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Oracle University Podcast

Podcast Oracle University Podcast
Oracle Corporation
Oracle University Podcast delivers convenient, foundational training on popular Oracle technologies such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Java, Autonomous Databa...
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  • Best of 2024: Preparing to Extend Oracle Fusion Apps Using Visual Builder Studio
    What do you need to start customizing the next generation of Oracle Fusion Apps? How do you create new pages for business processes? What level of expertise do you require for this?   Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham as they get answers to all these questions and more from Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald.   Survey: https://customersurveys.oracle.com/ords/surveys/t/oracle-university-gtm/survey?k=focus-group-2-link-share-5   Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/develop-fusion-applications-using-visual-builder-studio/138392/   Build Visual Applications Using Oracle Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/build-visual-applications-using-oracle-visual-builder-studio/137749/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Lois: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services. Nikita: Hi there! You’re listening to our Best of 2024 series, where over the next few weeks, we’ll be revisiting four of our most popular episodes of the year. Lois: Today’s episode is #2 of 4, and we’re throwing it back to another episode with our friend and Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald. This episode is all about extending Oracle Cloud Applications that are being built using Visual Builder for the front-end. 01:04 Nikita: Right, Lois. We began by asking Joe to explain what’s happening with the redesign and re-architecture of Oracle Cloud Applications using Visual Builder Studio, or VBS.  Joe: That’s right, Niki. Oracle is redesigning and rebuilding its entire suite of Fusion Cloud Applications, over 330 different products, utilizing over 60,000 engineers — that is “60,” not “16”—at Oracle to develop the next generation of Oracle Fusion Applications. What’s most exciting is that the same tools the engineers are using to accomplish this are available to our partners and our customers to use to extend the functionality and capabilities of Fusion Applications to meet their custom needs and processes.  01:45 Lois: That’s pretty awesome! We want to use this time today to ask you about extensions, the types of extensions you can create, and how to use Visual Builder Studio to create those extensions. Nikita: Yeah, can we start with you telling us what an extension is? I’ve gotten the sense that Oracle uses the term extension as both a noun and a verb and that’s a bit confusing to me. Joe: Yeah, good catch, Niki. Yes, Oracle does use the term extension in two ways: both as a noun and a verb. As a noun, an extension is a container for the code changes that you make to your applications. Basically, it’s a Git repository that Oracle creates and manages for you. So, the extension container holds the code changes you make to your page layouts: the fields, their positioning, showing and hiding fields, that sort of thing, as well as page functionality. These code changes you make are stored in the extension and it is this extension with your code changes that is merged with the main Git branch eventually and then deployed using continuous integration/continuous deployment jobs defined in Visual Builder Studio, which manages the project and its assets. Your extension is a Git branch that is an asset of the project. Once your extension code is merged with the main branch and deployed, then the next time someone brings up the application, they’ll see the changes you’ve made in the app. 02:59 Lois: And as a verb? Joe: As a verb, extension means to extend the functionality and the look and feel of the application, though I prefer the term customization or configuration to describe this aspect, as the documentation does, and to avoid confusion, though I’ll admit I’m not always consistent about the terms I use. 03:16 Lois: What types of customizations, or extensions, and I’m using the verb now, are available for Fusion Apps in Visual Builder Studio? Joe: There are three different ways Fusion Apps can be customized effectively, configured, or extended. The first way is what we call a basic extension, where you’re rearranging hiding, or showing, or moving around fields and sections on the page that have been set up to be extendable by the Fusion Application development teams. Things like hiding fields, showing fields, hiding sections, showing sections…  03:45 Nikita: So fairly basic actions… Joe: Yeah exactly and they can be done in Visual Builder Studio Designer by people with minimal VB training, Visual Builder training. And, most recently, if you have access to it, you can do it in the new Express mode, where the page shows you just those things you can work with and just the tools you need to work with the page. This is new and makes it much easier for folks who are not highly technical to make basic changes to the page layout. 04:09 Lois: People like me! That sounds easy enough. Joe: And the next type of extension is more of an intermediate change and requires some training with Visual Builder Studio because you’re creating rules that govern the display of layouts based on certain conditions on the page. These are highly flexible, powerful, and useful for creating customized page layouts based on a variety of factors from page size and orientation to the role of the person using it to values in the actual fields on the page itself. These rules can be combined to create complex rule-based conditions that display exactly what the user should see, given the conditions of the page and their role. I would also include making changes to action chains, which execute sequences of behaviors and navigation, and the actual structure of the application, but this is more advanced.  Lastly, is creating mashup applications, which are stand-alone Visual Builder visual applications, which use data from Fusion apps, and customer data sources, like their own database tables, and potentially third-party APIs to create brand new pages and applications with new functionality, new processes, new procedures, new displays, all of which look just like Fusion Applications and use the same data as Fusion applications. 05:18 Lois: Joe, how do I get started if I want to extend a page?  Joe: The easiest way to do it is to open a page in Fusion Applications and then select Edit Page in Visual Builder Studio from the Profile menu. You’re then prompted for a project to hold the Git repository for the extension container. And since there’s probably already one that exists, after you select the project, an extension Git container is assigned to you. Unless this is the very first time the application has been extended in which case it creates an extension for you. When creating customizations or configurations, we recommend that each application be done in its own separate project. So, for example, if you’re working on Customer Experience Sales, you might do it in Project A and if you’re working on extensions with HCM, you might do it in Project B. And if you decide to create your own pages and flows in your own app, you might do that in Project C.  06:04 Nikita: But why do you need to do this? Joe: That’s just to keep things nice and separate and organized. The tool, Visual Builder Studio, doesn’t really care, but it makes for cleaner development and can help with the management of the development teams. 06:14 Nikita: Ok, Joe, I have a question. How do I know if the page I’m on in Fusion Apps can be edited in Visual Builder? I know there are a lot of legacy pages still out there and they can co-exist with the new VB-based pages. Joe: If the URL of the page you’re on has the word /Redwood in it instead of /faces, then you know this is a page that was created using Visual Builder Studio and you’ll be able to extend it and make changes to it using the Edit in Visual Builder Studio option. So, if you select Edit in Visual Builder Studio, then the page you are on opens inside Visual Builder Studio Designer and you can make changes to any part of the page that has been explicitly enabled for extension by the development team. 06:53 Lois: That’s an important part, right? The application is not extendable by default.  Joe: That’s right, Lois. It is all locked down and you can’t make any changes to it by default. The development team must specifically enable certain parts of the page: sections, fields, layouts, variables, types, action chains, etc. as extendable for you to be able to make changes to it. This ensures the changes the development team makes to the application in the future won’t break your extensions. And conversely, the development team can choose to not extend portions that they do not want you to touch or mess with. Then if they do change that bit of the app in the future, it won’t break the application and you won’t get a big surprise. So, using the Edit page in Visual Builder Studio, you can make both basic changes, like moving, showing, and hiding fields and sections, as well as the more intermediate types of configurations, like using dynamic components to create rule-based layouts that change dynamically based on several conditions such as page size, roles of the user, and field values on the page itself. 07:51 Nikita: What happens if two developers make changes and essentially overwrite each other’s customizations — say one hides a field and another later exposes it? Joe: Well, whoever commits their changes and deploys last wins. The other developer’s changes get overwritten. So, this is something the team would want to consider carefully. It is possible to roll back to an earlier version if one must. And this can be done in Visual Builder Studio — the part that manages project assets like Git repositories. And there are Oracle blog posts about how to do that if you’re interested in learning more. 08:20 Lois: Joe, earlier you mentioned creating new pages and flows, but so far you’ve only talked about modifying existing extendable pages. How do I create new pages and flows? Joe: In a Visual Builder extension, a set of pages and flows is called an App UI. When I use the terms pages and flows, what I’m talking about is a set of pages that are logically related—whatever logical means to the designer and developer—in a group called a flow that you can navigate between. But you can also navigate between flows and even between applications. So, without getting too technical, each application has a default flow, which has a default page where that flow starts when the app first comes up. So, you can think of an App UI as a collection of flows and their pages, and a URL that accesses the default flow and its default page. That’s the page you would see first when accessing that URL. Of course, this can be configured and changed by the developer, as needed. Now, when Oracle creates the original application (for example, digital sales, helpdesk, or something like that), we create an App UI, which contains the pages and flows for that application and is the “entry point” into the app, accessing that App UI’s default flow and its default page and then things flow on from there. Partners and customers can create their own application extensions that are dependent on an Oracle application and even create their own App UI – their own sets of pages and flows to accommodate their own processing and workflow needs. This gives them the ability to add their own processes and rules, and still leverage and navigate to the core application that Oracle built. For example, say Oracle delivered digital sales as an Oracle Cloud Application built using Visual Builder to a customer and the customer needs to add a few pages to do some validation or other type of business processing before entering the digital sales application. What the customer does, in this case, is create a new extension of the Oracle Digital Sales app and an App UI of their own, which would be the set of pages and flows that contain the processing they want to start with before then navigating into the digital sales app to use Oracle’s application. 10:22 Nikita: Wait, did I hear that correctly? We’re creating an extension of an extension or creating an extension on an existing extension? Joe: I know, right? I realize this can sound confusing the first time you hear it or the second time or even the third time. It took me a while to get my head around what they’re talking about. Let’s start with a Fusion application. In a Fusion application, everything is an extension of something. This is just how the code base and the architecture are organized and how they manage the Git repositories and the code base itself. So, Oracle created a base application called the Unified App. The Unified Application contains the basic page structure and common functionality needed for all applications. For example, it contains the header at the top that has the profile and the footer at the bottom of the page that has that little Ask Oracle icon. Within that page, between the header and the footer, are the pages that are created by the developers, whether they be Oracle engineers or partners or customers. They display the contents of the page with the data and the layouts and all of that. In a sense, you can think of the Unified App as an index page, the starting page of the web application. Though that’s not completely true technically, it’s good enough for illustrative purposes. So, Oracle starts with the Unified App and then a development team extends that Unified App to build their product. This is how digital sales did it. This is how customer experience did it. This is how helpdesk did it. They start with the Unified App and they extend that and create an App UI that contains the flows and pages for their specific application, and then add functionality for all the pages and flows, as needed for the design. Partners and customers can then create a new extension that extends the Oracle Application and add their own App UI and their own URL if they want their pages accessed first, before navigating to the Oracle application. For example, if the digital sales application has functionality you’d like to leverage, like it has data services or fragments or page layouts that you want to reuse or other things, you extend the digital sales application, and this extension holds your code changes. You could then create a new App UI, and once deployed, users can use that URL for the new App UI to access your new pages. And your page can then navigate to the Oracle app when it needs to. Though I will say to date, we’re really not seeing much demand for this particular use case, but it is possible. 