Upgrades of Oracle Forms and Reports applications to the latest release, viz. Oracle 10g or 11g and Oracle 10g DS have become imperative. A technical upgrade along with application migration often does not provide any application features and functionality enhancements and are justified as the cost of obsolescence. However, the new releases are web enabled with no client-server option. While web enabling and other new features provide distinct advantages, these are not necessarily visible to the end-users. However, any loss of client-server like features that the users are accustomed to and changes to the usability are not taken kindly and make the user buy-in difficult.

Code Inspection Tool SetUpgrade to 10g/11g and DS10g is not the most challenging technological undertaking, but using our services and expertise can make it significantly easier, and better, without having to invest your own team’s time and energy, and without having to learn through costly mistakes.

At Enflexis we have executed large upgrades to the latest Oracle releases. Our best practices, methodology and migration assistance tools, tried and tested on real projects, can make a difference to your Oracle upgrade project. Not only do we perform the migrations faster, enable the use of newer features and provide solutions to reintroduce client-server like features in the web enabled environment, we provide a distinct quality assurance approach that significantly reduces the dependence on quality control and testing.

We have invested in building methodologies and tools that address the real issues in migrations that need to be addressed after the automated tools have done their job.

Oracle DB Upgrade

The upgrade of the database is a critical step in the upgrade process. While a plain vanilla “copy book” approach will perform the technical upgrade in a simple way our experience suggests that most clients need to deploy the advanced features of the new release, re-organize the database to overcome known issues and improve database performance.

Our database migration methodology includes script based collection of information from existing databases, analysis of existing database, identification of issues, database re-organization, deployment solution preparation, identification of encryption needs and review and improvements of backup/restore processes, to name a few. Our database administrators make it simpler for you to decide on how best to harness the latest features of the Oracle DB in your environment.

Obsolete Call Replaced with Equivalent in 10gMigrating Forms to 10g can pose challenges beyond the obsolete calls that are well documented. Every once in a while Forms and Menus start crashing after migration, and with no meaningful error messages available it becomes a developer’s nightmare to figure out the root cause and fix it. More often than not, the source is a piece of code that fails the strict rules of the new release. Similarly, there are cases where the error and the code that failed are shown but the code is simply not visible in the PL/SQL Editor of the Developer Suite. Some of these issues can take many person days of effort to fix, not to mention the frustration and productivity loss it can cause.

At Enflexis we therefore developed a code (deep inspection) tool that locates such difficult-to-debug and near-impossible-to-locate code in minutes, not days, by zeroing in on the code in its most elemental form.

Oracle Reports

Printing in the web enabled Forms/Menus environment is different from the client server environments. This impacts users, and they are not necessarily glad about it. Providing the simplicity of client-server printing requires some innovation and some best practices.

At Enflexis, we have built simple and effective frameworks to address the Oracle Reports, parameter form and printing issues. With Enflexis doing an upgrade your printing requirements will be the least of your concerns.

Example of Graphical Code AnalysisThe data migration strategy to move data to the new environment needs to be well thought out and tested to meet the requirements well ahead of the actual cut-over date. Also, effective ways to determine the correctness and completeness of the migration need to be put in place.

At Enflexis, we recognize the importance of data migration and have developed alternate frameworks that can be used to choose the right strategy and methodology depending on factors like permissible down-time of the database, size of the database, extent of re-organization/restructuring required, impact on other integrated applications, etc.

Data Obfuscation

Databases contain privileged, sensitive and proprietary information that cannot be sent out of the premises. This poses a challenge when outsourcing the migration and upgrade work since the migration and upgrade tasks need the schema to be available and some data is required to unit test the migrated objects. The most common approach adopted is to extract a small consistent subset of data from the Test or Development environment and obfuscate or scramble or depersonalize it. In reality, few organizations have such extraction scripts or scrambling routines readily available.

At Enflexis, we have built a framework and set of methods that enable us to work with minimal inputs from the application specialist to build the extraction and obfuscation routines, and build a Sample Database containing the complete schema, consistent data and access privilege settings that can be safely sent out of the premises.

Example of Code Analysis DataTesting of the upgraded and migrated application cannot be eliminated. However, testing cannot be 100% and the cost of testing can be significant.

At Enflexis we give special emphasis to Quality Assurance in our methodology. We have developed an innovative toolset that allows us to perform 100% code inspection of Forms, Menus, PLLs and Reports. So, while you will surely test the application we can provide you hard evidence that all the code that was required to be modified has been modified and no code has been inadvertently deleted, added or modified.

There are numerous other major and minor things that need to be taken care of to make the migration and upgrade a complete success. Addressed proactively, these steps can prevent common mistakes and provide more control during the User Acceptance Test phase, thus reducing stress and time and cost overruns.

At Enflexis we have built our best practices to proactively investigate and fix most of the potential issues. From simple things like icon files to more complex issues like performance management, we address the whole range of issues in the process to ensure a smooth and trouble free project.