Saturday, December 4, 2010

Oracle EBS – An Introduction

Oracle E-business Suite is a software package that lets an organization manage the key business processes. The better way to understand it is to imagine the world without it.

Automation is the key. Companies tend to automate processes to save time, money and other resources. Usually in a world without Oracle EBS or any other ERP software for that matter, there will be department specific applications where every department would have built its own application using some technology. So in one organization there would have been tens of different applications quite possibly built in different platforms. And there is also possibility that all those applications may store same data independently thus resulting in data duplication. For example the employee information is something that most departments in an organization need. Now here is a software package, mind you one software package that does this all. That removes all those applications numbered in tens and storing same data independently without any integration. And even if there is an effort of integration which is a must have for any company that will be cumbersome. And managing all those applications with proper integration can be a nightmare with heavy budget.

Oracle EBS does this all. Manages all parts of business processes, stores data only once and makes it available to all other applications with an integration that stands out. But it is software package not just single software which it looks and behaves like. There are many applications (GL, AP, Absence, Expense etc) that are bundled into product families (Financials, HRMS, CRM etc). And this fact adds more beauty to it. This modular nature of EBS allows you to implement parts of EBS rather than whole package at once. For example it is perfectly OK if you just want to implement Financials and nothing else. And as business and need grows you can add more product families to it without any hassle and without worrying about integration issues between existing and newly implemented modules.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

What’s in the Name!!! Oracle

It is quite a debatable topic of what is meant by an Oracle DBA/Architect when he utters the word Oracle. It's a question that is one of the earlier confusions of a novice when he enters in Oracle world and also it's a question that creates a rift in the mind of some seasoned Oracle practitioners as well.

According to Greek Mythology Apollo was termed as the God of fine arts and reflections. To help his followers in the matters of public relations and others Apollo used to speak at its temple. Apollo chose an older woman to convey his messages to common people. The name of that woman was Pythia and she spoke through meaningless cries which were only understood by priests. Those meaningless cries were called Oracle. So every time a person needs any advice from Apollo he would go to the temple and asked for Oracle. The word Oracle means "thing of wisdom".

In modern era Oracle was the name of a project of CIA in early 70s. That project vanished pretty soon and today Oracle is something else. Inspired from Codd's twelve rules for relational model for databases Larry Ellison suggested IBM to build a DBMS that uses those twelve rules. Upon IBM's refusal Larry Ellison and Bob Miner decide to quit their jobs in IBM and work for their own. They hired a room and started to build a DBMS that used relational model of databases. They build their first version in 1980 but did not commercialize it. In 1982 the second version came and they decide to name it Oracle. Today that product is the most popular and most reliable DBMS to ever exist.

It is still amongst the most amazing things in computer world that with all the rapid progress in the software and hardware industry, after almost forty years the basic elements in database design are still Tables, Columns and Rows. It's not because of lack of innovation in database area, it's only because of the fact that those ideas from E.F. Codd were so strong that there never has been a better alternative to that. And the only person to realize the potential of these concepts in late 70s was Larry Ellison.

Now back to the question what's meant by Oracle in today's world? There are three entities that are termed as Oracle and they are Oracle Corporation (Name of the company that Larry Ellison and Bob Miner started in 1978, at that time it was known as Relational Software Inc. Named to Oracle in 1983 and is the second largest software company in the world today.), Oracle Database (The physical set of files that makes storage and retrieval of data possible) and Oracle Server (The RDBMS, the software written in C Language that retrieves and manipulates the data stored in Oracle Database). As you can see that each one of these three entities has their own unique name i.e. Oracle Corporation, Oracle Database and Oracle Server. But for ease and for sometimes for style people rarely use the complete name of all three entities and simply say Oracle. The context on which the name is pronounced determines what is meant by Oracle.