12:33 Lois: Is that the only option available to customers and partners—to extend an existing Oracle application? Joe: No, Lois. We’re seeing customers and partners create brand new Fusion applications of their own, based on the Unified App Oracle created. In a sense, doing the same thing that our development teams here are doing.  Remember, I said an Oracle development team starts with the Unified App, which has common functionality and look and feel for all applications, and then extends that to add business rules processing, flows, App UI, whatever they need for their specific Oracle application. We’re seeing our partners and customers wanting to build their own applications. Maybe a customer or partner wants to create a Time & Expense application and leverage the Fusion application data and the APIs available, but define their own flows, their own pages, their own processing. This is very easy to do. They’d start by extending the Unified App just like the Oracle development teams do, and then build their own App UI and within that, their own flows, pages, and custom processing. The nice thing about it is that the application looks and works and feels just like a Fusion application and it appears alongside other Fusion applications, because it is a Fusion application. 13:43 Did you know that the Oracle University Learning Community regularly holds live events hosted by Oracle expert instructors. Find out how to prepare for your certification exams. Learn about the latest technology advances and features. Ask questions in real time and learn from an Oracle subject matter expert. From Ask Me Anything about certification to Ask the Instructor coaching sessions, you’ll be able to achieve your learning goals for 2024 in no time. Join a live event today and witness firsthand the transformative power of the Oracle University Learning Community. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started.  14:24 Nikita: Welcome back! So Joe, it sounds like there are two different paths or life cycles to create extensions for future applications in Visual Builder Studio. Is that correct? Joe: Yes, exactly. So one path to extending the functionality of Fusion apps is to edit the page in Visual Builder Studio, which opens the page in Visual Builder Designer, and you then make changes to the existing pages, depending on what the development team has made extendable.  14:49 Nikita: But you can’t create new pages and flows in this scenario, right? Joe: This is strictly about modifying an existing page. The other path is creating a new application extension, which is a new application from scratch or extending an existing Oracle application or even an existing partner or customer application. Again, we’re not seeing this typically being done too much. Most partners and customers create new applications or make customizations to existing pages. But the architecture does support it. So, your partner might create a new application based on the production app released by Oracle, and you could extend their application. Or a development team at your site could extend Oracle’s application and you could then extend that team’s application. This is mechanically possible, although I question the use case behind that. Usually, we see our apps being extended – becoming a dependency when there’s code that can be leveraged or reused for a new app and its new App UI. 15:40 Lois: Joe, what did you mean when you say one extension is a dependency of another? Can you talk a bit about dependencies, what that means, how it looks to the developer? Joe: When you extend an application, it becomes a dependency to your application, and you get access to all the resources within that dependency that are marked as extendable by the developer who created that extension. Most useful are things like service connections to REST APIs from Fusion apps data sources, reusable code fragments, and layouts that you can leverage in those cases where you want to create a new App UI. When an extension is listed as a dependency, you’ll see this graphically in Visual Builder Studio Designer. When you see an extension listed as a dependency, it means you can reference any of that extension’s resources that have been marked extendable by the developer. Recall all resources are closed off or hidden by default, but development teams can mark resources as open to being extended and reused, and then you can see and use those resources. So, you can easily add and remove extensions as dependencies in Visual Builder Designer as needed. Now, this can be a nice way to modularize and reuse your resources and assets. To summarize: I can modify an existing page – this is most common, extend an existing application and create a new App UI, which is not common, or I can extend the unified app to create a new app and a new App UI and add other extensions as dependences, as needed, to leverage their services, fragments, and layouts when building my own pages – this is pretty common as well. 17:04 Nikita: There’s one thing I’d like to come back to, Joe. You mentioned something called a mashup application earlier. Can you tell us a little more about that? Joe: To recap: I mentioned a couple of different ways that you can extend Fusion applications. One is changing layouts or creating rule-based layouts. You can also extend existing apps and create your own App UI on top of them or create your own Fusion app from scratch. But these are Fusion apps and they have restrictions.  These can only run within the Fusion applications ecosystem, which means they can only be accessed by people who are registered in the Fusion application ecosystem, and there are some other restrictions (for example, in terms of the APIs you can access). And you also have no access to customer data tables. Mashup applications use the stand-alone Visual Builder Cloud Service, which enables you to create custom visual applications. These are visual applications that run outside the Fusion apps ecosystem. Users only need to be identified to the Identity Cloud Service, IDCS, and then they can get access to these mashup apps, depending on the roles and privileges given to them, of course. These mashup applications can access Fusion apps API data, as well as customer database tables, Excel spreadsheet data, CSV files, and third-party APIs. And all this data can appear on the same page, in the same app, using the same Redwood components, so they look and work just like Fusion applications. 18:22 Lois: I know in the past there’s been some friction to making changes in Fusion applications. Partner and customer developers use different tools than the ones Oracle engineers use and there have been some deployment issues. To wrap up things, can you tell us why customers should use Visual Builder Studio to customize Fusion apps? Joe: Glad to, Lois. The big benefit to customers is that they are using the exact same tools, Visual Builder Designer for page design work and Visual Builder Studio for project and code management, to build the customizations and extensions that Oracle is using to create the applications and extensions that are delivered to them. I can’t emphasize enough how big a deal this is and how wonderful it is for the customer. We’re constantly making the Visual Builder Designer interface easier and easier to work with. We’re currently releasing a new version of Visual Builder Designer—the Express mode version. This version of Designer is lightweight and has only the necessary features required to allow you to make changes to pages and layouts, and create and manage dynamic rule-based layouts. If you need more (for example, you need to create service connections, fragments, and do a lot more of that type of advanced work), then use the advanced version of the Designer. Both are available to you, assuming that your user has the appropriate permission and the Fusion app you are using has implemented Express Designer. 19:37 Lois: OK Joe, what courses does Oracle University offer for me if I wanted to learn more about developing extensions for Fusion apps and creating mashup apps using Visual Builder Studio? Joe: Oracle University has several courses. We have the Develop Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio, which focuses on creating the stand-alone custom bespoke mashup visual applications. We also have our Design and Develop Redwood Applications course, which goes into detail about working with the Redwood page templates and components. All these courses are free and available today. And all you need to do is log in to mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 20:10 Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. Just a quick reminder before we close about the short survey we’ve put together to get your thoughts on the podcast. It’ll take just a few minutes and will help us make the podcast even better. Just click the link in the show notes to participate. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham... Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 20:33 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.
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  • Best of 2024: Introduction to Visual Builder Studio, Visual Builder Cloud Service, Stand-Alone, and JET
    The next generation of front-end user interfaces for Oracle Fusion Applications is being built using Visual Builder Studio and Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit. However, many of the terms associated with these tools can be confusing.   In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald. Together, they take you through the different terminologies, how they relate to each other, and how they can be used to deliver the new Oracle Fusion Applications as well as stand-alone, bespoke visual web applications.   Survey: https://customersurveys.oracle.com/ords/surveys/t/oracle-university-gtm/survey?k=focus-group-2-link-share-5   Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/develop-fusion-applications-using-visual-builder-studio/138392/   Build Visual Applications Using Oracle Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/build-visual-applications-using-oracle-visual-builder-studio/137749/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! If you’ve been following along with us, you’ll know that we’ve had some really interesting seasons this year. We covered Autonomous Database, Artificial Intelligence, Visual Builder Studio and Redwood, OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes, and Oracle Database 23ai New Features. Nikita: And we’ve had some pretty awesome special guests. Do go back and check out those episodes if any of those topics interest you. 01:04 Lois: As we close out the year, we thought this would be a good time to revisit some of our best episodes. Over the next few weeks, you’ll be able to listen to four of our most popular episodes of the year.  Nikita: Right, this is the best of the best–according to you–our listeners.   Lois: Today’s episode is #1 of 4 and is a throwback to a discussion with Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald on Visual Builder Studio. Nikita: We asked Joe about Visual Builder Studio and Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit, also known as JET. Together, they form the basis of the technology for the next generation of front-end user interfaces for Oracle Fusion Applications, as well as many other Oracle applications, including most Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) interfaces. 01:48 Lois: We looked at the different terminologies and technologies, how they relate to each other, and how they deliver the new Oracle Fusion Applications and stand-alone, bespoke visual web applications.  So, let’s dive right in. Nikita: Joe, I’m somewhat thrown by the terminology around Visual Builder, Visual Studio, and JET. Can you help streamline that for us? Lois: Yeah, things that are named the same sometimes refer to different things, and sometimes things with a different name refer to the same thing. 02:18 Joe: Yeah, I know where you’re coming from. So, let’s start with Visual Builder Studio. It’s abbreviated as VBS and can go by a number of different names. Some of the most well-known ones are Visual Builder Studio, VBS, Visual Builder, Visual Builder Stand-Alone, and Visual Builder Cloud Service. Clearly, this can be very confusing. For the purposes of these episodes as well as the training courses I create, I use certain definitions.  