Oracle Apps – Analysis of the Files and Filesystems

Continuing my analysis of Oracle Apps R12.  This time, the actual files on the server.  There are over 1/2 million files in APPL_TOP and COMMON_TOP!  Wow!

—————-

On my installation of Apps R12, there is:

APPL_TOP
/oapps/applmgr/VIS/apps/apps_st/appl

COMMON_TOP
/oapps/applmgr/VIS/apps/apps_st/comn/

ORACLE_HOME
/oapps/oracle/VIS/db/tech_st/11.1.0

—————-

The top parts of the directory structure:

find /oapps  -maxdepth 5 -type d

Why Is Your Software Such Crap??!!!

Recently I had the idea of copying some old VHS cassettes that I have, into MPEG files on disk, and then upload them to Youtube.  Simple enough, right?

I did manage to get the transfer to MPEG files to work ok.  It’s so much easier working with MPEG files than dealing with tapes.  Interestingly enough, I’m told some companies still use tapes for backups.  And I still wonder, why??  Disk is so cheap now, and has so many advantages.  Would you ever transfer your MPEG files to VHS cassettes?

The Simple Design I Was Looking For:

I knew that for Youtube, I would have to split up the MPEG files into shorter 10 minute segments.  What I was thinking of, was something that I’ve already seen.  The software would take a long mpeg file:

Design a la Steve Jobs

Today I saw an article interviewing John Sculley, former CEO of Apple.  He spoke about the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs, and a lot about, Design.  I loved many of the things he said.   Here are some excerpts:

Steve, from the moment I met him, always loved beautiful products, especially hardware. He came to my house, and he was fascinated, because I had special hinges and locks designed for doors. I had studied as an industrial designer, and the thing that connected Steve and me was industrial design. It wasn’t computing.

Steve had this perspective that always started with the user’s experience; and that industrial design was an incredibly important part of that user impression. He recruited me to Apple because he believed the computer was eventually going to become a consumer product. That was an outrageous idea back in the early 1980s. He felt the computer was going to change the world, and it was going to become what he called “the bicycle for the mind.”

Consuming Huge Amounts Of Unstructured Data

The recent presentation about Oracle Data Storage started me thinking about data.  I’ve worked with the Oracle database since 1995.  Lots of structured data in fields, tables and databases.  A certain amount of my job has been to turn these large amounts of data into usable information.  The result of which itself may in fact be unstructured, such as “the trend is …”.

But when I think of it, so much of what I actually consume and interact with, is in fact, very unstructured.  I started making a list of everything.

So much Content on the Web!

Google
Blogs and feedback
Webpages, articles, including animated GIF files that help explain things
News
Linked IN