Oracle E-Business Suite and Delphix conceptual overview

This topic provides a conceptual overview of the integration between the Delphix Continuous Data Engine and Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS).

Why use the Delphix Continuous Data Engine with the Oracle E-Business Suite?

Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) offers a multitude of enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) applications useful for running a business. Typical EBS instances are consumed horizontally across an organization but managed on-site by an IT organization. Most businesses hire consultants or in-house developers to customize these instances to fit business needs.

Production EBS instances are critical to many business processes; EBS is expected to be always available and functioning correctly. An IT organization's EBS team is responsible for maintaining this production instance: this team monitors the instance and manages how software modifications are integrated. Common EBS software modifications include patches provided by Oracle or new application logic provided by consultants or in-house developers.

However, before making a software modification to their production EBS instance, most EBS teams vet the modification. These teams typically maintain a series of non-production copies of their production EBS instance to use for the vetting process. To vet a modification, the EBS team will modify a non-production instance in an attempt to identify bugs in the modification that might lead to incorrect functionality, performance regressions, or downtime. Once a modification has been installed and tested successfully, it is considered vetted and the EBS team makes the same modification to the production instance. 

The problem with this process is that maintaining non-production copies of EBS is costly. EBS teams not only need to provision and maintain resources for each copy, they also must update each copy to match production every time production itself is modified. This process takes two hours at a minimum and can take up to a week or more.

The Delphix Continuous Data Engine can alleviate much of the pain around managing non-production copies of Oracle E-Business Suite. You can link a production EBS instance to the Delphix Continuous Data Engine and use the engine to provision virtual copies. These virtual copies lower storage costs associated with non-production. They also drastically reduce the amount of active attention required from the EBS team. When a change is made to the production EBS instance, the Delphix Continuous Data Engine can synchronize its copy; all virtual EBS instances can then be refreshed to match this new version of the production. The process of refreshing a virtual EBS instance is fully automated, so an EBS team no longer needs to invest copious amounts of time refreshing non-production instances manually.

In addition, the Delphix Continuous Data Engine can take snapshots of virtual EBS instances in known healthy states so that you can easily roll back risky modifications while vetting them. This functionality provides modern version control semantics for a process that previously had none.

Overview of linking and provisioning Oracle EBS

The Oracle EBS Suite as described here can be virtualized using  Delphix Continuous Data Engine. We can virtualize the Application Tier and Database Tier. The Database Tier is made up of two different datasets: the Oracle Database and the Database Technology Stack herewards referred as DBTechstack. The Application Tier (AppsTier) and Database Technology Stack (DBTechstack) is managed by the Oracle EBS connector while the Oracle Database is managed by the Oracle connector. The Delphix Continuous Data Engine can also manage custom extensions and plug-ins.

The process of linking EBS data involves creating multiple dSources:

• a dSource for the DBTechstack

• a dSource for the Oracle database used by EBS

• a dSource for the AppsTier

These dSources are collectively referred to as EBS dSources. They are also the source datasets from which you can provision virtual EBS instances.

The process of provisioning a virtual EBS instance involves provisioning from each of these dSources separately to the proper environments in sequence. You can add custom configuration logic to the Delphix Continuous Data Engine for each EBS instance such that the linking, provisioning, and refresh processes are fully automated.

The connector versions for AppsTier and DB Tech Stack need to be the same, at installation and through the upgrade. Installation and usage of different versions of these connectors are not supported and may encounter operational issues.

DBTechStack dataset

ORACLE_HOME is referred to as DBTechstack. The source DBTechstack(ORACLE_HOME) is linked using the Delphix Continuous Data Engine's EBS connector. The linking process runs pre-clone(adpreclone utility) logic to ensure the readiness of EBS configuration for data capture. When you provision EBS, the Delphix Continuous Data Engine automates post-clone configuration such that a copy of the DBTechstack is available for use on the target dbTier server with no additional effort. You can add this copy of the DBTechstack to the Delphix Continuous Data Engine as an Oracle installation home and use it to host an EBS virtual database (VDB).

Database dataset

The database dSource is linked and ingested using the Delphix Continuous Data Engine's native Oracle data source functionality. This dSource contains database data files that EBS is currently using. For more information about managing Oracle databases, refer Oracle data sources.

AppsTier dataset

The AppsTier is linked using the Delphix Continuous Data Engine's EBS support: the linking process automatically runs pre-clone logic to ensure EBS configuration is always appropriately staged at the time of data capture. When you provision EBS, the Delphix Continuous Data Engine will automate post-clone configuration such that a copy of the AppsTier is available for use on the target AppsTier server. This virtual copy of the AppsTier will connect to the provisioned EBS virtual database (VDB).

Sequence of provisioning

Unlike linking of data sources which can be done in any order or parallelly, provisioning the EBS application has to be done in a specific order mentioned below:

How does it work?

The Delphix Continuous Data Engine's linking and provisioning logic follows the Direct Ingestion architecture. More information about this architecture method can be found in the Direct Ingestion section

The Delphix Engine's linking and provisioning logic follows the Oracle-recommended cloning procedures outlined in the following Oracle Support documents found at http://docs.oracle.com:

• Cloning Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 with Rapid Clone (Doc ID 1383621.1)

• Cloning Oracle Applications Release 12 with Rapid Clone (Doc ID 406982.1)