02:42 Lois: Can you take us through those? Joe: Absolutely, Lois. Visual Builder Studio refers to a product that comes free with an OCI account and allows you to manage your project-related assets. This includes the project itself, which is a container for all of its assets. You can assign teams to your projects, as well as secure the project and declare roles for the different team members. You manage GIT repositories with full graphical and command-line GIT support, define package, build, and deploy jobs, and create and run continuous integration/continuous deployment graphical and code-managed pipelines for your applications. These can be visual applications, created using the Visual Builder Integrated Development Environment, the IDE, or non-visual apps, such as Java microservices, docker builds, NPM apps, and things like that. And you can define environments, which determine where your build jobs can be deployed. You can also define issues, which allow you to identify, track, and manage things like bugs, defects, and enhancements. And these can be tracked in code review merge requests and build jobs, and be mapped to agile sprints and scrum boards. There’s also support for wikis for team collaboration, code snippets, and the management of the repository and the project itself. So, VBS supports code reviews before code is merged into GIT branches for package, build, and deploy jobs using merge requests. 04:00 Nikita: OK, what exactly do you mean by that? Joe: Great. So, for example, you could have developers working in one GIT branch and when they’re done, they would push their private code changes into that remote branch. Then, they’d submit a merge request and their changes would be reviewed. Once the changes are approved, their code branch is merged into the main branch and then automatically runs a CI/CD package (continuous integration/continuous deployment) package, build, and deploy job on the code. Also, the CI/CD package, build, and deploy jobs can run against any branches, not just the main branch. So Visual Builder Studio is intended for managing the project and all of its assets. 04:37 Lois: So Joe, what are the different tools used in developing web applications? Joe: Well, Visual Builder, Visual Builder Studio Designer, Visual Builder Designer, Visual Builder Design-Time, Visual Builder Cloud Service, Visual Builder Stand-Alone all kind of get lumped together. You can kinda see why. What I’m referring to here are the tools that we use to build a visual web application composed of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) for metadata. I call this Visual Builder Designer. This is an Integrated Development Environment, it’s the “IDE” which runs in your browser. You use a combination of drag and drop, setting properties, and writing and modifying custom and generated code to develop your web applications. You work within a workspace, which is your own private copy of a remote Git branch. When you’re ready to start development work, you open an existing workspace or create a new one based on a clone of the remote branch you want to work on. Typically, a new branch would be created for the development work or you would join an existing branch. 05:38 Nikita: What’s a workspace, Joe? Is it like my personal laptop and drive? Joe: A workspace is your own private code area that stores any changes you make on the Oracle servers, so your code changes are never lost—even when working in a browser-based, network-based tool. A good analogy is, say I was working at home on my own machine. And I would make a copy of a remote GIT branch and then copy that code down to my local machine, make my code changes, do my testing, etc. and then commit my work—create a logical save point periodically—and then when I’m ready, I’d push that code up into the remote branch so it can be reviewed and merged with the main branch. My local machine is my workspace. However, since this code is hosted up by Oracle on our servers, and the code and the IDE are all running in your browser, the workspace is a simulation of a local work area on your own computer. So, the workspace is a hosted allocation of resources for you that’s private. Other people can’t see what’s going on in your workspace. Your workspace has a clone of the remote branch that you’re working with and the changes you make are isolated to your cloned code in your workspace. 06:41 Lois: Ok… the code is actually hosted on the server, so each time you make a change in the browser, the change is written back to the server? Is it possible that you might lose your edits if there’s a networking interruption? Joe: I want to emphasize that while I started out not personally being a fan of web-based integrated development environments, I have been using these tools for over three years and in all that time, while I have lost a connection at times—networks are still subject to interruptions—I’ve never lost any changes that I’ve made. Ever. 07:11 Nikita: Is there a way to save where you are in your work so that you could go back to it later if you need to? Joe: Yes, Niki, you’re asking about commits and savepoints, like in a Git repository or a Git branch. When you reach a logical stopping or development point in your work, you would create a commit or a savepoint. And when you’re ready, you would push that committed code in your workspace up to the remote branch where it can be reviewed and then eventually merged, usually with the main Git branch, and then continuous integration/continuous package and deployment build jobs are run. Now, I’m only giving you a high-level overview, but we cover all this and much more in detail with hands-on practices in our Visual Builder developer courses. Right now, I’m just trying to give you a sense of how these different tools are used. 07:52 Lois: Yeah, that makes sense, Joe. It’s a lot to cover in a short amount of time. Now, we’ve discussed the Visual Builder Designer IDE and workspace. But can you tell us more about Visual Builder Cloud Service and stand-alone environments? What are they used for? What features do they provide? Are they the same or different things? Joe: Visual Builder Cloud Service or Visual Builder Stand-Alone, as it’s sometimes called, is a service that Oracle hosts on its servers. It provides hosting for the deployed web application source code as well as database tables for business objects that we build and maintain to store your customer data. This data can come from XLS or CSV files, or even your own Oracle database customer table data. A custom REST proxy makes calls to external third-party REST services on your behalf and supports several popular authentication mechanisms. There is also integration with the Identity Cloud Service (IDCS) to manage users and their access to your web apps. Visual Builder Cloud Service is a for-fee product. You pay licensing fees for how much you use because it’s a hosted service. Visual Builder Studio, the project asset management aspect I discussed earlier, is free with a standard OCI license. Now, keep in mind these are separate from something like Visual Builder Design Time and the service that’s running in Fusion application environments. What I’m talking about now is creating stand-alone, bespoke, custom visual applications. These are applications that are built using industry-standard HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and JSON for metadata and are hosted on the Oracle servers.  09:30 Are you looking for practical use cases to help you plan and apply configurations that solve real-world challenges?  With the new Applied Learning courses for Cloud Applications, you'll be able to practically apply the concepts learned in our implementation courses and work through case studies featuring key decisions and configurations encountered during a typical Oracle Cloud Applications implementation. Applied learning scenarios are currently available for General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Accounting Hub, Global Human Resources, Talent Management, Inventory, and Procurement, with many more to come!  Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 10:12 Nikita: Welcome back! Joe, you said Visual Builder Cloud Service or Stand-Alone is a for-fee service. Is there a way I can learn about using Visual Builder Designer to build bespoke visual applications without a fee? Joe: Yes. Actually, we’ve added an option where you can run the Visual Builder Designer and learn how to create web apps without using the app hosting or the business object database that stores your customer data or the REST proxy for authentication or the Identity Cloud Service. So you don’t get those features, but you can still learn the fundamentals of developing with Visual Builder Designer. You can call third-party APIs, you can download the source, and run it locally, for example, in a Tomcat server. This is a great and free way to learn how to develop with the Visual Builder Designer. 10:55 Lois: Joe, I want to know more about the kinds of apps you can build in VB Designer and the capabilities that VB Cloud Service provides. Joe: Visual Builder Designer allows you to build custom, bespoke web applications made of interactive webpages; flows of pages for navigation; events that respond when things happen in the app, for example, GUI events like a button is clicked or values are entered into a text field; variables to store the state of the application and the ability to make REST calls, all from your browser. These applications have full access to the Oracle Fusion Applications APIs, given that you have the right security permissions and credentials of course. They can access your customer business data as business objects in our internally hosted database tables or your own customer database tables. They can access third-party APIs, and all these different data sources can appear in the same visual application, on the same page, at the same time. They use the Identity Cloud Service to identify which users can log in and authenticate against the application. And they all use the new Redwood graphical user interface components and page templates, so they have the same look and feel of all Oracle applications. 12:02 Nikita: But what if you’re building or extending Oracle Fusion Applications? Don’t things change a little bit? Joe: Good point, Niki. Yes. While you still work within Visual Builder Studio, that doesn’t change, VBS maintains your project and all your project-related assets, that is still the same. However, in this case, there is no separate hosted Visual Builder Cloud Service or Stand-Alone instance. In this case, Visual Builder is hosted inside of Fusion apps itself as part of the installation. I won’t go into the details of how the architecture works, but the Visual Builder instance that you’re running your code against is part of Fusion applications and is included in the architecture as well as the billing. All your code changes are maintained and stored within a single container called an extension. And this extension is a Git repository that is created for you, or you can create it yourself, depending on how you choose to work within Visual Builder Studio. You create an extension to hold the source code changes that provide a customization or configuration. This means making a change to an existing page or a set of pages or even adding new pages and flows to your Oracle Fusion Applications. You use Visual Builder Studio and Visual Builder Designer in a similar way as to how you would use them for bespoke stand-alone visual applications. 13:12 Lois: I’m trying to envision how this workflow is used. How is it different from bespoke VB app development? Or is it different at all? Joe: So, recall that the Visual Builder Designer is effectively the Integrated Development Environment, the IDE, where you make your code changes by working with both the raw HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript code, if need be, or the Page Designer for drag and drop, and setting properties and then Live mode to test your work. You use a version of VB Designer to view and modify your customizations, and the code is stored in a Git repository called an extension. So, in that sense, the work of developing pages and flows and such is the same. You still start by creating or, more typically, joining a project and then either create a new extension from scratch or base it on an existing application, or go directly to the page that you want to edit and, on that page, select from your profile menu to edit in Visual Builder Studio. Now, this is a different lifecycle path from bespoke visual applications. With them, you’re not extending an app or modifying individual pages in the same way. You get a choice of which project you want to add your extension to when you’re working with Fusion apps and potentially which repository to store your customizations, unless one already exists and then it’s assigned automatically to hold your code changes. So you make your changes and edits to the portions of the application that have been opened for extensibility by the development team. This is another difference. Once you make your code changes, the workflow is pretty much the same as for a bespoke visual application: do your development work, commit your changes, push your changes to the remote branch. And then typically, your code is reviewed and if the code passes and is approved, it’s merged with the main branch. Then, the package and deploy jobs run to deploy the main code to the production environment or whatever environment you’re targeting. And once the package and deploy jobs complete, the code base is updated and users who log in see the changes that you’ve made. 15:03 Nikita: You mentioned creating apps that combine data from Fusion cloud, applications, customer data, and third-party APIs into one page. Why is it necessary? Why can’t you just do all that in one Fusion Applications extension? Joe: When you create extensions, you are working within the Oracle Fusion Applications ecosystem, that’s what they actually call it, which includes a defined a set of users who have been predefined and are, therefore, known to Fusion Applications. So, if you’re a user and you’re not part of that Fusion Apps ecosystem, you can’t access the pages. Period. That’s how Fusion Apps works to maintain its security and integrity. Secondly, you’re working pretty much solely with the Fusion Applications APIs data sources coming directly from Fusion Applications, which are also available to you when you’re creating bespoke visual apps. When you’re working with Fusion Applications in Visual Builder, you don’t have access to these business objects that give you access to your own customer database data through Visual Builder-generated REST APIs. Business objects are available only to bespoke visual applications in the hosted VB Cloud Service instance. So, your data sources are restricted to the Oracle Fusion Applications APIs and some third-party APIs that work within a narrow set of authentication mechanisms currently, although there are plans to expand this in the future. A mashup app that allows you now to access all these data sources while creating apps that leverage the Redwood Component System, so they look and work like Fusion Apps. They’re a highly popular option for our partners and customers. 