Podcasts about oracle cloud applications

In a new season of the Oracle University Podcast, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham dive into the world of Oracle GoldenGate 23ai, a cutting-edge software solution for data management. They are joined by Nick Wagner, a seasoned expert in database replication, who provides a comprehensive overview of this powerful tool.   Nick highlights GoldenGate's ability to ensure continuous operations by efficiently moving data between databases and platforms with minimal overhead. He emphasizes its role in enabling real-time analytics, enhancing data security, and reducing costs by offloading data to low-cost hardware. The discussion also covers GoldenGate's role in facilitating data sharing, improving operational efficiency, and reducing downtime during outages.   Oracle GoldenGate 23ai: Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-goldengate-23ai-fundamentals/145884/237273 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ---------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:25 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston: Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi everyone! Welcome to a new season of the podcast. This time, we're focusing on the fundamentals of Oracle GoldenGate. Oracle GoldenGate helps organizations manage and synchronize their data across diverse systems and databases in real time.  And with the new Oracle GoldenGate 23ai release, we'll uncover the latest innovations and features that empower businesses to make the most of their data. Nikita: Taking us through this is Nick Wagner, Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle GoldenGate. He's been doing database replication for about 25 years and has been focused on GoldenGate on and off for about 20 of those years.  01:18 Lois: In today's episode, we'll ask Nick to give us a general overview of the product, along with some use cases and benefits. Hi Nick! To start with, why do customers need GoldenGate? Nick: Well, it delivers continuous operations, being able to continuously move data from one database to another database or data platform in efficiently and a high-speed manner, and it does this with very low overhead. Almost all the GoldenGate environments use transaction logs to pull the data out of the system, so we're not creating any additional triggers or very little overhead on that source system. GoldenGate can also enable real-time analytics, being able to pull data from all these different databases and move them into your analytics system in real time can improve the value that those analytics systems provide. Being able to do real-time statistics and analysis of that data within those high-performance custom environments is really important. 02:13 Nikita: Does it offer any benefits in terms of cost?  Nick: GoldenGate can also lower IT costs. A lot of times people run these massive OLTP databases, and they are running reporting in those same systems. With GoldenGate, you can offload some of the data or all the data to a low-cost commodity hardware where you can then run the reports on that other system. So, this way, you can get back that performance on the OLTP system, while at the same time optimizing your reporting environment for those long running reports. You can improve efficiencies and reduce risks. Being able to reduce the amount of downtime during planned and unplanned outages can really make a big benefit to the overall operational efficiencies of your company.  02:54 Nikita: What about when it comes to data sharing and data security? Nick: You can also reduce barriers to data sharing. Being able to pull subsets of data, or just specific pieces of data out of a production database and move it to the team or to the group that needs that information in real time is very important. And it also protects the security of your data by only moving in the information that they need and not the entire database. It also provides extensibility and flexibility, being able to support multiple different replication topologies and architectures. 03:24 Lois: Can you tell us about some of the use cases of GoldenGate? Where does GoldenGate truly shine?  Nick: Some of the more traditional use cases of GoldenGate include use within the multicloud fabric. Within a multicloud fabric, this essentially means that GoldenGate can replicate data between on-premise environments, within cloud environments, or hybrid, cloud to on-premise, on-premise to cloud, or even within multiple clouds. So, you can move data from AWS to Azure to OCI. You can also move between the systems themselves, so you don't have to use the same database in all the different clouds. For example, if you wanted to move data from AWS Postgres into Oracle running in OCI, you can do that using Oracle GoldenGate. We also support maximum availability architectures. And so, there's a lot of different use cases here, but primarily geared around reducing your recovery point objective and recovery time objective. 04:20 Lois: Ah, reducing RPO and RTO. That must have a significant advantage for the customer, right? Nick: So, reducing your RPO and RTO allows you to take advantage of some of the benefits of GoldenGate, being able to do active-active replication, being able to set up GoldenGate for high availability, real-time failover, and it can augment your active Data Guard and Data Guard configuration. So, a lot of times GoldenGate is used within Oracle's maximum availability architecture platinum tier level of replication, which means that at that point you've got lots of different capabilities within the Oracle Database itself. But to help eke out that last little bit of high availability, you want to set up an active-active environment with GoldenGate to really get true zero RPO and RTO. GoldenGate can also be used for data offloading and data hubs. Being able to pull data from one or more source systems and move it into a data hub, or into a data warehouse for your operational reporting. This could also be your analytics environment too. 05:22 Nikita: Does GoldenGate support online migrations? Nick: In fact, a lot of companies actually get started in GoldenGate by doing a migration from one platform to another. Now, these don't even have to be something as complex as going from one database like a DB2 on-premise into an Oracle on OCI, it could even be simple migrations. A lot of times doing something like a major application or a major database version upgrade is going to take downtime on that production system. You can use GoldenGate to eliminate that downtime. So this could be going from Oracle 19c to Oracle 23ai, or going from application version 1.0 to application version 2.0, because GoldenGate can do the transformation between the different application schemas. You can use GoldenGate to migrate your database from on premise into the cloud with no downtime as well. We also support real-time analytic feeds, being able to go from multiple databases, not only those on premise, but being able to pull information from different SaaS applications inside of OCI and move it to your different analytic systems. And then, of course, we also have the ability to stream events and analytics within GoldenGate itself.  06:34 Lois: Let's move on to the various topologies supported by GoldenGate. I know GoldenGate supports many different platforms and can be used with just about any database. Nick: This first layer of topologies is what we usually consider relational database topologies. And so this would be moving data from Oracle to Oracle, Postgres to Oracle, Sybase to SQL Server, a lot of different types of databases. So the first architecture would be unidirectional. This is replicating from one source to one target. You can do this for reporting. If I wanted to offload some reports into another server, I can go ahead and do that using GoldenGate. I can replicate the entire database or just a subset of tables. I can also set up GoldenGate for bidirectional, and this is what I want to set up GoldenGate for something like high availability. So in the event that one of the servers crashes, I can almost immediately reconnect my users to the other system. And that almost immediately depends on the amount of latency that GoldenGate has at that time. So a typical latency is anywhere from 3 to 6 seconds. So after that primary system fails, I can reconnect my users to the other system in 3 to 6 seconds. And I can do that because as GoldenGate's applying data into that target database, that target system is already open for read and write activity. GoldenGate is just another user connecting in issuing DML operations, and so it makes that failover time very low. 07:59 Nikita: Ok…If you can get it down to 3 to 6 seconds, can you bring it down to zero? Like zero failover time?   Nick: That's the next topology, which is active-active. And in this scenario, all servers are read/write all at the same time and all available for user activity. And you can do multiple topologies with this as well. You can do a mesh architecture, which is where every server talks to every other server. This works really well for 2, 3, 4, maybe even 5 environments, but when you get beyond that, having every server communicate with every other server can get a little complex. And so at that point we start looking at doing what we call a hub and spoke architecture, where we have lots of different spokes. At the end of each spoke is a read/write database, and then those communicate with a hub. So any change that happens on one spoke gets sent into the hub, and then from the hub it gets sent out to all the other spokes. And through that architecture, it allows you to really scale up your environments. We have customers that are doing up to 150 spokes within that hub architecture. Within active-active replication as well, we can do conflict detection and resolution, which means that if two users modify the same row on two different systems, GoldenGate can actually determine that there was an issue with that and determine what user wins or which row change wins, which is extremely important when doing active-active replication. And this means that if one of those systems fails, there is no downtime when you switch your users to another active system because it's already available for activity and ready to go. 09:35 Lois: Wow, that's fantastic. Ok, tell us more about the topologies. Nick: GoldenGate can do other things like broadcast, sending data from one system to multiple systems, or many to one as far as consolidation. We can also do cascading replication, so when data moves from one environment that GoldenGate is replicating into another environment that GoldenGate is replicating. By default, we ignore all of our own transactions. But there's actually a toggle switch that you can flip that says, hey, GoldenGate, even though you wrote that data into that database, still push it on to the next system. And then of course, we can also do distribution of data, and this is more like moving data from a relational database into something like a Kafka topic or a JMS queue or into some messaging service. 10:24 Raise your game with the Oracle Cloud Applications skills challenge. Get free training on Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, Oracle Modern Best Practice, and Oracle Cloud Success Navigator. Pass the free Oracle Fusion Cloud Foundations Associate exam to earn a Foundations Associate certification. Plus, there's a chance to win awards and prizes throughout the challenge! What are you waiting for? Join the challenge today by visiting visit oracle.com/education. 10:58 Nikita: Welcome back! Nick, does GoldenGate also have nonrelational capabilities?  