In November 2021, we reviewed the major changes coming with Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12.2.11. This post completes a series that has taken a more in-depth look at the new release including modern UI changes and functional innovations in Release 12.2.11.
For the final installment of this series, we’ll detail the changes in Oracle EBS Release 12.2.11 that add operational efficiency.
Customers Moving to OCI
Oracle’s announcement about EBS Release 12.2.11 notes that in 2021 they saw many of their customers move on-premises EBS environments to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Oracle recognized that many enterprises were skeptical of public cloud and its ability to safeguard and host critical enterprise and legacy applications. OCI has been the answer to that skepticism, offering an enterprise-grade public cloud created specifically to run enterprise applications and databases. Oracle also recognized the obstacles many organizations face when trying to move on-prem apps to the cloud. EBS Release 12.2.11 helps address that. The company has invested in provisioning to help businesses set up new environments and to help with the lift-and-shift of fully configured EBS systems to the cloud environment. The new release also aids with lifecycle management so, once on OCI, those tasks are automated. Elasticity features aid with scaling up and down cloud capacity.
In September 2021, Oracle added discovery features to EBS Cloud Manager. Those features help discover manually migrated environments and use EBS Cloud Manager automation capabilities. This version can update data in Cloud Manager even when updates and upgrades weren’t done through Cloud Manager. Once environments are discovered, Cloud Manager can manage them from that point forward. Oracle offers detailed guidance for deploying EBS on OCI and for preparing the tenancy for the first set of Oracle EBS environments.
Modernizing Database Architecture
With this release, Oracle has modernized its database architecture using the latest standards to improve how EBS interacts with databases. Part of that includes using public APIs. This release introduces a new EBS System Schema Architecture to optimize system privileges.
Following the new standards and implementing the new schema architecture have resulted in:
- Improved separation of duties and security
- Certification of Unified Auditing
- Simpler integration with Oracle Database Vault
- Easier and cleaner adoption of new database features
- Faster database certifications with new database releases
- Enablement of planned certification with Oracle Autonomous Database
As we noted back in our November article about this release, Oracle’s intention is to get customers to migrate to Oracle Autonomous Database. EBS is currently incompatible with Autonomous. Yet the new release, and AD-TXK Delta 13 specifically, introduces a new schema that will replace the current practice of deploying objects in the SYS and SYSTEM database schemas and effectively decouples EBS from the core database. Customers will be required to migrate any objects that currently reside in those schemas to the EBS_SYSTEM schema, the APPS schema, or the APPS_NE schema, depending on the object type.
Why does this matter? EBS admin actions (such as running adop, adadmin and other utilities) will ask for the EBS_SYSTEM password instead of the SYSTEM password. Anything previously run by the SYS or SYSTEM accounts will now be run by EBS_SYSTEM. After migration, access to the SYS and SYSTEM accounts and Oracle database server operating system is no longer required for EBS administration. This change could mean that Amazon RDS will become a viable option for EBS.
These changes also mean that updating grants becomes a two-step process. An Oracle DBA executes the first step, which is connecting as SYS to grant privileges to the EBS_SYSTEM account by running adgrants.sql. An Oracle Apps DBA executes the second step using the EBS_SYSTEM account and runs apps_adgrants.sh to grant required privileges to the APPS account. What does this mean? Currently, an issue with EBS technology is that database certifications take a long time. The new model cuts that time significantly, which means customers can adopt new features faster. We find this to be one of the more exciting changes with the new release and we plan to discuss the implications of it in more detail in a future piece.