Have you ever tried to debug an SQR and needed a way to know which procedures were being executed in which order?  Well, here's an easy way to add show statements at the start of each procedure wrapped in a "#DEBUGF" tag so you can activate it with a -debugf on the command line:

Open the SQR in UltraEdit.

Click Advanced > Configuration.  Then when the Configuration window appears Expand the Search menu and click Regular Expression Engine.  Set the Legacy Regular Expression Engine to "Unix Style Regular Expressions."  Click OK to confirm the change.

Click Search > Replace.  The Replace dialog window will appear.

Enter the following Regular Expression in the Text field:

^[\s]*Begin-Procedure[\s]+([\S]+)$

Enter the following Regular Expression in the Replace With field:

Begin-Procedure \1^p#DEBUGF show 'Procedure:  \1'

Check the "Regular expressions" check box.

Click the Replace All button.

I'm using Ultra Edit 12.20, so you may have to adjust this process accordingly.

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Don’t you just love production support?  There’s nothing like waking up in the morning, finishing your coffee, and not having a flippin’ clue what’s about to happen.

It’s been another one of those days, so I thought I’d share some of the problems I’ve looked at and their solutions.

Issue#1: Nvision Drilldown throws error "Error occurred during initialization of VM Could not reserve enough space for object heap"

Solution #1: This turned out to be related to some patches that were applied to our PSNT server over the weekend.  Our NT admin identified a hotfix and is in the process of applying it.

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Quotable Quotes

A good listener helps us overhear ourselves.  –Yahia Lababidi

He that would have fruit must climb the tree.  –Thomas Fuller

If you compare yourself to others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.  –Max Ehrmann

Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.  –Malcolm Forbes

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.  –Peter Drucker

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.  –Albert Einstein

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.  –Eleanor Roosevelt

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given.  –Anton Chekhov

How soon ‘not now’ becomes ‘never’.  –Martin Luther

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand.  Good programmers write code that humans can understand.  –Martin Fowler

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Quotable Quotes

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.  –Oliver Wendell Holmes

We have more ability than will power, and it is often an excuse to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible.  –François de la Rochefoucauld

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds you down or polishes you up depends on what you're made of.  –Jacob M. Braude

It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required.  –Ivan Goncharov

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.  –Robert Louis Stevenson

The only correct actions are those that demand no explanation and no apology.  –Red Auerbach

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Quotable Quotes

Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely, and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world.  –Charles Eames

Don't fight forces; use them.  –Buckminster Fuller

A day of worry is more exhausting than a week of work.  –John Lubbock

To be prepared is half the victory.  –Miguel de Cervantes

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.  –William Ellery Channing

All of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon—instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.  –Dale Carnegie

The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally new development.  –Alfred North Whitehead

Life is full of obstacle illusions.  –Grant Frazier

We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.  –E. Merrill Root

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How do you "roll your own" Tax Updates for HR and Financials?

Besides being able to upgrade at some point in the future and production support insurance, getting regular Tax Updates is one of the reasons companies give for not cancelling their support.  I’ll bet it’s not all that hard.

If I was a new college IT grad, would I want to learn PeopleSoft?

Okay, I really do like the PeopleSoft products.  But I got a call today from a recent college grad wanting some help with installing the PeopleSoft CD’s.  She asked how long it would take to learn PeopleSoft, because she noticed there were a lot of PeopleSoft jobs posted and thought it would be a good thing to know.  After explaining how PeopleSoft is a very broad and deep application and how she’d have to pick an area and specialize in that, I felt like I needed to give her the bigger picture.  PeopleSoft’s product line has a finite future.  The language is proprietary and specific to PeopleSoft applications.  Oracle isn’t investing in it the way PeopleSoft used to.  Applications Unlimited notwithstanding, the state of the art ERP application will be Fusion in the foreseeable future.  As much as I hated to, I told her she might look at SAP if she wanted to learn a product that’s likely to be in demand 10+ years down the road.

How much downward rate pressure (if any) are you independent consultants seeing out there?

What I've heard so far isn't too encouraging.

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So you are tasked with a maintenance pack install, or worse yet, a full blown upgrade.  You follow the upgrade procedures as best you can understand them.  You are at the step where you have run the compare reports, and are waiting for the developers to look over the reports.  Sure, they cursed at the fact that you wasted five hours of the print queue and half the trees Johnny Appleseed managed to plant, but the real fact is they have to shift through 1000’s of pages of compare reports that are meaningless due to their size.

What your developers need is a simple Excel list of all objects changed, which ones were custom work, and who the last developer was who touched the object.  This last point is crucial.  The work can be divided up quickly, if only we knew who last touched the object.  This becomes paramount when the system is shared by multiple development teams (as in HRMS and Campus Solutions).  Fortunately, it’s possible to write an SQL to give the developers what they need because the majority of App Designer objects have a field called “lastupdoprid” which holds the user who last saved that object in the current environment.  The delivered compare reports utilize this field as follows: if the userid is not equal to PPLSOFT, then the object has been updated by a customer site (and the asterisk will be used to indicate the delivered object has been modified).

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Tim Jones is an IT practitioner with many years of experience, and a good friend of mine.  He puts together a monthly newsletter about trends and interesting stories surrounding software development and testing.  I finally got around to asking him if I could republish it here for the benefit of the PeopleSoft Corner community, and he graciously agreed.   I hope you find it as valuable of a resource as I do.  Please click the Read More link to see the complete newsletter.  If you would like to see more, back issues (back to 1999) are available at http://swtest.workshopmultimedia.com/.

May 2009 Newsletter

Quotable Quotes

 Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else.  –Ivern Ball

 Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.  –Jonathan Kozol

 The person who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.  –Chinese proverb

 The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.  –Nikola Tesla

 Our actions are the results of our intentions and our intelligence.  –E. Stanley Jones

 Never neglect details. When everyone's mind is dulled or distracted, the leader must be doubly vigilant.  –Colin Powell

 There is only one you... Don't you dare change just because you're outnumbered!  –Charles Swindoll

 Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.  –Aesop

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Charles Phillips announced today at Collaborate 09 that Extended Support fees would be waived for the PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9 releases through June 2011. Extended support adds about 10% to the Premier Support, so that'll bring a bit of relief to IT budgets.

I believe that Extended Support is for products that have been released for five years or more.  It's interesting that after five years release 8.9 is only one release back from being current.  From a consulting perspective it's been nice to relax a bit from the biennial task of getting up to speed on a new release, but I have to wonder if PeopleSoft customers are getting as much value from their support dollars as they used to.  Either way I think Oracle is doing the right thing by not charging extra for supporting this not-so-outdated release.

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Sun Microsystems today has agreed to be bought by Oracle in a $7.4bn deal, just two weeks after IBM’s bid for Sun fell apart.  The acquisition gives Oracle some powerful assets to attack Microsoft and IBM on new fronts.

This deal will give Oracle control of MySQL (the “M” in the LAMP development platform”), and a lower-end competitor to Oracle’s flagship database product.  Oracle also gains control of Java, which is the software platform that Oracle’s Fusion Enterprise Applications due to be released in 2010 will run on.  Open Office, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, is now owned by the world's largest Enterprise Applications company. 

Sun manufactures servers based on the SPARC chips and the Solaris operating system.  I have been told that in the past Oracle has built its database on Sun servers, and ported it to other platforms.  Oracle may be looking to achieve more vertical integration with the hardware that it runs on.  That thought seems to be supported by this quote from Larry Ellison:

The acquisition combines best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems. Oracle plans to engineer and deliver an integrated system—applications to disk—where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Customers benefit as their system integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.

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