Nick: We have a number of nonrelational replication events in topologies as well. This includes things like data lake ingestion and streaming ingestion, being able to move data and data objects from these different relational database platforms into data lakes and into these streaming systems where you can run analytics on them and run reports. We can also do cloud ingestion, being able to move data from these databases into different cloud environments. And this is not only just moving it into relational databases with those clouds, but also their data lakes and data fabrics. 11:38 Lois: You mentioned a messaging service earlier. Can you tell us more about that? Nick: Messaging replication is also possible. So we can actually capture from things like messaging systems like Kafka Connect and JMS, replicate that into a relational data, or simply stream it into another environment. We also support NoSQL replication, being able to capture from MongoDB and replicate it onto another MongoDB for high availability or disaster recovery, or simply into any other system. 12:06 Nikita: I see. And is there any integration with a customer's SaaS applications? Nick: GoldenGate also supports a number of different OCI SaaS applications. And so a lot of these different applications like Oracle Financials Fusion, Oracle Transportation Management, they all have GoldenGate built under the covers and can be enabled with a flag that you can actually have that data sent out to your other GoldenGate environment. So you can actually subscribe to changes that are happening in these other systems with very little overhead. And then of course, we have event processing and analytics, and this is the final topology or flexibility within GoldenGate itself. And this is being able to push data through data pipelines, doing data transformations. GoldenGate is not an ETL tool, but it can do row-level transformation and row-level filtering.  12:55 Lois: Are there integrations offered by Oracle GoldenGate in automation and artificial intelligence? Nick: We can do time series analysis and geofencing using the GoldenGate Stream Analytics product. It allows you to actually do real time analysis and time series analysis on data as it flows through the GoldenGate trails. And then that same product, the GoldenGate Stream Analytics, can then take the data and move it to predictive analytics, where you can run MML on it, or ONNX or other Spark-type technologies and do real-time analysis and AI on that information as it's flowing through.  13:29 Nikita: So, GoldenGate is extremely flexible. And given Oracle's focus on integrating AI into its product portfolio, what about GoldenGate? Does it offer any AI-related features, especially since the product name has “23ai” in it? Nick: With the advent of Oracle GoldenGate 23ai, it's one of the two products at this point that has the AI moniker at Oracle. Oracle Database 23ai also has it, and that means that we actually do stuff with AI. So the Oracle GoldenGate product can actually capture vectors from databases like MySQL HeatWave, Postgres using pgvector, which includes things like AlloyDB, Amazon RDS Postgres, Aurora Postgres. We can also replicate data into Elasticsearch and OpenSearch, or if the data is using vectors within OCI or the Oracle Database itself. So GoldenGate can be used for a number of things here. The first one is being able to migrate vectors into the Oracle Database. So if you're using something like Postgres, MySQL, and you want to migrate the vector information into the Oracle Database, you can. Now one thing to keep in mind here is a vector is oftentimes like a GPS coordinate. So if I need to know the GPS coordinates of Austin, Texas, I can put in a latitude and longitude and it will give me the GPS coordinates of a building within that city. But if I also need to know the altitude of that same building, well, that's going to be a different algorithm. And GoldenGate and replicating vectors is the same way. When you create a vector, it's essentially just creating a bunch of numbers under the screen, kind of like those same GPS coordinates. The dimension and the algorithm that you use to generate that vector can be different across different databases, but the actual meaning of that data will change. And so GoldenGate can replicate the vector data as long as the algorithm and the dimensions are the same. If the algorithm and the dimensions are not the same between the source and the target, then you'll actually want GoldenGate to replicate the base data that created that vector. And then once GoldenGate replicates the base data, it'll actually call the vector embedding technology to re-embed that data and produce that numerical formatting for you.  15:42 Lois: So, there are some nuances there… Nick: GoldenGate can also replicate and consolidate vector changes or even do the embedding API calls itself. This is really nice because it means that we can take changes from multiple systems and consolidate them into a single one. We can also do the reverse of that too. A lot of customers are still trying to find out which algorithms work best for them. How many dimensions? What's the optimal use? Well, you can now run those in different servers without impacting your actual AI system. Once you've identified which algorithm and dimension is going to be best for your data, you can then have GoldenGate replicate that into your production system and we'll start using that instead. So it's a nice way to switch algorithms without taking extensive downtime. 16:29 Nikita: What about in multicloud environments?  Nick: GoldenGate can also do multicloud and N-way active-active Oracle replication between vectors. So if there's vectors in Oracle databases, in multiple clouds, or multiple on-premise databases, GoldenGate can synchronize them all up. And of course we can also stream changes from vector information, including text as well into different search engines. And that's where the integration with Elasticsearch and OpenSearch comes in. And then we can use things like NVIDIA and Cohere to actually do the AI on that data.  17:01 Lois: Using GoldenGate with AI in the database unlocks so many possibilities. Thanks for that detailed introduction to Oracle GoldenGate 23ai and its capabilities, Nick.  Nikita: We've run out of time for today, but Nick will be back next week to talk about how GoldenGate has evolved over time and its latest features. And if you liked what you heard today, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and take a look at the Oracle GoldenGate 23ai Fundamentals course to learn more. Until next time, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 17:33 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham kick off a new season of the podcast, exploring how Oracle APEX integrates with AI to build smarter low-code applications. They are joined by Chaitanya Koratamaddi, Director of Product Management at Oracle, who explains the basics of Oracle APEX, its global adoption, and the challenges it addresses for businesses managing and integrating data. They also explore real-world use cases of AI within the Oracle APEX ecosystem   Oracle APEX: Empowering Low Code Apps with AI: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-apex-empowering-low-code-apps-with-ai/146047/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   -----------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:25 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services. Nikita: Hi everyone! Thank you for joining us as we begin a new season of the podcast, this time focused on Oracle APEX and how it integrates with AI to help you create powerful applications. This season is for everyone—from beginners and SQL developers to DBA data scientists and low-code enthusiasts. So, if you're interested in using Oracle APEX to build low-code applications that have custom generative AI features, you'll want to stay tuned in. 01:07 Lois: That's right, Niki. Today, we're going to discuss Oracle APEX at a high level, starting with what it is. Then, we'll cover a few business challenges related to data and AI innovation that organizations face, and learn how the powerful combination of APEX and AI can help overcome these challenges.  01:27 Nikita: To take us through it all, we've got Chaitanya Koratamaddi with us. Chaitanya is Director of Product Management for Oracle APEX. Hi Chaitanya! For anyone new to Oracle APEX, can you explain what it is and why it's so widely used? Chaitanya: Oracle APEX is the world's most popular enterprise low code application platform. APEX enables you to build secure and scalable enterprise-scale applications with world class features that can be deployed anywhere, cloud or on-premises. And with APEX, you can build applications 20 times faster with 100 times less code. APEX delivers the most productive way to develop and deploy mobile and web applications everywhere. 02:18 Lois: That's impressive. So, what's the adoption rate like for Oracle APEX? Chaitanya: As of today, there are 19 million plus APEX applications created globally. 5,000 plus APEX applications are created on a daily basis and there are 800,000 plus APEX developers worldwide. 60,000 plus customers in 150 countries across various industry verticals. And 75% of Fortune 500 companies use Oracle APEX. 02:56 Nikita: Wow, the numbers really speak for themselves, right? But Chaitanya, why are organizations adopting Oracle APEX at this scale? Or to put it differently, what's the core business challenge that Oracle APEX is addressing? Chaitanya: From databases to all data, you know that the world is more connected and automated than ever. To drive new business value, organizations need to explore and exploit new sources of data that are generated from this connected world. That can be sounds, feeds, sensors, videos, images, and more. Businesses need to be able to work with all types of data and also make sure that it is available to be used together. Typically, businesses need to work on all data at a massive scale. For example, supply chains are no longer dependent just on inventory, demand, and order management signals. A manufacturer should be able to understand data describing global weather patterns and how it impacts their supply chains. Businesses need to pull in data from as many social sources as possible to understand how customer sentiment impacts product sales and corporate brands. Our customers need a data platform that ensures all this data works together seamlessly and easily. 04:38 Lois: So, you're saying Oracle APEX is the platform that helps businesses manage and integrate data seamlessly. But data is just one part of the equation, right? Then there's AI. How are the two related?  Chaitanya: Before we start talking about Oracle AI, let's first talk about what customers are looking for and where they are struggling within their AI innovation. It all starts with data. For decades, working with data has largely involved dealing with structured data, whether it is your customer records in your CRM application and orders from your ERP database. Data was organized into database and tables, and when you needed to find some insights in your data, all you need to do is just use stored procedures and SQL queries to deliver the answers. But today, the expectations are higher. You want to use AI to construct sophisticated predictions, find anomalies, make decisions, and even take actions autonomously. And the data is far more complicated. It is in an endless variety of formats scattered all over your business. You need tools to find this data, consume it, and easily make sense of it all. And now capabilities like natural language processing, computer vision, and anomaly detection are becoming very essential just like how SQL queries used to be. You need to use AI to analyze phone call transcripts, support tickets, or email complaints so you can understand what customers need and how they feel about your products, customer service, and brand. You may want to use a data source as noisy and unstructured as social media data to detect trends and identify issues in real time.  