An upgrade to Oracle 11g (or any database upgrade for that matter) requires careful attention to planning and documentation, as Maria Anderson pointed out in her session on upgrading to 11g at Collaborate.

Maria strongly recommended keeping a document with all the contact information of people working on the upgrade, commands and stop and start times. It serves as an audit trail for compliance purposes, helps with change management and lets you easily retrace your steps if something goes wrong.

Well, Maria was kind enough to share the template she used for her 11g upgrade. You can download it here for your own use.

And, if you have any suggestions for other useful information to include or comments about how documentation helped (or saved!) your upgrade project, please share them.

I caught an interesting session this week at Collaborate with Floyd Teter, who’s with the Jet Propulsion Lab, a bunch of scientists in Pasadena, Calif. working for NASA.

Teter’s presentation mirrored much of what I’d heard in an earlier session Nadia Bendjedou’s “10 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for Fusion Applications.” That presentation has apparently been making the rounds. It’s been done before with some tweaking, such as the 10 Things PeopleSoft users can do … and 10 things E-Business Suite customers… sessions we’ve covered before, yet it’s a useful one, nonetheless.

Teter’s session has one major difference, however. He’s actually a customer preparing a roadmap to Fusion applications for his business.

Well, one major difference and one minor difference. Teter’s is a much more humorous presentation (be sure to carefully read his “safe harbor statement” if you’re ever in one of his sessions). In addition to serving as systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Teter is the chair of the OAUG’s Fusion Council so he’s pretty attuned to what’s happening. His roadmap is based largely on the aforementioned “10 steps” presentation. He advocates a small, incremental approach. Still, there are some differences.

First of all, there are some things that make the Jet Propulsion Lab unique. A scientific organization, it works on consensus– everyone has to agree– so projects can take a long time. Additionally, it’s not chasing customers, it’s chasing government funding that tends to go down each year, Teter said. Each business owner can make their own business process, so integration and flexibility are very important. Primarily an Oracle shop, the lab runs E-Business Suite 11.5, but “whether you’re on JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, E-Business Suite or Siebel, it doesn’t matter,” Teter said. Preparation is key.

Teter offered a few more nuggets during his session:

Last year, much of the attention at Collaborate focused on new features coming in database 11g.

Now that it’s been released and digested by early adopters and beta testers, people are getting a handle on what they like. Case sensitive passwords in the database seem to be an early winner at sessions here in Denver.

It was one thing Daniel Morgan, of the University of Washington, an Oracle ACE director and beta tester, mentioned in a session he led “11g New Features for Application DBAs and Developers.”

“They have now changed passwords to be case sensitive and it’s about time they did,” Morgan, a member of the Puget Sound Oracle User Group, said. “One of the problems we’ve had for a long time is case sensitivity. People could put them in any way and they seemed to work.”

It also caught the attention of Maria Anderson, of Petro Canada, who led a session on avoiding the pitfalls of an 11g upgrade (we’ll be posting an article on that session later this week).

Real application testing has been a hot topic with 11g as well, but something Oracle is doing just fine getting the word out itself.

“I figure Oracle sales people are really good at their job, they can talk about real application testing,” Morgan said.

Another feature that stands out for Morgan is the flashback archive.

“This is one of the best new features in 11g,” he said. “Flashback archive solves a problem that came with the creation of flashback.

“Every table we’ve done in Oracle has always been a query as of system change number — a point in time. With 10g Oracle introduced flashback query so we could see as of particular time stamp.”

For example, a DBA who forgot to run a daily report at 9 a.m. for their manager could use flashback query at 2 p.m. and set the parameters to get the 9 a.m. information.

“With 11g, flashback archive allows you to take undo information as it’s evaporating out of undo table space and put it into an archive and track it,” Morgan said. “You can check it as far as 100 years back.”

Oracle may not be done yet.

In his opening keynote address at Collaborate ‘08 here in Denver, Oracle president Charles Phillips outlined Oracle’s strategy to dominate the database, middleware and applications markets.