16:28 Lois: So, to review, we have two different approaches. You can create a visual application using the for-fee, hosted Visual Builder Cloud Service/Stand-Alone or the one that comes with Oracle Integration Cloud, or you can use the extension architecture for Fusion applications, where you use the designer and create your extensions, and the code is delivered and deployed to Fusion applications code. You haven’t talked about JET yet though, Joe. What is that? Joe: So, JET is an abbreviation. It stands for Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit and JET is the underlying technology that makes Visual Builder, visual applications, and Visual Builder Extensions for Fusion Applications possible. Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit provides a module-based, open-source toolkit that leverages modern JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS3, and HTML5 to deliver web applications. It’s targeted at JavaScript developers working on client-side applications. It is not for backend development.  It’s a collection of popular, powerful JavaScript libraries and a set of Oracle-contributed JavaScript libraries that make it very simple, easy, and efficient to build front-end applications that can consume and interact with Oracle products and services, especially Oracle Cloud services, but of course it can work with any type of third-party API. 17:44 Nikita: How are JET applications architected, Joe, and how does that relate to Visual Builder pages and flows? Joe: The architecture of JET applications is what’s called a single page architecture. We’ve all seen these. These are where you have a single webpage—think of your index page that provides the header and footer for your webpage—and then the middle portion or the middle content of the page, represented by modules, allow you to navigate from one page or module to another. It also provides the data mapping so that the data elements in the variables and the state of the application, as well as the graphical user interface elements that provide the fields and functionality for the interface for the application, these are all maintained on the client side. If you’re working in pure JET, then you work with these modules at the raw JavaScript code level. And there are a lot of JavaScript developers who want to work like this and create their custom applications from the code up, so to speak. However, it also provides the basis for Visual Builder visual applications and Fusion Apps visual extensions in Visual Builder. 18:41 Lois: How does JET support VB Apps? You didn’t talk much about having to write a bunch of JavaScript and HTML5, so I got the impression that this is all done for you by VB Designer? Joe: Visual Builder applications are composed of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript code that is usually generated by the developer when she drags and drops components on to the page designer canvas or sets properties or creates action chains to respond to events. But there’s also a lot of JavaScript object notation (JSON) metadata created at the time that describes the pages, the flows, the navigation, the REST services, the variables, their data types, and other assets needed for the app to function. This JSON metadata is translated at runtime using a large JavaScript extension toolkit library called the Visual Builder Runtime that runs in the browser and real time translates the metadata and other assets in the Visual Builder source code into JET code and assets, which are actually executed at runtime. And it’s very quick, very fast, very efficient, and provides a layer of abstraction between the raw JET code and the Visual Builder architecture of pages, flows, action chains for executing code and events to handle things that occur in the user interface, including saving the state in variables that are mapped to GUI components. For example, if you have an Input text component, you need to have a variable to store the value that was entered into that Input text component between page refreshes. The data can move from the Input text component to the variable, and from the variable to that Input text component if it’s changed programmatically, for example. So, JET manages binding these data values to variables and the UI components on the page. So, a change to a variable value or a change to the contents of the component causes the others to change automatically. Now, this is only a small part of what JET and the frameworks and libraries it uses do for the applications. JET also provides more complex GUI components like lists and tables, and selection lists, and check boxes, and all the sorts of things you would expect in a modern GUI application. 20:37 Nikita: You mentioned a layer of abstraction between Visual Builder Studio Designer and JET. What’s the benefit of working in Visual Builder Designer versus JET itself? Joe: The benefit of Visual Builder is that you work at a higher level of abstraction than having to get down into the more detailed levels of deep JavaScript code, working with modules, data mappings, HTML code, single page architecture navigation, and the related functionalities. You can work at a higher level, a graphical level, where you can drag and drop things onto a design canvas and set properties. The VB architecture insulates you from the more technical bits of JET. Now, this frees the developer to concentrate more on application and page design, implementing logic and business rules, and creating a pleasing workflow and look and feel for the user. This keeps them from having to get caught up in the details of getting this working at the code level. Now if needed, you can write custom JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3 code, though much less than in a JET app, and all that is part of the VB application source, which becomes part of the code used by JET to execute the application itself. And yet it all works seamlessly together. 21:38 Lois: Joe, I know we have courses in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. But does a developer getting ready to work in Visual Builder Designer have to go take those courses first or can they start working in VB Designer right away? Joe: Yeah, that question does often comes up: Do I need to learn JET to work with Visual Builder? No, you don’t. That’s all taken care for you in the products themselves. I don’t really think it helps that much to learn JET if you are going to be a VB developer. In some ways, it could even be a bit distracting since some of things you learn to do in JET, you would have to unlearn or not do so much because of what VB does it for you. The things you would have to do manually in code in JET are done for you. This is why we call VB a low code development tool. I mean, you certainly can if you want to, but I would spend more time learning about the different GUI components, page templates, the Visual Builder architecture — events, action chains, and the data provider variables and types. Now, I know JET myself. I started with that before learning Visual Builder, but I use very little of my JET knowledge as a VB developer. Visual Builder Designer provides a nice, abstracted, clean layer of modern visual development on top of JET, while leveraging the power and flexibility of JET and keeping the lower-level details out of my way. 22:49 Nikita: Joe, where can I go to get started with Visual Builder? Joe: Well, for more information, I recommend you take a look at our Develop Fusion Applications course if you’re working with Fusion Applications and Visual Builder Studio. The other course is Develop Visual Applications with Visual Builder Studio and that’s if you’re creating stand-alone bespoke applications. Both these courses are free. We also have a comprehensive course that covers JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3, and while it’s not required that you take that to be successful, it can be helpful down the road. I would also say that some basic knowledge of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript will certainly support you and serve you well when working with Visual Builder. You learn more as you go along and you find that you need to create more sophisticated applications. I would also mention that a lot of the look and feel of the applications in Visual Builder visual applications and Fusion apps extensions and customizations come through JET components, JET styles, and JET variables, and CSS variables, so that’s something that you would want to pursue at some point. There’s a JET cookbook out there. You can search for Oracle JET and look for the JET cookbook and that’s a good introduction to all of that. 23:50 Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. To learn about some of the courses Joe mentioned, visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. Lois: Before we wrap up, we’ve got a favor to ask. We’ve created a short survey to capture your thoughts on the podcast. It’ll only take a few minutes of your time. Just click the link in the show notes and share your feedback. We want to make sure we’re delivering the best experience possible so don't hesitate to let us know what's on your mind! Thanks for your support. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 24:30 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.
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  • Oracle AI in Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management
    In this special episode of the Oracle University Podcast, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Principal HCM Instructor Jeff Schuster, delve into the intersection of HCM and AI, exploring the practical applications and implications of this technology in human resources. Jeff shares his insights on bias and fairness, the importance of human involvement, and the need for explainability and transparency in AI systems. The discussion also covers the various AI features embedded in HCM and their impact on talent acquisition, performance management, and succession planning.  Oracle AI in Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/learning-path/oracle-ai-in-fusion-cloud-human-capital-management-hcm/136722 Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM: Dynamic Skills: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-fusion-cloud-hcm-dynamic-skills/116654/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started!  00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs here at Oracle University, and with me, is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services. Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week’s conversation was all about Oracle Database 23ai backup and recovery, where we dove into instance recovery and effective recovery strategies. Today’s episode is a really special one, isn’t it, Lois? 00:53 Lois: It is, indeed, Niki. Of course, all of our AI episodes are special. But today, we have our friend and colleague Jeff Schuster with us. I think our listeners are really going to enjoy what Jeff has to share with us. Nikita: Yeah definitely! Jeff is a Principal HCM Instructor at Oracle University. He recently put together this really fantastic course on MyLearn, all about the intersection of HCM and AI, and that’s what we want to pick his brain about today. Hi Jeff! We’re so excited to have you here.  01:22 Jeff: Hey Niki! Hi Lois! I feel special already. Thanks you guys so much for having me. Nikita: You’ve had a couple of busy months, haven’t you?  01:29 Jeff: I have! It’s been a busy couple of months with live classes. I try and do one on AI in HCM at least once a month or so so that we can keep up with the latest/greatest stuff in that area. And I also got to spend a few days at Cloud World teaching a few live classes (about artificial intelligence in HCM, as a matter of fact) and meeting our customers and partners. So yeah, absolutely great week. A good time was had by me.  01:55 Lois: I’m sure. Cloud World is such a great experience. And just to clarify, do you think our customers and partners also had a good time, Jeff? It wasn’t just you, right? Jeff: Haha! I don’t think it was just me, Lois. But, you know, HCM is always a big deal, and now with all the embedded AI functionality, it really wasn’t hard to find people who wanted to spend a little extra time talking about AI in the context of our HCM apps. So, there are more than 30 separate AI-powered features in HCM. AI features for candidates to find the right jobs; for hiring managers to find the right candidates; skills, talent, performance management, succession planning— all of it is there and it really covers everything across the Attract/Grow/Keep buckets of the things that HR professionals do for a living. So, anyway, yeah, lots to talk about with a lot of people! There’s the functional part that people want to know about—what are these features and how do they work? But obviously, AI carries with it all this cultural significance these days. There’s so much uncertainty that comes from this pace of development in that area. So in fact, my Cloud World talk always starts with this really silly intro that we put in place just to knock down that anxiety and get to the more practical, functional stuff. 03:11 Nikita: Ok, we’re going to need to discuss the functional stuff, but I feel like we’re getting a raw deal if we don’t also get that silly intro. Lois: She makes a really good point.  