Today, AI capabilities are very essential to accelerate innovation, assess what's happening in your business, and most importantly, exceed the expectations of your customers. So, connecting your application, data, and infrastructure allows everyone in your business to benefit from data. 07:32 Raise your game with the Oracle Cloud Applications skills challenge. Get free training on Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, Oracle Modern Best Practice, and Oracle Cloud Success Navigator. Pass the free Oracle Fusion Cloud Foundations Associate exam to earn a Foundations Associate certification. Plus, there's a chance to win awards and prizes throughout the challenge! What are you waiting for? Join the challenge today by visiting oracle.com/education. 08:06 Nikita: Welcome back! So, let's focus on AI across the Oracle Cloud ecosystem. How does Oracle bring AI into the mix to connect applications, data, and infrastructure for businesses? Chaitanya: By embedding AI throughout the entire technology stack from the infrastructure that businesses run on through the applications for every line of business, from finance to supply chain and HR, Oracle is helping organizations pragmatically use AI to improve performance while saving time, energy, and resources.  Our core cloud infrastructure includes a unique AI infrastructure layer based on our supercluster technology, leveraging the latest and greatest hardware and uniquely able to get the maximum out of the AI infrastructure technology for scenarios such as large language processing. Then there is generative AI and ML for data platforms. On top of the AI infrastructure, our database layer embeds AI in our products such as autonomous database. With autonomous database, you can leverage large language models to use natural language queries rather than writing a SQL when interacting with the autonomous database. This enables you to achieve faster adoption in your application development. Businesses and their customers can use the Select AI natural language interface combined with Oracle Database AI Vector Search to obtain quicker, more intuitive insights into their own data. Then we have AI services. AI services are a collection of offerings, including generative AI with pre-built machine learning models that make it easier for developers to apply AI to applications and business operations. The models can be custom-trained for more accurate business results. 10:17 Nikita: And what specific AI services do we have at Oracle, Chaitanya?  Chaitanya: We have Oracle Digital Assistant Speech, Language, Vision, and Document Understanding. Then we have Oracle AI for Applications. Oracle delivers AI built for business, helping you make better decisions faster and empowering your workforce to work more effectively. By embedding classic and generative AI into its applications, Fusion Apps customers can instantly access AI outcomes wherever they are needed without leaving the software environment they use every day to power their business. 11:02 Lois: Let's talk specifically about APEX. How does APEX use the Gen AI and machine learning models in the stack to empower developers. How does it help them boost productivity? Chaitanya: Starting APEX 24.1, you can choose your preferred large language models and leverage native generative AI capabilities of APEX for AI assistants, prompt-based application creation, and more. Using native OCI capabilities, you can leverage native platform capabilities from OCI, like AI infrastructure and object storage, etc. Oracle APEX running on autonomous infrastructure in Oracle Cloud leverages its unique native generative AI capabilities tuned specifically on your data. These language models are schema aware, data aware, and take into account the shape of information, enabling your applications to take advantage of large language models pre-trained on your unique data. You can give your users greater insights by leveraging native capabilities, including vector-based similarity search, content summary, and predictions. You can also incorporate powerful AI features to deliver personalized experiences and recommendations, process natural language prompts, and more by integrating directly with a suite of OCI AI services. 12:38 Nikita: Can you give us some examples of this? Chaitanya: You can leverage OCI Vision to interpret visual and text inputs, including image recognition and classification. Or you can use OCI Speech to transcribe and understand spoken language, making both image and audio content accessible and actionable. You can work with disparate data sources like JSON, spatial, graphs, vectors, and build AI capabilities around your own business data. So, low-code application development with APEX along with AI is a very powerful combination. 13:22 Nikita: What are some use cases of AI-powered Oracle APEX applications?  Chaitanya: You can build APEX applications to include conversational chatbots. Your APEX applications can include image and object detection capability. Your APEX applications can include speech transcription capability. And in your applications, you can include code generation that is natural language to SQL conversion capability. Your applications can be powered by semantic search capability. Your APEX applications can include text generation capability. 14:00 Lois: So, there's really a lot we can do! Thank you, Chaitanya, for joining us today. With that, we're wrapping up this episode. We covered Oracle APEX, the key challenges businesses face when it comes to AI innovation, and how APEX and AI work together to give businesses an AI edge.  Nikita: Yeah, and if you want to know more about Oracle APEX, visit mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle APEX: Empowering Low Code Apps with AI course. Join us next week for a discussion on AI-assisted development in Oracle APEX. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston signing off! 14:39 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

In this special episode of the Oracle University Podcast, Bill Lawson and Nikita Abraham chat with Peter Fernandez, Senior Director of Cloud Certification at Oracle University, about the exciting new Raise Your Game challenge. They discuss how the initiative is designed to enhance participants' skills in Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and Oracle Cloud Success Navigator. They also cover key details about the challenge, such as how to get started, who can participate, the way it is structured, and the prizes up for grabs.   Raise Your Game: https://education.oracle.com/raise-your-game-saas Oracle University Learning Community:  https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ------------------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:25 Bill: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Bill Lawson, Senior Director of Cloud Applications Product Management with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services. Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week, we concluded our three-part series on multicloud, and today, we're shifting gears and exploring an exciting new challenge that's been thrown down by Oracle University. To tell us all about it, we have Peter Fernandez joining us. Peter is Senior Director of Cloud Certification at Oracle University. Hi Peter! We're thrilled to have you with us today! Peter: Hi Niki, hi Bill! I'm delighted to be here. 01:02 Bill: So, Peter, let's get straight into it. What's this new challenge all about?  Peter: The challenge, which we're calling Raise Your Game, is an incredible opportunity for anyone looking to gain knowledge and gain professional skills about Oracle's Fusion Cloud Applications. We launched a skills challenge on Feb 14, and it will continue until May 15, 2025. This challenge encourages you to build expertise in two key areas: Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and Oracle Cloud Success Navigator.  This training is geared towards anyone who could be a student in higher ed or someone pursuing a business degree, and Oracle customers and partners who are new to Oracle's Applications or experienced consultants implementing business applications.  01:55 Nikita: And how exactly does the challenge help in building this expertise? Peter: The challenge has two levels. In Level 1, you'll need to complete an Oracle Fusion Cloud Apps Foundations course and pass the corresponding exam. These courses are designed to deepen your understanding of the technology enablers in Oracle's Fusion Cloud Applications and learn about Oracle's Modern Best Practice, or OMBP. These are extremely helpful throughout all phases in the journey when implementing and using Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. The Foundation training itself covers a wide range of topics, including core OMBP processes, key performance metrics, implementation considerations, and technology enablers like AI, ML, mobile, and analytics.  02:49 Bill: Before we move on, Peter, can you tell us more about Oracle Modern Best Practice? We discussed it a few weeks back, but for anyone who missed that episode, it'll be nice to get a quick refresher. Peter: Sure, Bill. Implementing Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications successfully is more than just technology—it's about following best practices that drive efficiency and success and tie back to business requirements.  Oracle Modern Best Practice represent years of accumulated experience, industry insights, and proven methodologies. It serves as a guiding framework for implementing efficient business processes within Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. These best practices map the features and innovations within Oracle applications to the processes that customers perform every day, and that is key.  These curated, industry-leading practices detail how the features that we have built using the most modern technologies can be leveraged to optimize operations.  Having a solid grasp of an OMBP and its associated technology enablers will empower you to ensure smoother business operations and higher customer satisfaction. It will show you how to automate activities, streamline tasks, improve results, and set your team up for continued success.  The goal of these courses is to make it easy for implementers, global process owners, IT teams to identify every opportunity to improve an organization's business processes with Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.  04:33 Bill: So, getting back to Level 1, what do I earn when I complete it? Peter: When you complete this level, you'll earn a Level 1 Oracle University Learning Community badge. This recognizes that you have foundational knowledge in your chosen Fusion application. 04:48 Bill: That sounds exciting. And then there's a Level 2? Peter: There is also a Level 2 and where things get even more exciting. You're going to take your knowledge to the next level by completing the Oracle Cloud Success Navigator Essentials course and passing the associated assessment.  This level in the challenge focuses on particularly applying the knowledge you gained in Level 1 where you'll explore the Oracle Cloud Success Navigator's features and functionality, and get the skills you need to lead organizations through their Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications implementation journey.  05:25 Nikita: And when I complete Level 2, I earn another badge? Peter: That's right, Niki. When you successfully complete Level 2, you'll earn a special Level 2 Oracle University Learning Community badge.  The goal of Raise Your Game is to reach the Summit by completing both Level 1 and Level 2 challenges with the fastest time and the highest pass scores. Both these combined determine your position on the leaderboard and your position in the Top 500, which will be awarded separate prizes at the end of the challenge.  