Oracle waives fees on extended support offerings

Oracle President Charles Phillips pleasantly surprised Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) Collaborate 09 attendees this morning during his keynote with the decision to waive Extended Support fees for a number of product lines through 2010 and 2011.

As customers and prospects face one of the worst global economic crises, proactive relief on support and maintenance fees could not come at a better time. Summary details of the program can be found below

Oracle's move to address the support issue may stem from a variety of reasons but the main focus centers around improving the vendor-client relationship for a few reasons:

Responding to the global economic crisis. Oracle has taken the initiative in listening to customers, partners, and industry watchers about customer reactions to the escalating costs of software maintenance. Oracle's Applications Unlimited and Lifetime Support Programs have been successful in retaining acquired customers and have shown customers that acquisitions need not be slash and burn with minimal reinvestment.
Providing more time for customers to adopt Fusion Apps. With the slow down, Oracle may be anticipating slower upgrade rates. While no clear date and product road map has been communicated to customers, removing the price pressure on extended support fees provides customers with some breathing room on upgrade timing.
Mitigating attention on high profit margins and its M&A strategy. After touting record profit margins near 50% and continuing its M&A strategy with the announcement to acquire Sun, customers have become concerned about the impact of less choice in the market. This move may appease regulators and industry watchers and show that Oracle has some self regulating policies.
The bottom line - user groups should now determine the minimum R&D percentage of investment from revenues

Oracle continues to gain economies of scale with each acquisition. The good news - Oracle has the capacity to reinvest $2.6B per year into R&D and the real dollar amount has increased from 1.9B in 2006. While this is a large figure, the bigger and more important issue - what percentage of the maintenance revenues have been reinvested?

Here's where we find a slight drop from 12.6% to about 11.6% in 2008. Consequently, like SAP's users and user groups, OAUG and the other Oracle users and user groups should begin to track the ratio of R&D dollars that tie back to the amount of maintenance revenue. In fact, they may want to take a look at the SUGEN KPI's and see if they are applicable to Oracle's environment.

based on :
http://www.oracle.com/profit/features/support.html?msgid=7642415

Grating roles after creating table/views/synonyms in Peoplesoft

When ever there database changes in migrations, Admin need to update the customized grants to the tables /views /synonyms in oracle.

This can be automated with sciprt below :

This script helps to create public synonyms , reanalyze the tables that got modified with data. Also provide the grants to roles with new objects

I just mentioned the broad steps to follow to automate ;

-- Create roles

select 'create role xxxx;' from dual

-- Create public synonyms

select 'create public synonym ' || table_name || ' for ' || owner || '.' || table_name || ';'
from dba_tables a
where owner = 'user1'
and not exists (select 'x'
from dba_synonyms b
where b.owner = 'PUBLIC'
and b.synonym_name = a.table_name
and b.table_owner = a.owner
and b.table_name = a.table_name)
union
select 'create public synonym ' || view_name || ' for ' || owner || '.' || view_name || ';'
from dba_views a
where owner = 'user1'
and not exists (select 'x'
from dba_synonyms b
where b.owner = 'PUBLIC'
and b.synonym_name = a.view_name
and b.table_owner = a.owner
and b.table_name = a.view_name)


-- Analyze tables

-- Grant select to xxxx
select 'grant select on ' || owner || '.' || object_name || ' to xxxx;'
from dba_objects
where owner = 'user1'