Jeff: Hahaha! Alright, fair enough. Ok, but you guys are gonna have to imagine I’ve got a microphone and a big room and a lot of echo. AI is everywhere. In your home. In your office. In your homie’s home office. 03:39 Lois: I feel like I just watched the intro of a sci-fi movie. Jeff: Yeah. I’m not sure it’s one I’d watch, but I think more importantly it’s a good way to get into discussing some of the overarching things we need to know about AI and Oracle’s approach before we dive into the specific features, so you know, those features will make more sense when we get there?  03:59  Nikita: What are these “overarching” things?  Jeff: Well, the things we work on anytime we’re touching AI at Oracle. So, you know, it starts with things like Bias and Fairness. We usually end up in a pretty great conversation about things like how we avoid bias on the front end by making sure we don’t ingest things like bias-generating content, which is to say data that doesn’t necessarily represent bias by itself, but could be misused. And that pretty naturally leads us into a talk about guardrails. Nikita: Guardrails? Jeff:  Yeah, you can think of those as checkpoints. So, we’ve got rules about ingestion and bias. And if we check the output coming out of the LLM to ensure it complied with the bias and fairness rules, that’s a guardrail. So, we do that. And we do it again on the apps side. And so that’s to say, even though it’s already been checked on the AI side, before we bring the output into the HCM app, it’s checked again. So another guardrail.  04:58 Lois: How effective is that? The guardrails, and not taking in data that’s flagged as bias-generating? Jeff: Well, I’ll say this: It’s both surprisingly good, and also nowhere near good enough.  Lois: Ok, that’s as clear as mud. You want to elaborate on that?  Jeff: Haha! I think all it means is that approach does a great job, but our second point in the whole “standards” discussion is about the significance of having a human in the loop. Sometimes more than one, but the point here is that, particularly in HCM, where we’re handling some really important and sensitive data, and we’re introducing really powerful technology, the H in HCM gets even more important. So, throughout the HCM AI course, we talk about opportunities to have a human in the loop. And it’s not just for reviewing things. It’s about having the AI make suggestions, and not decisions, for example. And that’s something we always have a human in the loop for all the time. In fact, when I started teaching AI for HCM, I always said that I like to think of it is as a great big brain, without any hands.  06:00 Nikita: So, we’re not talking about replacing humans in HCM with AI.                                                                         Jeff: No, but we’re definitely talking about changing what the humans do and why it’s more important than ever what the humans do. So, think of it this way, we can have our embedded AI generate this amazing content, or create really useful predictions, whatever it is that we need. We can use whatever tools we want to get there, but we can still expect people to ask us, “Where did that come from?” or “Does this account for [whatever]?”. So we still have to be able to answer that. So that’s another thing we talk about as kind of an overarching important concept: Explainability and Transparency. 06:41 Nikita: I’m assuming that’s the part about showing our work, right? Explaining what's being considered, how it's being processed, and what it is that you're getting back. Jeff: That’s exactly it. So we like to have that discussion up front, even before we get to things like Gen and Non-Gen AI, because it’s great context to have in mind when you start thinking about the technology. Whenever we’re looking at the tech or the features, we’re always thinking about whether people are appropriately involved, and whether people can understand the AI product as well as they need to.  07:11 Lois: You mentioned Gen and Non-Gen AI. I’ve also heard people use the term “Classic AI.” And lately, a lot more about RAG and Agents. When you're teaching the course, does everybody manage to keep all the terminology straight? Jeff: Yeah, people usually do a great job with this. I think the trick is, you have to know that you need to know it, if that makes sense.  Lois: I think so, but why don’t you spell it out for us. Jeff: Well, the temptation is sometimes to leave that stuff to the implementers or product developers, who we know need to have a deep understanding of all of that. But I think what we’ve learned is, especially because of all the functional implications, practitioners, product owners, everybody needs to know it too. If for no other reason so they can have more productive conversations with their implementers. You need to know that Classic or Non-Generative AI leverages machine learning, and that that’s all you need in order to do some incredibly powerful things like predictions and matching. So in HCM, we’re talking about things like predicting time to hire, identifying suggested candidates for job openings, finding candidates similar to ones you already like, suggesting career paths for employees, and finding recommended successors. All really powerful matching stuff. And all of that stuff uses machine learning and it’s certainly AI, but none of that uses Generative AI to do that because it doesn’t need to. 08:38 Nikita: So how does that fit in with all the hype we’ve been hearing for a long time now about Gen AI and how it’s such a transformative technology that’s going to be more impactful than anything else? Jeff: Yeah, and that can be true too. And this is what we really lean into when we do the AI in HCM course live. It’s much more of a “right AI for the right job” kind of proposition. Lois: So, just like you wouldn’t use a shovel to mix a cake. Use the right tool for the job. I think I’ve got it. So, the Classic AI is what’s driving those kinds of features in HCM? The matching and recommendations?  Jeff: Exactly right. And where we need generative content, that’s where we add on the large language model capability. With LLMs, we get the ability to do natural language processing. So it makes sense that that’s the technology we’d use for tasks like “write me a job description” or “write me performance development tips for my employee”. 09:33 Nikita: Ok, so how does that fit in with what Lois was asking about RAG and Agents? Is that something people care about, or need to? Jeff: I think it’s easiest to think about those as the “what’s next” pieces, at least as it relates to the embedded AI. They kind of deal with the inherent limitations of Gen and Non-Gen components. So, RAG, for example - I know you guys know, but your listeners might not...so what’s RAG stand for? Lois & Nikita: Retrieval. Augmented. Generation. Jeff: Hahaha! Exactly. Obviously. But I think everything an HCM person needs to know about that is in the name. So for me, it’s easiest to read that one backwards. Retrieval Augmented Generation. Well, the Generation just means it’s more generative AI. Augmented means it’s supplementing the existing AI. And Retrieval just tells you that that’s how it’s doing it. It’s going out and fetching something it didn’t already have in order to complete the operation. 10:31 Lois: And this helps with those limitations you mentioned? Nikita: Yeah, and what are they anyway?  Jeff: I think an example most people are familiar with is that large language models are trained on this huge set of information. To a certain point. So that model is trained right up to the point where it stopped getting trained. So if you’re talking about interacting with ChatGPT, as an example, it’ll blow your doors off right up until you get to about October of 2023 and then, it just hasn’t been trained on things after that. So, if you wanted to have a conversation about something that happened after that, it would need to go out and retrieve the information that it needed. For us in HCM, what that means is taking the large language model that you get with Oracle, and using retrieval to augment the AI generation for the things that the large language model wouldn’t have had.  11:22 Nikita: So, things that happened after the model was trained? Company-specific data? What kind of augmenting are you talking about? Jeff: It’s all of that. All those things happen and it’s anything that might be useful, but it’s outside the LLM’s existing scope. So, let’s do an example. Let’s say you and Lois are in the market to hire someone. You’re looking for a Junior Podcast Assistant. We’d like the AI in HCM to help, and in order to do that, it would be great if it could not just generate a generic job description for the posting, but it could really make it specific to Oracle. Even better, to Oracle University.  So, you’d need the AI to know a few more things in order to make that happen. If it knows the job level, and the department, and the organization—already the job posting description gets a lot better. So what other things do you think it might need to know? 12:13 Lois: Umm I’m thinking…does it need to account for our previous hiring decisions? Can it inform that at all? Jeff: Yes! That’s actually a key one. If the AI is aware not only of all the vacancies and all of the transactional stuff that goes along with it (like you know who posted it, what’s its metadata, what business group it was in, and all that stuff)...but it also knows who we hired, that’s huge. So if we put all that together, we can start doing the really cool stuff—like suggesting candidates based not only on their apparent match on skills and qualifications, but also based on folks that we’ve hired for similar positions. We know how long it took to make those hires from requisition open to the employee’s first start date. So we can also do things like predicting time to hire for each vacancy we have with a lot more accuracy. So now all of a sudden, we’re not just doing recruiting, but we have a system that accounts for “how we do it around here,” if that makes any sense.  But the point is, it’s the augmented data, it’s that kind of training that we do throughout ingestion, going out to other sources for newer or better information, whatever it is we need. The ability to include it alongside everything that’s already in the LLM, that’s a huge deal.  13:31  Nikita: Ok, so I think the only one we didn’t get to was Agents. Jeff: Yeah, so this one is maybe a little less relevant in HCM—for now anyway. But it’s something to keep an eye on. Because remember earlier when I described our AI as having a great big brain but no hands?  Lois: Yeah... Jeff: Well, agents are a way of giving it hands. At least for a very well-defined, limited set of purposes. So routine and repetitive tasks. And for obvious reasons, in the HCM space, that causes some concerns. You don’t want, for example, your AI moving people forward in the recruiting process or changing their status to “not considered” all by itself. So going forward, this is going to be a balancing act. When we ask the same thing of the AI over and over again, there comes a point where it makes sense to kind of “save” that ask. When, for example, we get the “compare a candidate profile to a job vacancy” results and we got it working just right, we can create an agent. And just that one AI call that specializes in getting that analysis right. It does the analysis, it hands it back to the LLM, and when the human has had what they need to make sure they get what they need to make a decision out of it, you’ve got automation on one hand and human hands on the other...hand. 14:56 Have you mastered the basics of AI? Are you ready to take your skills to the next level? Unlock the potential of advanced AI with our OCI Generative AI Professional course and certification that covers topics like large language models, the OCI Generative AI Service, and building Q&A chatbots for real-world applications. Head over to mylearn.oracle.com to find out more. 15:26 Nikita: Welcome back! Jeff, you’ve mentioned the “Time to Hire” feature a few times? Is that a favorite with people who take your classes? Jeff: The recruiting folks definitely seem to enjoy it, but I think it’s just a great example for a couple of reasons. First, it’s really powerful non-generative AI. So it helps emphasize the point around the right AI for the right job. And if we’re talking about things in chronological order, it’s something that shows up really early in the hire-to-retire cycle. And, you know, just between us learning nerds, I like to use Time to Hire as an early example because it gets folks in the habit of working through some use cases. You don’t really know if a feature is going to get you what you need until you’ve done some of that. So, for example, if I tell you that Time to Hire produces an estimated number of days to your first hire. And you’re still Lois, and you’re still Niki, and you’re hiring for a Junior Podcast Assistant. So why do you care about time to hire? And I’m asking you for real—What would you do with that prediction if you had it?  16:29 Nikita: I guess I’d know how long it is before I can expect help to arrive, and I could plan my work accordingly. Jeff: Absolutely. What else. What could you do with a prediction for Time to Hire? Lois: Think about coverage? Jeff: Yeah! Exactly the word I was looking for. Say more about that.  Lois: Well, if I know it’s gonna be three months before our new assistant starts, I might be able to plan for some temporary coverage for that work. But if I had a prediction that said it’s only going to be two weeks before a new hire could start, it probably wouldn’t be worth arranging temporary coverage. Niki can hold things down for a couple of weeks. Jeff: See, I’m positive she could! That’s absolutely perfect! And I think that’s all you really need to have in terms of prerequisites to understand any of the AI features in HCM. When you know what you might want to do with it, like predicting the need for temp cover, and you’ve got everything we talked about in the foundation part of the course—the Gen and the Classic, all that stuff, you can look at a feature like Time to Hire and then you can probably pick that up in 30 seconds. 