05:59 Nikita: So, when you're done, you'll have both theoretical and practical knowledge. And I understand that there are some fantastic prizes up for grabs? Peter: Absolutely, Niki.  This not only helps with both theoretical but also practical knowledge. Learners also have a chance to be featured on the leaderboard in the Oracle University Learning Community. The leaderboard showcases the people who have achieved Level 1 and Level 2 with the fastest times and the highest scores. Along with the badges I told you about, at the end of the promotion, the top 500 people who complete both Level 1 and Level 2 with the fastest time and highest pass scores will receive an Oracle-branded cap, an Oracle Success Navigator pin, and a special Oracle University Community Success Navigator digital badge.  06:52 Bill: So, Peter, who can participate in this challenge, and are there any prerequisites? Peter: The challenge is open to anyone interested in expanding their knowledge of Oracle Cloud Applications. And while there are no strict prerequisites, a basic understanding of business concepts and some familiarity with Oracle Cloud Applications is recommended.  This will ensure that you're able to make the most of the learning materials and engage with the content effectively. You can always check the program overview on the website if you have more questions about this challenge. We've got an FAQ posted there that should answer most anything you are curious about. 07:31 Bill: That's good to know, Peter. And the fact that I get started no matter my level of experience is great news, too. Peter: Absolutely, Bill. Even if you are a beginner fresh out of college, or a seasoned pro like I mentioned earlier who has been implementing Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications (or other applications) for years, I would recommend the challenge and training to you.  Basically, this training is for everyone. This program provides foundational knowledge to improve the implementation approach using Oracle Modern Best Practices. Even those individuals that are certified in Cloud Applications will benefit from learning how these modern best practices fit into their work.  08:12 Nikita: Ok, Peter, I'm ready to do it. How do I get started with the challenge? Peter: That's great. The first step, of course, is to register. And you can do this by visiting oracle.com/education. That's Oracle's main site. oracle.com/education. And select the first tile that you'll see on the webpage, which is the Raise Your Game challenge. If you don't already have an Oracle MyLearn account, you'll need to create one and you'll be prompted to create one. This account gives you access to the Oracle MyLearning platform. Once you're registered, you'll have access to a curated list of learning paths and corresponding certifications. It's important that you review the official rules and promotion details before proceeding with the challenge.  09:12 Unlock the power of AI Vector Search with our new course and certification. Get more accurate search results, handle complex datasets easily, and supercharge your data-driven decisions. From now to May 15, 2025, we are waiving the certification exam fee (valued at $245). Visit mylearn.oracle.com to enroll. 09:40 Nikita: Welcome back! Ok, Peter, I've registered. What's next? Peter: After you're done registering, you need to select the Cloud Application course that aligns with your interests and goals. We have courses on four different areas: Human Capital Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management, and Customer Experience. Once you complete the training and certification, you're done with Level 1.  For Level 2, we have the Oracle Cloud Success Navigator Essentials course and assessment that you will need to complete. You can check your status on the leaderboard in the Oracle University Learning Community and share your progress on social media. Like I was saying, the time taken to complete each of these levels and the higher scores earned determines the Top 500 winners.  10:36 Bill: And the best part of this challenge is that it's completely free, right? Peter: Absolutely. There is no cost associated with participating in the skills challenge. It is completely free for anyone, anywhere in the world to participate as long as they comply with the official rules of the promotion. You can take any or all of the Foundation Associate certification exams at no cost. With multiple free attempts, there is no time limit for completing the exams, but to be eligible for the prizes, you must complete the exams and assessments by May 15, 2025. That's midnight GMT. 11:16 Nikita: What if someone doesn't pass the certification exam on their first attempt? Peter: If someone does not pass the certification exam on their first attempt, we understand that not everyone does. We've made provisions for that. If you don't pass the foundations associate certification exam, you have the option to retake the exam many times over. 11:37 Nikita: Now, Peter, let's say someone has already registered for the Fusion Cloud Applications Foundations Associate certification exam before joining the skills challenge. Will their exam be considered for the prizes? Peter: Well, that's a great question, Niki. If someone has already registered for the exam before joining the challenge, their exam will be considered for the prizes as long as they first join the skills challenge. This ensures that everyone who engages with the challenge has a fair chance to win. 12:06 Bill: Does course content consumed before the start of the challenge count towards the awards and badges? Peter: Unfortunately no, Bill. Any content consumed or purchased before Feb 14, 2025, that's again 12 AM GMT, does not apply retroactively to awards or prizes in the Raise Your Game challenge. We want everyone to start on an equal footing here. 12:29 Nikita: What about certifications earned before the challenge began? Peter: Again, certifications earned before Feb 14, 2025, again 12 AM GMT, do not qualify for the promotion. That ensures again that the challenge is fair for all participants. 12:48 Nikita: Now, Peter, how many free exam attempts do participants get as part of the challenge? Peter: Since all the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Foundations Associate Certification exams are free, there is no limit to the number of attempts. Participants can take these exams as many times as they need to. 13:05 Bill: And, Peter, say I want to take more than one of the Foundations courses and exams. Can I do that? Peter: Absolutely. This is a great way for someone to learn about the different areas of business that they may be familiar with. As I mentioned earlier, the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Foundations training is a program to provide you with knowledge of OMBPs, Oracle Modern Best Practices, that is, and Fusion Cloud Applications. So, it's a great opportunity to cross-skill. You can earn all four certifications if you choose. 13:38 Bill: Peter, thank you so much for joining us today and telling us all about this challenge. It is a really fantastic opportunity for everyone, whether you're new to Fusion Cloud Applications or an experienced implementation professional, to boost your Oracle Cloud Apps expertise. We're really excited to try it out ourselves! Peter: A sincere thank you to you, Bill and Niki. It's been an absolute pleasure. I'd really encourage everyone to jump on this challenge. It's a great way to enhance your learning journey and have some fun along the way. Nikita: I couldn't agree more! Thanks Peter. That's a wrap on this episode. Join us next week for another episode of the Oracle University Podcast. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham… Bill: And Bill Lawson, signing off! 14:19 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

In this special episode of the Oracle University Podcast, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham dive into Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and the new courses and certifications on offer. They are joined by Oracle Fusion Apps experts Patrick McBride and Bill Lawson who introduce the concept of Oracle Modern Best Practice (OMBP), explaining how it helps organizations maximize results by mapping Fusion Application features to daily business processes. They also discuss how the new courses educate learners on OMBP and its role in improving Fusion Cloud Apps implementations.   OMBP: https://www.oracle.com/applications/modern-best-practice/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ---------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:25 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs.  Lois: Hi everyone! For the last two months, we've been focusing on all things MySQL. But today, we wanted to share some really exciting news about new courses and certifications on Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications that feature Oracle Modern Best Practice, or OMBP, and Oracle Cloud Success Navigator.  00:57 Nikita: And to tell us more about this, we have two very special guests joining us today. Patrick McBride is a Senior Director from the Fusion Application Development organization. He leads the Oracle Modern Best Practice Program office for Oracle. And Bill Lawson is a Senior Director for Cloud Applications Product Management here at Oracle University. We'll first ask Patrick about Oracle Modern Best Practice and then move on to Bill for details about the new training and certification we're offering. Patrick, Bill, thanks for being here today.   Patrick: Hey, Niki and Lois, thanks for the invitation. Happy to be here.  Bill: Hi Niki, Lois. 01:32 Lois: Patrick, let's start with some basic information about what OMBP are. Can you tell us a little about why they were created? Patrick: Sure, love to. So, modern best practices are more than just a business process. They're really about translating features and technology into actionable capabilities in our product. So, we've created these by curating industry leading best practices we've collected from our customers over the years. And ensure that the most modern technologies that we've built into the Fusion Application stack are represented inside of those business processes. Our goal is really to help you as customers improve your business operations by easily finding and applying those technologies to what you do every day.  02:18 Nikita: So, by understanding these modern best practice and the technology that enables it, you're really unlocking the full potential of Fusion Apps.  Patrick: Absolutely. So, the goal is that modern best practice make it really easy for customers, implementers, partners, to see the opportunity and take action. 02:38 Lois: That's great. OK, so, let's talk about implementations, Patrick. How do Oracle Modern Best Practice support customers throughout the lifecycle of an Oracle Fusion Cloud implementation? Patrick: What we found during many implementers' journey with taking our solution and trying to apply it with customers is that customers come in with a long list of capabilities that they're asking us to replicate. What they've always done in the past. And what modern best practice is trying to do is help customers to reimage the art of the possible…what's possible with Fusion by taking advantage of innovative features like AI, like IoT, like, you know, all of the other solutions that we built in to help you automate your processes to help you get the most out of the solution using the latest and greatest technology. So, if you're an implementer, there's a number of ways a modern best practice can help during an implementation. First is that reimagine exercise where you can help the customer see what's possible. And how we can do it in a better way. I think more importantly though, as you go through your implementation, many customers aren't able to get everything done by the time they have to go live. They have a list of things they've deferred and modern best practices really establishes itself as a road map for success, so you can go back to it at the completion and see what's left for the opportunity to take advantage of and you can use it to track kind of the continuous innovation that Oracle delivers with every release and see what's changed with that business process and how can I get the most out of it. 04:08 Nikita: Thanks, Patrick. That's a great primer on OMBP that I'm sure everyone will find very helpful. Patrick: Thanks, Niki. We want our customers to understand the value of modern best practices so they can really maximize their investment in Oracle technology today and in the future as we continue to innovate. 