Stu's Braindump

I have moved my blog back within the Oracle blog-space. please update your links and RSS feeds to point to my new home at http://blogs.oracle.com/stusbraindump

A handy hint from one of my colleagues (thanks SG) is to populate the VERSION field on each record with a unique number for each of your various data sources (ie 1000,2000,3000) to allow for easy identification of converted data at a later date, as well as the allowing for identification of the associated conversion stream which created this record (assuming each source has a different set of mapping rules).

My current project contained a requirement to embed an external application within the the CC&B framework and initiate calls to this application supplying a number of context elements to ensure that the correct information is displayed. The client also requested that the application be 'skinned' to maintain the CC&B look-and-feel. This is how we implemented it.. Defined a number of Business Object to manage retrieval of data from some of the base CC&B objects in a flattened format (ie. Characteristics mapped to descriptive elements, unused fields not defined, etc). Defined a UI map which forms the canvas for 'painting' the application within our framework. A Query Zone to ensure that the required data associated with the Context Zones are retrieved (using Zone type F1-DE-QUERY). A Business Service to wrap the call to the Query Zone into a usable service. A Script to initiate the call to the Business Service with the associated Context Identifiers (fr

I have been unable to access one of my Windows Live accounts (via Messenger and Mail) for the last couple of weeks with every attempt failing with a 80048820 error stating that the service was unreachable. Other accounts on the same machine connect successfully, and attempts to log-on from different devices result in the same message (for this account only). It appears that Microsoft have changed their approach to what is allowed in your Live Profile Name, and no longer support special characters (such as &). A quick review of this page should point you in the right direction if you are experiencing the same issues.

A blog run by my colleague, Anthony Shorten, contains some very handy updates in regards to Production Configuration and the new Batch Submission methods released recently. I strongly recommend that you pay a visit to his blog.

Memory leaks seem to be one of our biggest issues on my current project (CC&B 2.2.0 on Windows Server x64 2003 R2). A review of the components experiencing these leaks has led us to upgrade the following (with thanks to Josh, Ken and Andre for their assistance): Sun Java has now been patched from 1.5.0_09 to 1.5.0_22 BEA Weblogic 10.0 has been patched from MP1 to MP2 Single Fix 8882447 is recommended if your implementation includes complex plug-in scripts, since these appeared to suffer from a defect in regards to the caching of PreparedXQuery elements resulting in them consuming large amounts of memory. Review all custom batch modules to ensure that they make use of the createJobWorkForEntityQuery method to build the JobWork object, or use createJobWorkForQueryIterato r and createWorkUnit if you need to add supplemental data.  These methods cache the thread work units to a temporary disk file to reduce memory consumption, instead of the managing the ThreadWorkUnits list insi