tax information. Our Payroll Analyst confirmed that everything was working fine by executing a successful Payroll run.

We have two remaining issues: RightFax and check printing through AcuPrint.