04:24 Lois: Right. And the way we're doing that is through new training and certifications that are closely aligned with OMBP. Bill, what can you tell us about this? Bill: Yes, sure. So, the new Oracle Fusion Applications Foundations training program is designed to help partners and customers understand Oracle Modern Best Practice and how they improve the entire implementation journey with Fusion Cloud Applications. As a learner, you will understand how to adhere to these practices and how they promise a greater level of success and customer satisfaction. So, whether you're designing, or implementing, or going live, you'll be able to get it right on day one. So, like Patrick was saying, these OMBPs are reimagined, industry-standard business processes built into Fusion Applications. So, you'll also discover how technologies like AI, Mobile, and Analytics help you automate tasks and make smarter decisions. You'll see how data flows between processes and get tips for successful go-lives. So, the training we're offering includes product demonstrations, key metrics, and design considerations to give you a solid understanding of modern best practice. It also introduces you to Oracle Cloud Success Navigator and how it can be leveraged and relied upon as a trusted source to guide you through every step of your cloud journey, so from planning, designing, and implementation, to user acceptance testing and post-go-live innovations with each quarterly new release of Fusion Applications and those new features. And then, the training also prepares you for Oracle Cloud Applications Foundations certifications.                   05:55 Nikita: Which applications does the training focus on, Bill? Bill: Sure, so the training focuses on four key pillars of Fusion Apps and the associated OMBP with them. For Human Capital Management, we cover Human Resources and Talent Management. For Enterprise Resource Planning, it's all about Financials, Project Management, and Risk Management. In Supply Chain Management, you'll look at Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Inventory, Procurement, and more. And for Customer Experience, we'll focus on Marketing, Sales, and Service. 06:24 Lois: That's great, Bill. Now, who is the training and certification for?  Bill: That's a great question. So, it's really for anyone who wants to get the most out of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. It doesn't matter if you're an experienced professional or someone new to Fusion Apps, this is a great place to start. It's even recommended for professionals with experience in implementing other applications, like on-premise products. The goal is to give you a solid foundation in Oracle Modern Best Practice and show you how to use them to improve your implementation approach. We want to make it easy for anyone, whether you're an implementer, a global process owner, or an IT team employee, to identify every way Fusion Applications can improve your organization. So, if you're new to Fusion Apps, you'll get a comprehensive overview of Oracle Fusion Applications and how to use OMBP to improve business operations. If you're already certified in Oracle Cloud Applications and have years of experience, you'll still benefit from learning how OMBP fits into your work.  If you're an experienced Fusion consultant who is new to Oracle Modern Best Practice processes, this is a good place to begin and learn how to apply them and the latest technology enablers during implementations.  And, lastly, if you're an on-premise or you have non-Fusion consultant skills looking to upskill to Fusion, this is a great way to begin acquiring the knowledge and skills needed to transition to Fusion and migrate your existing expertise. 07:53 Raise your game with the Oracle Cloud Applications skills challenge. Get free training on Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, Oracle Modern Best Practice, and Oracle Cloud Success Navigator. Pass the free Oracle Fusion Cloud Foundations Associate exam to earn a Foundations Associate certification. Plus, there's a chance to win awards and prizes throughout the challenge! What are you waiting for? Join the challenge today by visiting oracle.com/education. 08:27 Nikita: Welcome back! Bill, how long is it going to take me to complete this training program? Bill: So, we wanted to make this program detailed enough so our learners find it valuable, obviously. But at the same time, we didn't want to make it too long. So, each course is approximately 5 hours or more, and provides folks with all the requisite knowledge they need to get started with Oracle Modern Best Practice and Fusion Applications.  08:51 Lois: Bill, is there anything that I need to know before I take this course? Are there any prerequisites? Bill: No, Lois, there are no prerequisites. Like I was saying, whether you're fresh out of college or a seasoned professional, this is a great place to start your journey into Fusion Apps and Oracle Modern Best Practice. 09:06 Nikita: That's great, you know, that there are no barriers to starting. Now, Bill, what can you tell us about the certification that goes along with this new program?  Bill: The best part, Niki, is that it's free. In fact, the training is also free. We have four courses and corresponding Foundation Associate–level certifications for Human Capital Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management, and Customer Experience. So, completing the training prepares you for an hour-long exam with 25 questions. It's a pretty straightforward way to validate your expertise in Oracle Modern Best Practice and Fusion Apps implementation considerations. 09:40 Nikita: Ok. Say I take this course and certification. What can I do next? Where should my learning journey take me? Bill: So, you're building knowledge and expertise with Fusion Applications, correct? So, once you take this training and certification, I recommend that you identify a product area you want to specialize in. So, if you take the Foundations training for HCM, you can dive deeper into specialized paths focused on implementing Human Resources, Workforce Management, Talent Management, or Payroll applications, for example.  The same goes for other product areas. If you finish the certification for Foundations in ERP, you may choose to specialize in Finance or Project Management and get your professional certifications there as your next step. So, once you have this foundational knowledge, moving on to advanced learning in these areas becomes much easier. We offer various learning paths with associated professional-level certifications to deepen your knowledge and expertise in Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. So, you can learn more about these courses by visiting oracle.com/education/training/ to find out more of what Oracle University has to offer. 10:43 Lois: Right. I love that we have a clear path from foundational-level training to more advanced levels. So, as your skills grow, we've got the resources to help you move forward.  Nikita: That's right, Lois. Thanks for walking us through all this, Patrick and Bill. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us on the podcast. Bill: Yeah, it's always a pleasure to join you on the podcast. Thank you very much. Patrick: Oh, thanks for having me, Lois. Happy to be here. Lois: Well, that's all the time we have for today. If you have questions or suggestions about anything we discussed today, you can write to us at ou-podcast_ww@oracle.com. That's ou-podcast_ww@oracle.com. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 11:29 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Redwood is a state-of-the-art graphical interface that defines the look and feel of the new Oracle Cloud Redwood Applications.   In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald, take a closer look at the intent behind the design and development aspects of the new Redwood experience. They also explore Redwood page templates and components.   Survey: https://customersurveys.oracle.com/ords/surveys/t/oracle-university-gtm/survey?k=focus-group-2-link-share-5   Developing Redwood Applications with Visual Builder: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/learning-path/developing-redwood-applications-with-visual-builder/112791   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ---------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started. 00:26 Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi everyone! Thanks for joining us for this Best of 2024 series, where we're playing for you our four most popular episodes of the year.    Nikita: Today's episode is #3 of 4 and is a throwback to another conversation with Joe Greenwald, our Senior Principal OCI Instructor. We asked Joe about Oracle's Redwood design system and how it helps us create stunning, world-class enterprise applications and user experiences.  01:04 Lois: Yeah, Redwood is the basis for all the new Oracle Cloud Applications being re-designed, developed, and delivered. Joe is the best person to ask about all of this because he's been working with our Oracle software development tools since the early 90s and is responsible for OU's Visual Builder Studio and Redwood course content. So, let's dive right in! Joe: Hi Lois. Hi Niki. I am excited to join you on this episode because with the release of 24A Fusion applications, we are encouraging all our customers to adopt the new Redwood design system and components, and take advantage of the world-class look and feel of the new Redwood user experience. Redwood represents a new approach and direction for us at Oracle, and we're excited to have our customers benefit from it. 01:49 Nikita: Joe, you've been working with Oracle user interface development tools and frameworks for a long time. How and why is Redwood different? Joe: I joined Oracle in 1992, and the first Oracle user interface I experienced was Oracle Forms. And that was the character mode. I came from a background of Smalltalk and its amazing, pioneering graphical user interface (GUI) design capabilities. I worked at Apple and I developed my own GUIs for a few years on PCs and Macs. So, Character Mode Forms, what we used to call DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) screens, was a shock, to say the least. Since then, I've worked with almost every user interface and development platform Oracle has created: Character Mode Forms, GUI Forms, Power Objects, HyperCard on the Macintosh, that was pre-OS X by the way, Sedona, written in native C++ and ActiveX and OLE, which didn't make it to a product but appeared in other things later, ADF Faces, which uses Java to generate HTML pages, and APEX, which uses PL/SQL to generate HTML pages. And I've worked with and wrote training classes for Java Swing, an excellent GUI framework for event-driven desktop and enterprise applications, but it wasn't designed for the web. So, it's with pleasure that I introduce you to the Redwood design system, easily the best effort I've ever seen, from the look and feel of holistic user-goal-centered design philosophy and approach to the cutting-edge WYSIWYG design tools.  