I spent three interesting days at the DOAG Konferenz 2012 – the German Oracle User Group’s conference. It was the 25th birthday and my first time as a DOAG Konferenz speaker. In this post, I will not talk about my presentation, but rather give you information from the sessions I went to. I will talk about three areas: Oracle WebLogic 12c, monitoring & diagnostics, and licensing.

Regarding WebLogic, Mr. Munz from munz & more described 10 things to know about Oracle WebLogic 12c. Here are some of them I did not know:

  • WLS 12c is still bundled with JDK6 but it is certified and runs with JDK7. JDK6 EOL has been postponed from July 2012 to November 2012 (now) but then again, it was postponed to February 2013
  • To avoid using different settings when you start a managed server with the start script or via the nodemanager, you have to set the startScriptEnabled to true to always use the parameters defined in the start script
  • EJBs development has been simplified and is now packaged in WAR files
  • WLS can now be managed with RESTful Management Services
  • Using j4psh (JMX-shell) or jolokia (deployed as a war file) to work with the MBeans
  • Proxy plugin for load balancing is missing, you have to use the one delivered with WLS 10.3.6

There were several sessions about monitoring, tuning, and diagnostics. I will list some tools, without explaining them, that can be used to help us to solve or avoid connected issues:

  • JVMD, Automatic Workload Repository for Oracle DB
  • ThreadLogic for Treads
  • JProfiles, Jprobe, JVisualVM for CPU use and timing analyze
  • MemoryAnalyzer, VisualGC for memory and Grabage Collection
  • Application Testing Suite from Oracle
  • Application Replay Pack
  • HP LoadRunner, Jmeter
  • Diagnostic Frameworks from Oracle which works with:
    • WLDF from WebLogic
    • DMS – Dynamic Monitoring Service
    • ODL . Oracle Diagnostic Logging from Oracle Fusion Middleware
    • ST – Selective Tracing

The room where Mr. Hatzinger from DBCONCEPTS explained the licensing and licensing-stumbling blocks was full, which means that I was probably not the only one having difficulties to understand the Oracle licensing model. He talked about some gray zones that can lead to misinterpretation and that are not always clearly defined. I will not describe the session, but just tell you about his sources of information:

  • Software investment guide
  • OLSA (Oracle License and Service Agreement)
  • Product license information guide
  • other like Core factor tables

At the DOAG Konferenz 2012 I learned a lot, especially in terms of best practice, and met very interesting people. I am already curious about next year’s event!