Introduction I used LastPass for several years, and it helped me a lot to access my passwords and secrets on any moment, from multiple devices, in a secure way. But to be honest, I freaked out when I heard about the last hack [1]. I changed my most important passwords, […]
Tools
Everything that is not part of the final application
How to run Jenkins with Chrome from a Docker container
In this blog I will show you how to run a Jenkins agent that can use chrome from a docker container. The Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml file are explained in this article.
Review: Greenshot, Easy tool for screenshots
Is it possible to make something simple as making a screenshot easier? Yes, I have been using the free and open-source tool Greenshot for the past year. And I noticed missing the features when I got a new Windows image on my laptop. I would recommend installing this for anyone […]
OWASP ZAP: A quick introduction to a versatile open source DAST tool
OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) is an open source dynamic application security testing (DAST) tool. It is available here and has a website with documentation here. I recently encountered it when looking for open source security test tools to embed in a CI/CD pipeline (here). I was surprised by how versatile this tool […]
Automating actions on Windows – my first steps with AutoIt
I recently spent quite some time on getting to know Playwright – a great tool for automating virtually any operation performed in a browser. Playwright is great for automating testing web applications as well as for screen scraping (for data), tactical integration, RPA, prototyping and even customizing third party applications […]
Python: A Google Translate service using Playwright
There are a lot of use-cases in which you might want to automate web-browser actions. For example to automate tedious repetitive tasks or to perform automated tests of front-end applications. There are several tools available to do this such as Selenium, Cypress and Puppeteer. Several blog posts (such as here) […]
How to dynamically Schedule EM Blackouts after PatchTuesday
In the organization I’m currently working for, the OS-patch schedule depends on PatchTuesday (PT) just as Microsoft, Adobe or Oracle are using. And PatchTuesday is, as you all know, the Second Tuesday of each month. But this is a schedule you can not set in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Scheduler. […]
ADF Performance Monitor: New Introduction Video (3:40)
Are you unable to pinpoint frustrating blind spots and recurring problems in your ADF application? This video gives a quick introduction of the features of the ADF Performance Monitor, an advanced monitor specifically designed for Oracle ADF applications.
ADF Performance Monitor: Thread Wait and Blocked Time
Last week we had a new version of the ADF Performance Monitor available – version 9.5. In this blog I will write on one of the new features; thread wait and thread blocked time of requests. Sometimes we cannot explain a poor performance, disruptions, hiccups. If we dive into the […]
Migrating an old (10.2.0.4) database to Oracle Cloud with minimal downtime
Unlike most of our posts this post will contain almost no code or examples. But it hopefully will help somebody who ends up to be in the same situation we landed on: migrating data from very old versions to a new environment. Recently we were tasked with the migration of […]
HTTP benchmarking using wrk. Parsing output to CSV or JSON using Python
wrk is a modern HTTP benchmarking tool. Using a simple CLI interface you can put simple load on HTTP services and determine latency, response times and the number of successfully processed requests. It has a LuaJIT scripting interface which provides extensibility. A distinguishing feature of wrk compared to for example ab […]
ADF Performance Monitor brings performance improvements and Insight at Intris
Intris is the leading Belgian provider of freight forwarding, customs and warehousing management solutions. Headquartered in Antwerp, Intris provides its integrated software and cloud-based solutions to logistics services providers in Belgium and the Netherlands. Ben Rombouts is Chief Operating Officer at Intris. Recently he has written a detailed review on […]
Jenkins 2.0 pipeline: Scripting active parameters for SCM
Last year I got introduced to the new features 2nd generation Jenkins at a workshop of CloudBees . This year I got also the opportunity to discover them in practice. One of the most interesting and often challenging part of working with scripted pipelines is the gap between the list of plugins supported […]
Running Spring Tool Suite and other GUI applications from a Docker container