17:29 Nikita: Can we try it? Jeff: Sure! I mean, you know, we’re not looking at screens for this conversation, but we can absolutely try it. You’re a recruiter. If I tell you that Time to Hire is a feature that you run into on the job requisition and it shows you just a few editable fields, and then of course, the prediction of the number of days to hire—tell me how you think that feature is going to work when you get there. Lois: So, what are the fields? And does it matter? Jeff: Probably not really, but of course you can ask. So, let me tell you. Ready? The fields—they are these. Requisition Title, Location, and Education Level.  Nikita: Ok, well, I have to assume that as I change those things… like from a Junior Podcast Assistant to a Senior Podcast Assistant, or change the location from Redwood Shores to Detroit, or change the required education, the time to hire is going to change, right?  Jeff: 100%, exactly. And it does it in real time as you make those changes to those values. So when you pick a new location, you immediately get a new number of days, so it really is a useful tool. But how does it work? Well, we know it’s using a few fields from the job requisition, but that’s not enough. Besides those fields, what else would you need in order to make this prediction work? 18:43 Lois: The part where it translates to a number of days. So, this is based on our historic hiring data? How long it took us to hire a podcast assistant the last time? Jeff: Yep! And now you have everything you need. We call that “historic data from our company” bit “ingestion,” by the way. And there’s always a really interesting discussion around that when it comes up in the course. But it’s the process we use to bring in the HCM data to the AI so it can be considered or predictions exactly like this. Lois: So it’s the HCM data making the AI smarter and more powerful. Nikita: And tailored. Jeff: Exactly, it’s all of that. And obviously, the HCM is better because we’ve given it the AI. But the AI is also better because it has the HCM in it. But look, I was able to give you a quick description of Time to Hire, and you were able to tell me what it does, which data it uses, and how it works in just a few seconds. So, that’s kind of the goal when we teach this stuff. It’s getting everybody ready to be productive from moment #1 because what is it and how does it work stuff is already out of the way, you know?  19:52 Lois: I do know! Nikita: Can we try it with another one? Jeff: Sure! How about we do...Suggested Candidates. Lois: And you’re going to tell us what we get on the screen, and we have to tell you how it works, right? Jeff: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Ok—Suggested Candidates. You’re a recruiter or a hiring manager. You guys are still looking for your Junior Podcast Assistant. On the requisition, you’ve got a section called Suggested Candidates. And you see the candidate’s name and some scores. Those scores are for profile match, skills match, experience match. And there’s also an overall match score, and the highest rated people you notice are sorted to the top of the list. So, you with me so far?  Lois: Yes! Jeff: So you already know that it’s suggesting candidates. But if you care about explainability and transparency like we talked about at the start, then you also care about where these suggested candidates came from. So let’s see if we can make progress against that. Let’s think about those match scores. What would you need in order to come up with match scores like that? 20:54 Nikita: Tell me if I’m oversimplifying this, but everything about the job on the requisition, and everything about the candidate? Their skills and experience? Jeff: Yeah, that’s actually simplified pretty perfectly. So in HCM, the candidate profile has their skills and experience, and the req profile has the req requirements.  Lois: So we’re comparing the elements of the job profile and the person/candidate profile. And they’re weighted, I assume? Jeff: That’s exactly how it works. See, 30 seconds and you guys are nailing these! In fairness, when we discuss these things in the course, we go into more detail. And I think it’s helpful for HCM practitioners to know which data from the person and the job profiles is being considered (and sometimes just as important, which is not being considered). And don’t forget we’re also considering our ingested data. Our previously selected candidates. 21:45 Lois: Jeff, can I change the weighting? If I care more about skills than experience or education, can I adjust the weighting and have it re-sort the candidates? Jeff: Super important question. So let me give you the answer first, which is “no.” But because it’s important, I want to tell you more. This is a discussion we have in the class around Oracle’s Embedded vs. Custom AI. And they’re both really important offerings. With Embedded, what we’re talking about are the features that come in HCM like any other feature. They might have some enablement steps like profile options, and there’s an activation panel. But essentially, that’s it. There’s no inspection panel for you to open up and start sticking your screwdriver in there and making changes. Believe it or not, that’s a big advantage with Embedded AI, if you ask me anyway.  Nikita: It’s an advantage to not be able to configure it? Jeff: In this context, I think you can say that it is. You know, we talk about the advantages about the baked-in, Embedded AI in this course, but one of the key things is that it’s pre-built and pre-tested. And the big one: that it’s ready to use on day one. But one little change in a prompt can have a pretty big butterfly effect across all of your results. So, Oracle provides the Embedded AI because we know it works because we’ve already tested it, and it’s, therefore, ready on day one. And I think that story maybe changes a little bit when you open up the inspection panel and bust out that screwdriver. Now you’re signing up to be a test pilot. And that’s just fundamentally different than “pre-built and ready on day one.” Not that it’s bad to want configuration. 23:24 Lois: That’s what the Custom AI path and OCI are about though, right? For when customers have hyper-specific needs outside of Oracle’s business processes within the apps, or for when that kind of tuning is really required. And your AI for HCM course—that focuses on the Embedded AI instead of Custom, yes? Jeff: That is exactly it, yes. Nikita: You said there are about 30 of these AI features across HCM. So, when you teach the course, do you go through all of them or are there favorites? Ones that people want to spend more time on so you focus on those? Jeff: The professional part of me wants to tell you that we do try to cover all of them, because that explainability and transparency business we talked about at the beginning. That’s for real, so I want our customers to have that for the whole scope.  24:12  Nikita: The professional part? What’s the other part?  Jeff: I guess that’s the part that says sure, we need to hit all of them. But some of them are just inherently more fun to work on. So, it’s usually the learners who drive that in the live classes when they get into something, that’s where we spend the most time. So, I have my favorites too. The learners have their favorites. And we spend time where it’s everybody’s favorite. Lois: Like where? Jeff: Ok, so one is far from the most complex one, but I think it’s really elegant in its simplicity. And it’s the Celebrate feature, where we do employee recognition. There’s an AI Assist available there. So when it’s time to recognize a colleague, you just need to enter the headline or the title, and the AI takes it from there and just writes up the recognition. 24:56 Lois: What about that makes it a good example, Jeff? You said it’s elegant. What do you mean?  Jeff: I think it’s a few things. So, start with the prompt. It’s just the one line—just the headline. And that’s your one input. So, type in the headline, get the recognition below. It’s a great demonstration of not just the simplicity, but the power we get out of that simplicity. I always ask it to recognize my employees for implementing AI features in Oracle HCM, just to see what it comes up with. When it tells the employee that they’re helping the company by automating routine tasks, bringing efficiency to the HR department, and then launches into specific examples of how AI features help in HCM, it really is pretty incredible. So, it’s a simple demo, but it explains a lot about how the Gen AI works. Lois: That’s really cool. 25:45 Nikita: So this one is generative AI. It’s using the large language model to create the recognition based on the prompt, which is basically just whatever you entered in the headline. But how does that help explain how Gen AI works in HCM? Jeff: Well, let’s take our simple prompt for example. There’s a lot happening behind the scenes. It’s taking our prompt, it’s doing its LLM thing, but before it’s done, it’s creating the results in a very specific way. An employee recognition reads really differently than a job description. So, I usually describe this as the hidden part of our prompt. The visible part is what we typed. But it needs to know things like our desired output format. Make sure to use the person’s name, summarize the benefits, and be sure to thank them for their contribution, that kind of stuff. So, those things are essentially hard-coded into the page. And that’s to say, this is another area where we don’t get an inspection panel that lets us go in and tweak the prompt.  26:42 Nikita: And that’s generally how generative AI works? Jeff: Pretty much. Wherever you see an AI Assist button in HCM, that’s more or less what’s going on. And so when you get to some of the other more complex features, it’s helpful to know that that is what’s going on.  Lois: Like where? Jeff: Well, it works that way for the About Me part of your employee profile, for goal creation in performance, and I think a really great example is in performance, where managers are providing the competency development tips. So the prompt there is a little more complex there because it involves the employee’s proficiency rating instead of free text. But still, pretty straightforward. You’re gonna click AI Assist and it’s gonna generate all the development tips for any specific competency listed for that employee. Good development tips. Five of them. Nicely formatted with bullet points. And these aren’t random words assembled by an AI. So they conform to best practices in the development of competencies. So, something is telling the LLM to give us results that are that good, in that particular way.  So, it’s just another good example of the work AI is doing while protected behind the inspection panel that doesn’t exist. So, the coding of that page, in combination with what the LLM generates and the agent that it uses, is what produces the result. That’s generally the approach. In the class, we always have a good time digging into what must be going on behind that inspection panel. Generally speaking, the better feel we have for what’s going on on these pages, the better we’re able to get the results we want, even without having that screwdriver out. 28:21  Nikita: So it’s time well-spent, looking at all the individual features? Jeff: I think so, especially if you’re anticipating really using any of them. So, the good news is, once you learn a few of them and how they work, and what they’re best at, you stop being surprised after a while. But there are always tips and tricks. And like we talked about at the top, explainability and transparency are absolutely key. So, as much as I’m not a fan of the phrase, I do think this is kind of a “knowledge is power” kind of situation. 28:51 Nikita: Sadly, we’re just about out of time for this episode.  Lois: That’s too bad, I was really enjoying this. Jeff, you were just talking about knowledge—where can we get more?  Jeff: Well, like you mentioned at the start, check out the AI in HCM course on MyLearn. It’s about an hour and a half, but it really is time well spent. And we get into detail on everything the three of us discussed here today, and then we have demoscussions of every feature where we show them and how they work and which data they’re using and a whole bunch more. So, there’s that. Plus, I hear the instructor is excellent. Lois: I can vouch for that! Jeff: Well, then you should definitely look into Dynamic Skills. Different instructor. But we have another course, and again I think about an hour and a half, but when you’re done with the AI course, I always feel like Dynamic Skills is where you really wanna go next to really flesh out all the Talent Management ideas that got stirred up while you were having a great time in the AI course.  And then finally, the live classes. It’s always really fun to take live questions while we talk about AI in HCM.   29:54 Nikita: Thanks, Jeff! This has been really interesting.  Lois: Yeah, thanks for being here, Jeff. We’ve loved having you on. Jeff: Thank you guys so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.  Lois: If you want to learn more about what we discussed, go to the show notes for today’s episode. You’ll find links to the AI for Human Capital Management and Dynamic Skills courses that Jeff mentioned so you can check them out. You can also head over to mylearn.oracle.com to find the live sessions for MyLearn subscribers that Jeff conducts. Nikita: Join us next week as we kick off our “Best of 2024” season, where we’ll be revisiting some of our most popular episodes of the year. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham…  Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off!   30:35 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.