03:16 Lois: Joe, is Redwood just another set of styles, colors, and fonts, albeit very nice-looking ones? Joe: The Redwood platform is new for Oracle, and it represents a significant change, not just in the look and feel, colors, fonts, and styles, I mean that too, but it's also a fundamental change in how Oracle is creating, designing, and imagining user interfaces. As you may be aware, all Oracle Cloud Applications are being re-designed, re-engineered, and re-rebuilt from the ground up, with significant changes to both back-end and front-end architectures. The front end is being redesigned, re-developed, and re-created in pure HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript using Visual Builder Studio and its design-time browser-based Integrated Development Environment. The back end is being re-architected, re-designed, and implemented in a modern microservice architecture for Oracle Cloud using Kubernetes and other modern technologies that improve performance and work better in the cloud than our current legacy architecture. The new Oracle Cloud Applications platform uses Redwood for its design system—its tools, its patterns, its components, and page templates. Redwood is a richer and more productive platform to create solutions while still being cost-effective for Oracle. It encourages a transformation of the fundamental user experience, emphasizing identifying, meeting, and understanding end users' goals and how the applications are used.  04:39 Nikita: Joe, do you think Oracle's user interface has been improved with Redwood? In what ways has the UI changed? Joe: Yes, absolutely. Redwood has changed a lot of things. When I joined Oracle back in the '90s, there was effectively no user interface division or UI team. Everybody just did their own thing. There was no user interface lab—and that was started in the mid-‘90s—and I was asked to give product usability feedback and participate in UI tests and experiments in those labs. I also helped test the products I was teaching at the time. I actually distinctly remember having to take a week to train users on Oracle's Designer CASE tool product just to prep the participants enough to perform usability testing. I can still hear the UI lab manager shaking her head and saying any product that requires a week of training to do usability testing has usability issues! And if you're like me and you've been around Oracle long enough, you know that Oracle's not always been known for its user interfaces and been known to release products that look like they were designed by two or more different companies. All that has changed with Redwood. With Redwood, there's a new internal design group that oversees the design choices of all development teams that develop products. This includes a design system review and an ongoing audit process to ensure that all the products being released, whether Fusion apps or something else, all look and feel similar so it looks like it's designed by a single company with a single thought in mind. Which it is. There's a deeper, consistent commitment in identifying user needs, understanding how the applications are being used, and how they meet those user needs through things like telemetry: gathering metrics from the actual components and the Redwood system itself to see how the applications are being used, what's working well, and what isn't.  This telemetry is available to us here at Oracle, and we use it to fine tune the applications' usability and purpose.  06:29 Lois: That's really interesting, Joe. So, it's a fundamental change in the way we're doing things. What about the GUI components themselves? Are these more sophisticated than simple GUI components like buttons and text fields? Joe: The graphical components themselves are at a much higher level, more comprehensive, and work better together. And in Redwood, everything is a component. And I'm not just talking about things like input text fields and buttons, though it applies to these more fine-grained components as well. Leveraging Oracle's deep experience in building enterprise applications, we've incorporated that knowledge into creating page templates so that the structure and look and feel of the page is fixed based on our internal design standards. The developer has control over certain portions of it, but the overall look and feel of the page is controlled by Oracle. So there is consistency of look and feel within and across applications. These page templates come with predefined functionalities: headers, titles, properties, and variables to manipulate content and settings, slots for other components to hold like search fields, collections, contextual information, badges, and images, as well as primary and secondary actions, and variables for events and event handling through Visual Builder action chains, which handle the various actions and processing of the request on the page. And all these page templates and components are responsive, meaning they respond to the change in the size of the page and the orientation. So, when you move from a desktop to a handheld mobile device or a tablet, they respond appropriately and consistently to deliver a clean, easy-to-use interface and experience. 08:03 Nikita: You mentioned WYSIWYG design tools and their integration with Visual Builder Studio's integrated development environment. How does Redwood work with Visual Builder Studio? Joe: This is easily one of my most favorite aspects about Redwood and the integration with Visual Builder Studio Designer. The components and page templates are responsive at runtime as well as responsive at design time! In over 30 years of working with Oracle software development products, this is the first development system and integrated development environment I've seen Oracle produce where what you see is what you get at design time. Now, with products such as Designer and JDeveloper ADF Faces and even APEX—all those page-generation types of products—you have to generate the page, deploy it, and only then can you view the final page to see whether it meets the needs of your user interface. For example, with Designer, there were literally hundreds of configuration parameters that you could set to control how forms and reports looked when they were generated —down to how many buttons on a row or how many rows to a page, that sort of thing, all done in text mode. Then you'd generate and run the page to see what the result was and then go back and modify things until you got what you wanted. I remember hearing the product managers for Oracle ADF Faces being asked…well, a customer asked, “What happens if I put this component here and this component here? What will the page look like?” and they'd say, “I don't know. Render the page and let's see.” That's just crazy talk. With Redwood and its integration with Visual Builder Studio Designer, what you see on the page at design time is literally what you get. And if I make the page narrower or I even convert it to a mobile display while in the Designer itself, I immediately see what the page looks like in that new mode. Everything just moves accordingly, at design time. For example, when changing to a mobile UI, everything stacks up nicely; the components adjust to the page size and change right there in the design environment. Again, I can't emphasize enough the simple luxury of being able to see exactly what the user is going to see on my page and having the ability to change the resolution, orientation, and screen size, and it changes right there immediately in my design environment. 10:06 Lois: I'm intrigued by the idea of page templates that are managed by Oracle but still leave room for the developer to customize aspects of the look and feel and functionality. How does that work? Joe: Well, the page templates themselves represent the typical pages you would most likely use in an enterprise application. Things like a welcome page, a search page, and edit and create pages, and a couple of different ways to display summary information, including foldout pages, though this is not an exhaustive list of course. Not only do they provide a logical and complete starting point for the layout of the page itself, but they also include built-in functionality. These templates include functionality for buttons, primary and secondary actions, and areas for holding contextual information, badges, avatars, and images. And this is all built right into the page, and all of them use variables to describe the contents for the various parts, so the contents can change programmatically as the variables' contents change, if necessary. 11:04 Do you have an idea for a new course or learning opportunity? We'd love to hear it! Visit the Oracle University Learning Community and share your thoughts with us on the Idea Incubator. Your suggestion could find a place in future development projects. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started.  11:24 Nikita: Welcome back! So, Joe, let's say I'm a developer. How do I get started working with Redwood? Joe: One of the easiest ways to do it is to use Visual Builder Studio Designer and create a new visual application. If you're creating a standalone, bespoke custom application, you can choose a Redwood starter template, which will include all the Redwood components and page templates automatically. Or, if you're extending and customizing an Oracle Fusion application, Redwood is already included.  Either way, when you create a new page, you have a choice of different page templates—welcome page templates, edit pages, search pages, etc. —and all you have to do is choose a page that you want and begin configuring it. And actually if you make a mistake, it's easy to switch page templates. All the components, page templates, and so on have documentation right there inside Visual Builder Studio Designer, and we do recommend that you read through the documentation first to get an understanding of what the use case for that template is and how to use it. And some components are more granular, like a collection container which holds a collection of rows of a list or a table and provides capabilities like toolbars and other actions that are already built and defined. You decide what actions you want and then use predefined event listeners that are triggered when an event occurs in the application—like a button being clicked or a row being selected—which kicks off a series of actions to be performed. 12:42 Lois: That sounds easy enough if you know what you're doing. Joe, what are some of the more common pages and what are they used for?  Joe: Redwood page templates can be broken down into categories. There are overview templates like the welcome page template, which has a nice banner, colors, and illustrations that can be used for a welcoming page—like for entering a new application or a new logical section of the application. The dashboard landing page template displays key information values and their charts and graphs, which can come from Oracle Analytics, and automatically switches the display depending on which set of data is selected.  The detail templates include a general overview, which presents read-only information related to a single record or resource. The item overview gives you a small panel to view summary information (for example, information on a customer) and in the main section, you can view details like all the orders for that customer. And you can even navigate through a set of customers, clicking arrows for next-previous navigation. And that's all built in. There's no programming required. The fold-out page template folds out horizontally to show you individual panels with more detail that can be displayed about the subject being retrieved as well as overflow and drill-down areas. And there's a collection detail template that will display a list with additional details about the selected item (for example, an order and its order line items). The smart search page does exactly what it says. It has a search component that you use to filter or search the data coming back from the REST data sources and then display the results in a list or a table. You define the filter yourself and apply it using different kinds of comparators, so you can look for strings that start with certain values or contain values, or numerical values that are equal to or less than, depending on what you're filtering for. And then there are the transactional templates, which are meant to make changes. This includes both the simple create and edit and advanced create and edit templates.  