Running an application within a Docker container helps in isolating the application from the host OS. Running GUI applications like for example an IDE from a Docker container, can be challenging. I’ll explain several of the issues you might encounter and how to solve them. For this I will use […]
ADF Performance Monitor: Monitoring with Percentiles
What is best metric in performance monitoring – averages or percentiles? Statistically speaking there are many methods to determine just how good of an overall experience your application is providing. Averages are used widely. They are easy to understand and calculate – however they can be misleading. This blog is on […]
ADF Performance Monitor – Major New Version 7.0
We are very happy to announce that a major new version 7.0 of the ADF Performance Monitor will be available from May 2018. There are many improvements and major new features. This blog describes one of the new features; on usage statistics and performance metrics of end-user click actions. A […]
ADF Performance Tuning: Avoid a Long Browser Load Time
It is not always easy to troubleshoot ADF performance problems – it is often complicated. Many parts needs to be measured, analyzed and considered. While looking for performance problems at the usual suspects (ADF application, database, network), the real problem can also be found in the often overlooked browser load […]
Change UUIDs in VirtualBox
If you are anything like me you will have multiple virtualboxes running on your system. Sometimes you might want to run a copy of a virtualbox for different purposes. Like running an Oracle 11 Devdays instance as test environment but also running the same vbox for customer testing. If you […]
6 surprising things you can do with Google search
Next the normal Google search you can use this search box for a lot more things. This search box is often the first place where you type when you want something done. Below I list 6 examples of how Google search can help you much quicker to answer a bit more complex questions. Set […]
XL Deploy: Inception of legacy processes using the rule system
My first article I wrote about controlling deployment sequence by artifact type extensions and modifications.That way, the deployment process itself was still completely left over to the capabilities within the distributed plug-ins. What happens if a legacy deployment process is very robust, tested out and trusted by the organization? On […]
Sonatype Nexus: Delete artifacts based on a selection
Sonatype Nexus provides several mechanisms to remove artifacts from the repository. You can schedule a job to keep only specified number of the latest releases (see here). You can also specifically remove a single artifact or an entire group using the API (see here). Suppose you want to make a […]
XL Deploy: Simple Case of Custom Deployment
The last couple of months I have been assigned to a project dedicated to deployment automation including several levels and types of technologies: database, middleware, services and portals. The selected deployment tool is XL Deploy from XebiaLabs. One of the main challenges was to determine the proper order of the […]
ADF Performance Monitor: Support for EJB/JPA (EclipseLink)
Not all Oracle ADF projects are built with ADF Business Components (ADF BC). Some organizations prefer to use EJB/JPA (EclipseLink) instead of ADF BC. The EclipseLink JPA provides developers with a standards based Object-Relational persistence solution. The application still reflects the Model-View-Controller architecture. In this case the model is provided by […]
ADF Performance Monitor: Measuring Network Time to Browser and Browser Load Time
Recently we added a great new feature to the ADF Performance Monitor: network and browser load time information. Now you know exactly every end-user experience of your ADF application, in real-time. You can quickly resolve any performance bottlenecks with this end-to-end visibility. You can even drill down into an individual user to […]
Sonatype Nexus: Retrieving artifacts using the REST API or Apache Ivy
– This blog post was also published on http://www.sonatype.org/ – Sonatype Nexus is an often used artifact repository. In a previous blog post I have shown an example how Maven can be used to assemble and release artifacts to Nexus. In this blog post I will describe two ways how artifacts […]
Creating Intuitive & Interactive Dashboards with the ADF Data Visualization Components
Last week I presented at the UKOUG’14 conference on creating intuitive & interactive dashboards with the ADF Data Visualization Components. Frequently end-users are overwhelmed with too much and confusing information displayed in rows and columns. It can be difficult to quickly get the relative significance. This session discussed how to create intuitive, interactive […]
The caveats of running .sql scripts with GUI tools