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  • Oracle Database 23ai: Backup and Recovery - Part 2
    Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham continue their deep dive into Oracle Database 23ai backup and recovery strategies with Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor Bill Millar.   Picking up from Part 1, they explore critical concepts such as instance recovery, checkpoint processes, and the role of redo log files. Bill shares insights into complete and incomplete recovery, flashback technologies, and lots more.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-backup-and-recovery/141127/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 
00:26 Nikita: Welcome back to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi everyone! Last week, we had a fantastic chat with Bill Millar, our Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor. We dug into the basics of backup and recovery. We touched on everything from a DBA’s role in preventing data loss to handling different types of failures, and even some common mistakes that tend to pop up when managing a database. Nikita: Yeah, if you missed that episode, definitely go back and check it out. It’s packed with useful info, especially if you’re in charge of keeping databases safe. 01:10 Lois: Today, we’re picking up where we left off. We’re going to ask Bill about instance recovery and recovery strategies. Bill, can you kick things off by explaining what instance recovery is? Bill: You can understand instant recovery by becoming familiar with the checkpoint process, the redo log files, and the role of the log writer with the redo log files. Automatically instance or crash recovery. What is it doing? What are the phases of instance recovery? How we possibly can tune that instance recovery. We can use the mean time to recovery advisor that can help us determine how we might tune the instance recovery. 01:51 Nikita: OK, so let’s go through some of these concepts and procedures you mentioned. What is the checkpoint process responsible for exactly? Bill: The checkpoint process itself, it's responsible for updating the data file headers with checkpoint information. When a checkpoint is taken, it is going to write into the controlfiles. It tells the DB writer to write. DB writer writes to the data files, and the checkpoint is also annotated in the data files. So updating controlfiles with that checkpoint information also, controlfiles and database files. It signals that DB writer at full check points again, hey, it's time to write. So that way, it has the latest data written to the data files. The controlfile and datafiles, those are in sync with that. 02:40 Lois: Bill, what about the log writer process and the redo log files? Bill: With the log writer process and the redo log files, the redo log files record the changes to the database himself. It should be multiplexed. 02:53 Nikita: What do you mean by that? Bill: More than one redo log group. Now, the redo log groups, it is recommended that they should be multiplexed. Each group member should be on a different disk or in a different disk group if you're using ASM. 03:10 Nikita: And why is that, Bill? Bill: Because if I lose one, if I lose one redo log group, one member, I can continue to operate with just the one. If I only have one redo log group member and the system comes around and tries to write to it, then my system is going to come to a halt. So the log writer is going to write to those redo logs whenever somebody does a commit. When that redo log buffer is 1/3 full or every three seconds and before DB writer writes. So those are the four mechanism that tells log writer to write from that log buffer to the redo log files. And it'll also write, when we do a shut down, all the buffers will be flushed. And so that way, everything will be in sync when the system is shut down. 04:01 Lois: What are the different modes of operation for a database, Bill? And how do these modes impact the recovery capabilities of the database? Bill: So we have two different modes we can operate in. One is called NOARCHIVELOG mode. It is the default. ARCHIVELOG mode, highly encouraged. But not every environment has to be in ARCHIVELOG mode. 04:21 Nikita: So with ARCHIVELOG mode… Bill: Closed database. You have to close it, recover to the last backup. That's as far as I can go. Actually, I could, depending on what happens, I might be able to apply some redo. Suitable for training and test environments or for data warehouses, we don't have a lot of frequent changes. It's mainly bulk loading data at night and querying during the day. So it might be appropriate for that. Because ARCHIVELOG mode, it is a little overhead. Yes. So with that database, it goes down while it's open. The system, when it comes up, it can recover to the last committed transaction. And this is usually the mode we want to operate in for production environments. So we have that data in the buffer cache. We have that redo being buffered. We have the undo tablespace, keeping track of what the data was before a change. The redo keeps track of what was the change. And if we're in ARCHIVELOG mode, as we switch from one redo log to another, we will generate what's referred to as archived log files, and that's what allows us to do a complete recovery. 05:33 Lois: What happens in the case of automatic instance recovery? Bill: For an automatic instance recovery or crash recovery, our system went down unexpectedly. Because it did not do a clean shutdown, the buffers were not flushed. Everything was not synchronized. So the datafile, controlfile, everything is out of sync. 05:53 Nikita: So, how do the files get synchronized then? Bill: It uses the redo log groups to synchronize the files. It's going to roll forward. It rolls forward the changes that were made. So due to different distinct operations. Roll forward applies committed and uncommitted data. And the redo does not keep track of what was committed and uncommitted. It'll keep track of, hey, I had this transaction, hey, here's a commit for that transaction. But hey, I have a transaction. That was never uncommitted. That's the job of the undo. But rolls forward all those changes. And then anything that did not actually receive a commit, it will roll back the uncommitted data, return to the original state. And that is the job of the undo tablespace. 06:37 Lois: Bill, is it possible to tune instance recovery for better performance? Bill: You can try to tune this instance recovery. Tuning it is touchy. Be careful because you can cause more harm than what you think you might be doing good. The instance recovery, what we're doing, we're trying to-- the transactions between checkpoints. When was the last checkpoint? Because the items between the checkpoints, that's what has to be reapplied. So the last checkpoint to the last redo log, what is that time frame there between those? Well, what we're going to do, we're going to try to control that. We're going to try to control the difference between the checkpoint and the end of the redo log. There is a mean-time recovery advisor. You specify the desired times in seconds or minutes that how often you want that checkpoint to occur. There is a parameter, FAST_START_MTTR parameter that you can set. The default value is zero saying, hey, I'm going to let the system take care of it. And the maximum you can set it is to one hour. 07:46 Nikita: And why 1 hour?
 Bill: The reason being, if I set that to one hour and I have a lot of activity, how long is it going to take? How many transactions can happen within that hour? Yeah, I'm not doing a checkpoint as often, so I'm eliminating that workload. But if it has to recover, how long is it going to take? If I set it too small, the system says, hey, right now, it's going to take me 19 seconds based off statistics. If I said, OK, I want it in five seconds. So what does that mean? Every five seconds, I'm saying do a checkpoint. So what is it doing? OK, time to do a checkpoint. OK, time to go ahead and OK, DB writer write. OK, log writer write. OK, let me update the datafiles and the controlfiles. So you're just thrashing your system. So be careful if you decide to try to manually tune it. And when you go out and look at this mean time to recover, and even if you do it through the command line, you'll see that, that value is most likely going to change throughout the day, depending on the workload that you have. 08:46 Lois: How does the process of restoring and recovering data typically work? Bill: So when we restore, we're restoring our datafiles. All the datafiles, tablespace, controlfiles, archived redo log, server parameter file. Then when we recover, it involves depending on the backup that we use and other factors in there, it is going to apply the redo. So automatically done by RMAN. So I tell it, this is what I want to do. Hey, I want to restore a database. OK, RMAN says, all right, what backup are you going to use? What is it I need to restore? And then we tell it to recover. OK, I know what I need to use to recover. So RMAN can do the work for you. So when we restore and recover due to a manual process and there's different methods that we can use, and depending on the failure, we'll drive what type of restore and recovery we might perform. 09:40 Are you looking for practical use cases to help you plan and apply configurations that solve real-world challenges? With the new Applied Learning courses for Cloud Applications, you'll be able to practically apply the concepts learned in our implementation courses and work through case studies featuring key decisions and configurations encountered during a typical Oracle Cloud Applications implementation. Applied learning scenarios are currently available in General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Accounting Hub, Global Human Resources, Talent Management, Inventory, and Procurement, with many more to come! Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 10:22 Nikita: Welcome back! Can you talk about the different types of recovery scopes, Bill? How do they compare? Bill: Recovery can have two kinds of scope. All right. One is the complete recovery. We are getting the database back to the current time of the crash with no loss of data. We're going to again bring everything back to the present. Incomplete or point-in-time recovery. We're going to take a database or maybe a tablespace or even a table back to a point-in-time in the past. So from the time that we select to take it to recover, everything that was done after that is null and void, is gone missing. That's why it's called incomplete recovery, because it's not complete. 11:09 Lois: What are the steps that take place during complete recovery? Bill: We restore the datafiles. Changes are applied. We're applying the redo. The datafiles contained committed and uncommitted transactions. The undo is applied. Anything that did not receive an actual commit will take back to the original value. And we have our datafiles recovered. 11:33 Nikita: And what about point-in-time recovery? Bill: Point-in-time recovery, very similar. We're going to restore the datafiles from as far back as necessary. Changes are applied. So the data files are going to contain the committed and uncommitted up to that point-in-time. Database is open, that redo, that undo, anything that did not actually receive a commit. The undo is applied. The point-in-time recovered is complete. We're not applying all the redo, all the changes, only up to the time that we specify. 12:08 Lois: Are there any features that can make point-in-time recovery quicker? Bill: We also have the ability to use flashback database. It is an optional feature. And it can be a quick way to do that point-in-time recovery. It is an alternative to that database point-in-time recovery we just looked at. Faster. No restore is required. It's going to rewind the database. It does require some configuration in the environment. We do have to set up in order to use flashback database. 12:41 Nikita: I want to talk about Oracle’s data protection solutions, particularly when it comes to backup and recovery or disaster recovery. Bill: So for physical data protection-- backup and recovery objective. Yep, that works for both physical and logical. My recovery time, hours to days. Possibly minutes to hours for the logical. And Oracle solution, we have the Recovery Manager that's out of the box, RMAN. Oracle Secure Backup, that is Oracle's media management library system backing up to tape. The logical protection, yes, flashback technologies can help me take care of that very easily. For disaster recovery, physical data protection, recovery time objective, seconds to minutes. We're not going to accomplish that with RMAN. You're going to want to use our Data Guard with the Active Data Guard feature to be able to switch over to a standby database within seconds of a failure. 13:41 Lois: Why would someone choose to use flashback technologies for recovery, Bill? Bill: With the flashback technologies, we can use it for viewing data as past dates. What did it look like? We can wind the database back and forth in time. Assist users in an error analysis and recovery, because we have different technologies. This flashback query, version query, transaction query, those allow me to view what was the value of a row at a time. I can even see what were the changes to a row over a period of time? I can also view the query that caused that change. For error recovery, I can back out a transaction. I can take a table back to a non-current time. I can also flashback a table that was dropped. And I can also take an entire database by using flashback. So the different recovery options I might have with the flashback technology. 14:44 Lois: Thank you so much, Bill. These last two episodes have been so insightful, right Niki? Nikita: I couldn’t agree more, Lois! If you want to know more about backup and recovery configuration and other concepts, visit mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Database 23ai: Backup and Recovery course. Our upcoming episode is a very special one, where we’ll be discussing Oracle AI in Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management. So, watch out for that! Until next week, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off!