The simple create and edit page template edits a single record or creates a single record. And the advanced page template works well if you're working with master-detail, parent-child type relationships. Let's say you want to view the parent and create children for it or even create a parent and the children at the same time. And there's a Gantt chart page for project management–type tracking and a guided process page for multiple-step processes and there's a data management page template specifically for viewing and editing data collections like Excel spreadsheets. 14:55 Nikita: You mentioned that there's a design system behind all this. How is this used, and how does the customer benefit from it? Joe: Redwood comprises both a design system and a development system. The design system has a series of steps that we follow here at Oracle and can suggest that you, our customers and partners, can follow as well. This includes understanding the problem, articulating the vision for the page and the application (what it should do), identifying the proper Redwood page templates to use, adding detail and refining the design and then using a number of different mechanisms, including PowerPoint or Figma design tools to specify the design for development, and then monitor engagement in the real world. These are the steps that we follow here at Oracle. The Redwood development process starts with learning how to use Redwood components and templates using the documentation and other content from redwood.oracle.com and Visual Builder Studio. Then it's about understanding the design created by the design team, learning more about components and templates for your application, specifically the ones you're going to use, how they work, and how they work together. Then developing your application using Visual Builder Studio Designer, and finally improving and refining your application. Now, right now, as I mentioned, telemetry is available to us here at Oracle so we can get a sense of the feedback on the pages of how components are being used and where time is being spent, and we use that to tune the designs and components being used. That telemetry data may be available to customers in the future. Now, when you go to redwood.oracle.com, you can access the Redwood pattern book that shows you in detail all the different page templates that are available: smart search page, data grid, welcome page, dashboard landing page, and so on, and you can select these and read more about them as well as the actual design specifications that were used to build the pages—defining what they do and what they respond to. They provide a lot of detailed information about the templates and components, how they work and how they're intended to be used. 16:50 Lois: That's a lot of great resources available. But what if I don't have access to Visual Builder Studio Designer? Can I still see how Redwood looks and behaves? Joe: Well, if you go to redwood.oracle.com, you can log in and work with the Redwood reference application, which is a live application working with live data. It was created to show off the various page templates and components, their look and feel and functionality from the Redwood design and development systems. This is an order management application, so you can do things like view filtered pending orders, create new orders, manage orders, and view information about customers and inventory. It uses the different page templates to show you how the application can perform. 17:29 Nikita: I assume there are common aspects to how these page templates are designed, built, and intended to be used. Is that a good way to begin understanding how to work with them? Becoming familiar with their common properties and functionality? Joe: Absolutely! Good point! All pages have titles, and most have primary and secondary actions that can be triggered through a variety of GUI events, like clicking a button or a link or selecting something in a list or a table. The transactional page templates include validation groups that validate whether the data is correct before it is submitted, as well as a message dialog that can pop up if there are unsaved changes and someone tries to leave the page. All the pages can use variables to display information or set properties and can easily display specific contextual information about records that have been retrieved, like adding the Order Number or Customer Name and Number to the page title or section headers. 18:18 Lois: If I were a developer, I'd be really excited to get started! So, let's say I'm a developer. What's the best way to begin learning about Redwood, Joe? Joe: A great place to start learning about the Redwood design and development system is at the redwood.oracle.com page I mentioned. We have many different pages that describe the philosophy and fundamental basis for Redwood, the ideas and intent behind it, and how we're using it here at Oracle. It also has a list of all the different page templates and components you can use and a link to the Redwood reference application where you can sign in and try it yourself. In addition, we at Oracle University offer a course called Design and Develop Redwood Applications, and in there, we have both lecture content as well as hands-on practices where you build a lightweight version of the Redwood reference application using data from the Fusion apps application, as well as the pages that I talked about: the welcome page, detail pages, transactional pages, and the dashboard landing page.  And you'll see how those pages are designed and constructed while building them yourself.  It's very important though to take one of the free Visual Builder Developer courses first: either Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio and/or Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio before you try to work through the practices in the Redwood course because it uses a lot of Visual Builder Designer technology.  You'll get a lot more out of the Redwood practices if you understand the basics of Visual Builder Studio first. The Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio course is probably a better place to start unless you know for a fact you will be focusing on extending Oracle Fusion Applications using Visual Builder Studio. Now, a lot of the content is the same between the two courses as they share much of the same technology and architectures. 19:58 Lois: Ok, so Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio and Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio…all on mylearn.oracle.com and all free for anyone who wants to take them, right? Joe: Yes, exactly. And the free Redwood learning path leads to an Associate certification. While our courses are a great place to start in preparing for your certification exam, they are not, of course, by themselves sufficient to pass and you will want to study and be familiar with the redwood.oracle.com content as well. The learning path is free, but you do have to pay for the certification exam. Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. A quick reminder about the short survey we've created to gather your insights and suggestions for the podcast. It's really quick. Just click the link in the show notes to complete the survey. Thank you so much for helping us make the show better. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham... Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 20:58 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

What do you need to start customizing the next generation of Oracle Fusion Apps? How do you create new pages for business processes? What level of expertise do you require for this?   Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham as they get answers to all these questions and more from Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald.   Survey: https://customersurveys.oracle.com/ords/surveys/t/oracle-university-gtm/survey?k=focus-group-2-link-share-5   Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/develop-fusion-applications-using-visual-builder-studio/138392/   Build Visual Applications Using Oracle Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/build-visual-applications-using-oracle-visual-builder-studio/137749/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started. 00:26 Lois: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services. Nikita: Hi there! You're listening to our Best of 2024 series, where over the next few weeks, we'll be revisiting four of our most popular episodes of the year. Lois: Today's episode is #2 of 4, and we're throwing it back to another episode with our friend and Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald. This episode is all about extending Oracle Cloud Applications that are being built using Visual Builder for the front-end. 01:04 Nikita: Right, Lois. We began by asking Joe to explain what's happening with the redesign and re-architecture of Oracle Cloud Applications using Visual Builder Studio, or VBS.  Joe: That's right, Niki. Oracle is redesigning and rebuilding its entire suite of Fusion Cloud Applications, over 330 different products, utilizing over 60,000 engineers — that is “60,” not “16”—at Oracle to develop the next generation of Oracle Fusion Applications. What's most exciting is that the same tools the engineers are using to accomplish this are available to our partners and our customers to use to extend the functionality and capabilities of Fusion Applications to meet their custom needs and processes.  01:45 Lois: That's pretty awesome! We want to use this time today to ask you about extensions, the types of extensions you can create, and how to use Visual Builder Studio to create those extensions. Nikita: Yeah, can we start with you telling us what an extension is? I've gotten the sense that Oracle uses the term extension as both a noun and a verb and that's a bit confusing to me. Joe: Yeah, good catch, Niki. Yes, Oracle does use the term extension in two ways: both as a noun and a verb. As a noun, an extension is a container for the code changes that you make to your applications. Basically, it's a Git repository that Oracle creates and manages for you. So, the extension container holds the code changes you make to your page layouts: the fields, their positioning, showing and hiding fields, that sort of thing, as well as page functionality. These code changes you make are stored in the extension and it is this extension with your code changes that is merged with the main Git branch eventually and then deployed using continuous integration/continuous deployment jobs defined in Visual Builder Studio, which manages the project and its assets. Your extension is a Git branch that is an asset of the project. Once your extension code is merged with the main branch and deployed, then the next time someone brings up the application, they'll see the changes you've made in the app. 02:59 Lois: And as a verb? Joe: As a verb, extension means to extend the functionality and the look and feel of the application, though I prefer the term customization or configuration to describe this aspect, as the documentation does, and to avoid confusion, though I'll admit I'm not always consistent about the terms I use. 03:16 Lois: What types of customizations, or extensions, and I'm using the verb now, are available for Fusion Apps in Visual Builder Studio? Joe: There are three different ways Fusion Apps can be customized effectively, configured, or extended. The first way is what we call a basic extension, where you're rearranging hiding, or showing, or moving around fields and sections on the page that have been set up to be extendable by the Fusion Application development teams. Things like hiding fields, showing fields, hiding sections, showing sections…  03:45 Nikita: So fairly basic actions… Joe: Yeah exactly and they can be done in Visual Builder Studio Designer by people with minimal VB training, Visual Builder training. And, most recently, if you have access to it, you can do it in the new Express mode, where the page shows you just those things you can work with and just the tools you need to work with the page. This is new and makes it much easier for folks who are not highly technical to make basic changes to the page layout. 