The database market seems to be well in hand. To applause from the audience, Phillips cited recent Gartner figures that said last year was the first time Oracle had more database market share than IBM and Microsoft combined.

“If you’re an Oracle database customer, you can rest easy,” Phillips said.

Not that there was much chance of Oracle’s database business folding. Nonetheless the 7,000 members of Oracle’s three major user groups, the Independent Oracle User Group, the Oracle Applications User Group and Quest, still like to hear that their vendor is staying aggressive.

Oracle needs the user groups to help keep people informed, Phillips told the audience. No small task considering there are now 6,000 products at Oracle and more companies are joining the fold every day, willingly or unwillingly, a point Phillips joked about in his address.

“There’s a new person almost every day at Oracle because of the acquisitions,” he said. “So if you’re not a customer yet, we’ll get you sooner or later.”

That’s what happened with BEA. Five years ago, Oracle decided to enter the middleware market, perfect timing given the emergence of the Internet and industry integration standards.

“Now we’re over $1 billion in revenue [in middleware],” he said. “We surpassed BEA and now we get to buy them. That’s the way it works.”

The moment also presented Phillips with an opportunity to brag about Oracle’s application integration architecture (AIA) strategy announced last year at the show. AIA provides packaged, SOA technology, built on standards-based middleware, to integrate Oracle applications. Initial packages focused on some of the most common integrations, like order to cash integrations between Siebel and Oracle E-Business Suite. More packaged integrations will be released later this year.

An Oracle address can’t go by without a swipe at SAP — and AIA provided Phillips the perfect opportunity.

“If we don’t have [the integration] you want, you can take the platform yourself and build it,” he said. “That includes legacy applications and the mother of all legacy applications, of course, is SAP. In the course of all these acquisitions, [companies] are finding they’re Oracle applications shops now, they’re just using SAP for general ledger.”

Future development, Phillips said, will focus on marrying Web 2.0 features into both Oracle’s enterprise and industry-specific applications.

“You look at off-the-shelf applications and off-the-shelf is only about a third of what you do every day,” he said. “We hadn’t been addressing these industries.”

Finally, in the one bit of news released yesterday, Phillips announced Oracle is extending Premium Support for Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 another year later than planned, to November 2010.

“When we said we were going to end support, we heard you’re not quite ready to upgrade,” he said. “Based on the input you’re giving us we do listen, we do react.”

Duncan Jones at Forrester recently published some interesting research on best practices for negotiating with Oracle.

It’s primarily based on the experiences of a group of Forrester clients that have had some success in their negotiations. A key factor, as Jones points out, is that Oracle’s size — and its centralized oversight of even the smallest of concessions — requires that organizations be patient during negotiations.

It also bolsters what I’ve heard around the industry (from SAP in particular, no real shock) that Oracle sales reps are … tough negotiators.

Oracle deployments, be they database, middleware or applications, are a big, costly undertaking and it’s important negotiations are done right. That doesn’t necessarily just mean inexpensively for you — it could mean agreeing on just the right language about support or winning a concession around a specific technology. Consider for example Oracle’s approach to virtualization and VMWare, another hot topic lately that our friends over at SearchServerVirtualization have been all over.

I’m curious (as I’m sure others are) about what kind of experiences the SearchOracle.com community has had with Oracle negotiations. Is the mega vendor’s tough reputation deserved? Did you win some concessions and if so, how? What were you looking for and what was Oracle particularly staunch in defending?

– Barney Beal

Like peanut butter and chocolate, the City by the Bay and Oracle’s massive (and getting bigger every minute) user conference seem to be two great things that go great together, but it may not stay that way.

According to a report in the San Francisco Business Times, (subscription only except for the top three paragraphs) Oracle was close to moving OpenWorld to another city before a  mayoral delegation stepped in to offer improved terms. The show will stay in San Francisco through 2008. However, there are no promises past then and the show may in fact move.

Those who have been to the event know just how big it’s gotten in recent years, particularly since Oracle began its acquisition spree. How big an impact does it make? According to the story, the show brings in $60 million to the city economy and $10 million in tax revenue. All those brownies, bottled waters and laptop bags add up apparently.

– Barney