 15:16 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.
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  • Oracle Database 23ai: Backup and Recovery - Part 1
    In this two-part special, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham delve into the critical topic of backup and recovery in Oracle Database 23ai.   Together with Bill Millar, Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor, they discuss the role of database administrators, strategies for protecting data, and dealing with various types of data failure.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-backup-and-recovery/141127/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! For the last two weeks, we’ve been having really exciting discussions on Oracle AI Vector Search. We covered the fundamentals, benefits, the vector workflow, and lots more. Today, we’re going to talk about backup and recovery in Oracle Database 23ai with Bill Millar. If you’ve been listening this season, you’ll know that Bill is a Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor with Oracle University. Nikita: In this two-part special, we’ll dive into some of the things you need to know about backup and recovery, especially if you’re a database and backup admin. So, if you're the person in charge of keeping data safe and handling disaster recovery, this is definitely worth your time. 01:20 Lois: That’s right, Niki. Hi Bill, thanks for joining us again. What’s the role of a Database Administrator, or DBA, when it comes to backup and recovery? Bill: The DBA is typically responsible for ensuring the database is open and available when needed and at times you need to work with system administrators and other people within your organization to achieve that. But we want to try to protect the database from failure wherever possible. We want to increase the mean time between failures. Hopefully, we don't have failures, and we have to increase that time. But it might mean that we need to ensure we have redundant hardware and that in place, again, maybe out of the realm of the DBA, but people within your organization can help with that. We want to protect those critical components by using the redundancy. And we want to decrease the mean time to recover. Failures happen, but how fast can we get access back to that data after that failure. The faster we can do it, the happier customers are. Minimize the loss of data. It's never good to lose data, especially in a critical environment, but maybe in test and development, maybe not so bad.  02:39 Nikita: How do we ensure a separation of duties for backup and recovery processes? Bill: For a separation of duties, we do have a user called SYSBACKUP. It has the privileges that's required to perform backup and recoveries, the privilege to connect and execute the commands in what we refer to as RMAN, our Recovery Manager. As I said, it has permissions for backup and recovery because you do need to shut down the database, start up the database, those type of things. We're able to connect to that closed database to try to troubleshoot it, to get it to the open state again. It does not include any privileges to access data. The SYSBACKUP user is created when we install the database, when we create the database. We can use it explicitly for privileged user connection. It allows us to connect to the database. So RMAN connects as SYSBACKUP. 03:37 Lois: Bill, what should people keep in mind when figuring out what’s considered critical data? Bill: You want to try to identify your critical data. Some data might be highly required to access and make sure we don't lose don't lose data, but then you might have some environments. OK, I don't need to have them up and running as fast. If we lose a little data, it may not hurt, but we want to identify the difference in the different data that we have on different environments. So we want to also prioritize that critical data, which data do we need access to first because how much will the company lose per hour of downtime because we can't do business. We want to make sure the access data protection requirements. Not everybody has access to everything. And there are different types of disaster that can happen that are going to be totally out of your control. There's the physical disaster, a hurricane or tornado, outages, power outages, component failures, failures within the building itself, corruption of data because of some of these failures. And then, the most dreaded one, the one that happens most often, usually those human errors, the logical errors, where the data is just bad, we are able to access and everything. It's just that something has changed that shouldn't have been changed. We want to make sure we access our recovery requirements.  05:04 Lois: So, what are they? What are those requirements? Bill: We want to base that requirement based on how critical is that data, how soon do we need to have access to that? What is our recovery point objective? Do we have a tolerance for any type of data loss? How frequently should we backups? How often they should be taken? What type of backups will be another thing we'll want to figure out? Is point-in-time recovery required? Are we able to or do we ever need to go back to a previous point in time to do something? It's not always just recovery for a database failure. We might need to do a recovery point in time to a different system so we can investigate something. What is my recovery time objective? Again, what is the tolerance for the downtime? How long can I be down? The downtime, the biggest part of when a system goes down is trying to identify what is the problem, then next is what is going to be my plan to recover, and then perform in the recovery. We might have a tiered required time objective based off of critical data, and then depending on the failure. Is that failure at the entire database? Is it just a tablespace? Is it just a table? Is it just a row? That also determines how long it takes to recover and what type of recovery we might try to perform. What is my backup retention policy? Do I have a requirement to where I have to have my backups off site? And it doesn't mean like back in the old days of mainframe computers, you'd back up to tape and you'd take those tapes off site. You might still do that today. Or, am I backing up to a cloud environment? So what do I need to have for that? What about long-term backups? We work with our day-to-day backups, but there's those backups that require for longer, archives like end of year backups. Some places require to keep their end of year backup for like 10 years. How are we going to handle that? So these are some of the things that we have to think about when we start talking about backup and recovery. 07:23 Did you know that the Oracle University Learning Community regularly holds live events hosted by Oracle expert instructors. Find out how to prepare for your certification exams. Learn about the latest technology advances and features. Ask questions in real time and learn from an Oracle subject matter expert. From Ask Me Anything about certification to Ask the Instructor coaching sessions, you’ll be able to achieve your learning goals for 2024 in no time. Join a live event today and witness firsthand the transformative power of the Oracle University Learning Community. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 08:04 Nikita: Welcome back! Bill, I want to talk about the different failures that can occur in an Oracle database. How would you categorize them? Bill: There are different category of failure. This is not an all-inclusive list by any means. It's just something that possibly can happen. So they can usually be divided into different categories like statement failure. All right. When doing a select and insert, update, delete, the statement itself fails. A user process fails. Single database session fails for some reason. Network failure, connectivity is lost. The user error, probably one of the most common ones we have to deal with. A user successfully completes an operation, but that operation was erroneous. They dropped the wrong table, updated the wrong row. Then there's the instance failure. The database itself shuts down unexpectedly. And then media failure, usually a hard failure of our disk. Something of memory, something failed and caused an error. 09:12 Lois: Ok. I want to dive a little deeper into each of these categories that you mentioned. Let’s start with statement failures. What are typical problems that one might face? Bill: Attempts to enter invalid data into a table. They're trying to put a numeric field in a date field, and usually just working with the user is going to correct that. Is that the DBA responsible? Yes, no, maybe. They attempt to form operations with insufficient privileges. Attempts to allocate space that fails, well, that depends on are they going-- do they have unlimited storage or do they have a limit? Logic errors in the application. Well, that's where we're going to have to work with those developers to try to correct those type of errors. 09:59 Nikita: What about user process failures? Bill: User performs an abnormal disconnect, doesn't close out properly. It can cause something to hang up or even possibly erroneous data to be updated. A user session is abnormally terminated. Well, usually, we don't have to try to resolve those user type errors, but something we might need to look into. A user experiences a program error that terminates the session. Again, usually it's the application developers, but it's something as a DBA, we might want to keep an eye on. Is it the same person? Is it from the same location? Is it the same module within that application? Maybe there's some things we can help to identify what the possible problem can be. 10:43 Nikita: Bill, tell us about common issues that can lead to network failures. What can we do to mitigate these problems and ensure network resilience? Bill: The listener fails. Well, we can connect a backup listener and configure how it can connect time failover can work. A network interface card fails. Well, again, we're not the hardware people, but can we work with our network, our server team, whatever, to possibly have redundant network cards? The network connection fails itself. Can we configure a backup network connection? 11:18 Lois: And what about user errors? How can we recover from those types of scenarios? Bill: The user inadvertently deletes or modifies data. Well, we have some things we'll look at as far as like rollback a transaction along with the dependent transactions. Rewind that table back to where it should have been. You're also can use LogMiner. You can look at our redo logs to try to figure out where that bad transaction was. User drops a table inadvertently. Well, we can recover the table from the recycle bin if we have the recycle bin on or we may need to recover from a backup. 11:56 Nikita: What are common causes of instance failures, Bill? Bill: The dreaded power outage. Well, hopefully, we have some type of up system to keep us running, even if it's not for continuous operation. Maybe if it's just to allow us to gracefully take a system down. The dreaded hardware failure. If you have a way to predict a hardware failure, you can make a lot of money. Always happens at the most inopportune times. But then again, do we have redundant hardware? Do we have something in place to help allow us to continue to operate in case of a hardware failure? Failure of one of the critical background processes. Why did it fail? We can go out. We can look at our alert log, we have trace files. And then we have, you have the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. We can do the same thing as looking at the alert log and trace files. But the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control gives us a GUI interface to allow us to do that. 12:53 Lois: Before we let you go, Bill, can you tell us about media and data failures? Bill: Failure of a disk drive, failure of a disk controller, deletion or corruption of a file needed for database operation, well, this is the dreaded media failure. So we're going to restore from a backup. If we need to move, we can move a data file to a different location. We can notify, hey, here's that new location. And then recover by applying any of the incremental backups, any of the redo to get it back to where it should be. And then we have the data failures. We can't access the component, missing data files at OS level. And maybe our system administrators deleted something thinking it wasn't needed, or maybe even a developer on a development type system. Don't have the right permissions. Tablespace is offline. Well, why is it offline? Did somebody took the wrong tablespace offline? We have physical corruptions, block checksum failures. It's inconsistent between the header and footer. Invalid block header field values, like all of them are zeroed out. Then we have the logical corruptions, inconsistent dictionary, corrupt row piece, the inconsistencies, a control file not synchronized with the data files, usually because we recovered something and didn't do it the right way. I/O failures, maybe we just exceeded the number of open files that we're allowed to have. Maybe it's just a network or an I/O error itself. And these are different types of failures that you might experience. Again, it's not an all-inclusive list. It's just a few examples. 14:41 Nikita: I know you said it’s not an all-inclusive list and you were just giving us a few examples, but that seemed quite thorough! Thank you so much, Bill, for walking us through all of that today! Lois: Yeah, I totally agree! Thanks Bill! For more on what we discussed today, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Search for the Oracle Database 23ai: Backup and Recovery course. Next week, we’ll get into instance recovery and recovery strategies. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 15:15 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.
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