One of my pet peeves is people using GUI tools like Toad or SQL Developer while running release scripts on test, acceptation or production systems. Actually, pet peeves is putting it too mildly. Ive had to troubleshoot enough incidents because of this to hold a serious grudge against that careless […]
Bulk authorizing Oracle Unified Directory (OUD) users by adding them to OUD groups from the Linux/Unix Command Line
When using Oracle Unified Directory (OUD) as an identity store, it is in some occasions needed to add OUD users to OUD groups by hand. When you have to grant privileges to one user, this is easily done through the Oracle Directory Services Manager (ODSM) interface. However doing so for […]
Using Maven to assemble and release artifacts to Nexus
An important part of a release process is storing artifacts in an artifact repository. Many customers use custom implementations of artifact repositories (such as file shares in combination with custom scripts) but there are also products which offer many functions of such a repository (and probably many more) out of […]
FTPS with PL/SQL
Doing a FTP-job with PL/SQL is not difficult. A basic implementation of RFC 959 can be written in a few hundred lines. See for instance ORACLE-BASE, How to FTP with Oracle PL/SQL or Oracle FAQ’s But what if you want to secure your FTP transmission. Google doesn’t find any pure […]
Monitor Dell PERC when running on Oracle Virtual Server 3.x
In this article I will try to explain how to monitor your Dell Raid Controller with Cloud Control when running Oracle Virtual server 3.x (OVS3.x). Some time ago a physical drive broke down on one of our Dell PowerEdge Servers. Not causing any problem because it was configured in a […]
ADF Performance Monitor: Measuring Slow Network Time
Recently I was implementing the ADF Performance Monitor at a customer site and doing a detailed performance analysis. This customer had severe (and less severe) performance problems but was unable to pinpoint the exact pain points. Frequently, end-users were complaining because they were experiencing first a very good performance (response times […]
Troubleshooting ADF ViewObject Range Paging Issues
ADF BC ViewObjects provide a very valuable mechanism to page through large data sets so that a user can navigate to a specific page in the results. Range Paging fetches and caches only the current page of rows in the ViewObject row cache (at the cost of another query execution) […]
ADF Runtime Diagnostics: Instrumenting your ADF Application – Part 2
In a series of blog articles I show how you can instrument your ADF Application key actions. Instrumenting gives visibility and insight of what is happening inside the ADF application and in the ADF framework (what methods and queries are executed, when and how often). These runtime diagnostics can be very effective in […]
ADF Runtime Diagnostics: Instrumenting your ADF Application – Part 1
In a series of blog articles I will show how you can instrument your ADF Application key actions. Instrumenting gives visibility and insight of what is happening inside the ADF application and in the ADF framework (what methods and queries are executed, when and how often). These runtime diagnostics can be very effective […]
ADF Performance Monitor: Detecting and Analyzing a High ADF BC Memory Consumption
Like other web applications, Oracle ADF applications potentially use a lot of JVM memory. Many times, the root cause of a high memory usage is that application data retrieved from the database into memory is not properly limited; hundreds or thousands of rows (with too many attributes) are fetched and […]
JavaOne 2013: Java Mission Control
The convergence project between Oracle’s JVMs JRockit and Hotspot is making significant progress. Included in the latest Java 7 JDK update (‘7u40’) is a new powerful monitor tool: Java Mission Control (JMC). JMC is a production time tool that has its roots in the JRockit JVM tooling. It is located in the […]
Oracle OpenWorld & JavaOne Review bijeenkomst – 10 oktober
Op 22 september begint in San Francisco de Oracle OpenWorld: hét internationale evenement waar Oracle haar productstrategie presenteert en Oracle-specialisten ervaringen uitwisselen. Naast Oracle OpenWorld wordt ook de JavaOne georganiseerd, internationaal trefpunt voor de Java-community. AMIS heeft de traditie om uitgebreid verslag te doen van beide conferenties. Dat doen we […]
Automatic deployment .ear file to Oracle Application Server 10.1.3 (OAS) with Ant tasks
In this post I would like to share an example how to deploy an .ear file with an Ant script to the Oracle Application Server 10.1.3 (OAS). Automatic deployment can help improve the release process. First of all because manual deployment usually costs time of the developers. Especially the lead […]