04:09 Lois: People like me! That sounds easy enough. Joe: And the next type of extension is more of an intermediate change and requires some training with Visual Builder Studio because you're creating rules that govern the display of layouts based on certain conditions on the page. These are highly flexible, powerful, and useful for creating customized page layouts based on a variety of factors from page size and orientation to the role of the person using it to values in the actual fields on the page itself. These rules can be combined to create complex rule-based conditions that display exactly what the user should see, given the conditions of the page and their role. I would also include making changes to action chains, which execute sequences of behaviors and navigation, and the actual structure of the application, but this is more advanced.  Lastly, is creating mashup applications, which are stand-alone Visual Builder visual applications, which use data from Fusion apps, and customer data sources, like their own database tables, and potentially third-party APIs to create brand new pages and applications with new functionality, new processes, new procedures, new displays, all of which look just like Fusion Applications and use the same data as Fusion applications. 05:18 Lois: Joe, how do I get started if I want to extend a page?  Joe: The easiest way to do it is to open a page in Fusion Applications and then select Edit Page in Visual Builder Studio from the Profile menu. You're then prompted for a project to hold the Git repository for the extension container. And since there's probably already one that exists, after you select the project, an extension Git container is assigned to you. Unless this is the very first time the application has been extended in which case it creates an extension for you. When creating customizations or configurations, we recommend that each application be done in its own separate project. So, for example, if you're working on Customer Experience Sales, you might do it in Project A and if you're working on extensions with HCM, you might do it in Project B. And if you decide to create your own pages and flows in your own app, you might do that in Project C.  06:04 Nikita: But why do you need to do this? Joe: That's just to keep things nice and separate and organized. The tool, Visual Builder Studio, doesn't really care, but it makes for cleaner development and can help with the management of the development teams. 06:14 Nikita: Ok, Joe, I have a question. How do I know if the page I'm on in Fusion Apps can be edited in Visual Builder? I know there are a lot of legacy pages still out there and they can co-exist with the new VB-based pages. Joe: If the URL of the page you're on has the word /Redwood in it instead of /faces, then you know this is a page that was created using Visual Builder Studio and you'll be able to extend it and make changes to it using the Edit in Visual Builder Studio option. So, if you select Edit in Visual Builder Studio, then the page you are on opens inside Visual Builder Studio Designer and you can make changes to any part of the page that has been explicitly enabled for extension by the development team. 06:53 Lois: That's an important part, right? The application is not extendable by default.  Joe: That's right, Lois. It is all locked down and you can't make any changes to it by default. The development team must specifically enable certain parts of the page: sections, fields, layouts, variables, types, action chains, etc. as extendable for you to be able to make changes to it. This ensures the changes the development team makes to the application in the future won't break your extensions. And conversely, the development team can choose to not extend portions that they do not want you to touch or mess with. Then if they do change that bit of the app in the future, it won't break the application and you won't get a big surprise. So, using the Edit page in Visual Builder Studio, you can make both basic changes, like moving, showing, and hiding fields and sections, as well as the more intermediate types of configurations, like using dynamic components to create rule-based layouts that change dynamically based on several conditions such as page size, roles of the user, and field values on the page itself. 07:51 Nikita: What happens if two developers make changes and essentially overwrite each other's customizations — say one hides a field and another later exposes it? Joe: Well, whoever commits their changes and deploys last wins. The other developer's changes get overwritten. So, this is something the team would want to consider carefully. It is possible to roll back to an earlier version if one must. And this can be done in Visual Builder Studio — the part that manages project assets like Git repositories. And there are Oracle blog posts about how to do that if you're interested in learning more. 08:20 Lois: Joe, earlier you mentioned creating new pages and flows, but so far you've only talked about modifying existing extendable pages. How do I create new pages and flows? Joe: In a Visual Builder extension, a set of pages and flows is called an App UI. When I use the terms pages and flows, what I'm talking about is a set of pages that are logically related—whatever logical means to the designer and developer—in a group called a flow that you can navigate between. But you can also navigate between flows and even between applications. So, without getting too technical, each application has a default flow, which has a default page where that flow starts when the app first comes up. So, you can think of an App UI as a collection of flows and their pages, and a URL that accesses the default flow and its default page. That's the page you would see first when accessing that URL. Of course, this can be configured and changed by the developer, as needed. Now, when Oracle creates the original application (for example, digital sales, helpdesk, or something like that), we create an App UI, which contains the pages and flows for that application and is the “entry point” into the app, accessing that App UI's default flow and its default page and then things flow on from there. Partners and customers can create their own application extensions that are dependent on an Oracle application and even create their own App UI – their own sets of pages and flows to accommodate their own processing and workflow needs. This gives them the ability to add their own processes and rules, and still leverage and navigate to the core application that Oracle built. For example, say Oracle delivered digital sales as an Oracle Cloud Application built using Visual Builder to a customer and the customer needs to add a few pages to do some validation or other type of business processing before entering the digital sales application. What the customer does, in this case, is create a new extension of the Oracle Digital Sales app and an App UI of their own, which would be the set of pages and flows that contain the processing they want to start with before then navigating into the digital sales app to use Oracle's application. 10:22 Nikita: Wait, did I hear that correctly? We're creating an extension of an extension or creating an extension on an existing extension? Joe: I know, right? I realize this can sound confusing the first time you hear it or the second time or even the third time. It took me a while to get my head around what they're talking about. Let's start with a Fusion application. In a Fusion application, everything is an extension of something. This is just how the code base and the architecture are organized and how they manage the Git repositories and the code base itself. So, Oracle created a base application called the Unified App. The Unified Application contains the basic page structure and common functionality needed for all applications. For example, it contains the header at the top that has the profile and the footer at the bottom of the page that has that little Ask Oracle icon. Within that page, between the header and the footer, are the pages that are created by the developers, whether they be Oracle engineers or partners or customers. They display the contents of the page with the data and the layouts and all of that. In a sense, you can think of the Unified App as an index page, the starting page of the web application. Though that's not completely true technically, it's good enough for illustrative purposes. So, Oracle starts with the Unified App and then a development team extends that Unified App to build their product. This is how digital sales did it. This is how customer experience did it. This is how helpdesk did it. They start with the Unified App and they extend that and create an App UI that contains the flows and pages for their specific application, and then add functionality for all the pages and flows, as needed for the design. Partners and customers can then create a new extension that extends the Oracle Application and add their own App UI and their own URL if they want their pages accessed first, before navigating to the Oracle application. For example, if the digital sales application has functionality you'd like to leverage, like it has data services or fragments or page layouts that you want to reuse or other things, you extend the digital sales application, and this extension holds your code changes. You could then create a new App UI, and once deployed, users can use that URL for the new App UI to access your new pages. And your page can then navigate to the Oracle app when it needs to. Though I will say to date, we're really not seeing much demand for this particular use case, but it is possible. 12:33 Lois: Is that the only option available to customers and partners—to extend an existing Oracle application? Joe: No, Lois. We're seeing customers and partners create brand new Fusion applications of their own, based on the Unified App Oracle created. In a sense, doing the same thing that our development teams here are doing.  Remember, I said an Oracle development team starts with the Unified App, which has common functionality and look and feel for all applications, and then extends that to add business rules processing, flows, App UI, whatever they need for their specific Oracle application. We're seeing our partners and customers wanting to build their own applications. Maybe a customer or partner wants to create a Time & Expense application and leverage the Fusion application data and the APIs available, but define their own flows, their own pages, their own processing. This is very easy to do. They'd start by extending the Unified App just like the Oracle development teams do, and then build their own App UI and within that, their own flows, pages, and custom processing. The nice thing about it is that the application looks and works and feels just like a Fusion application and it appears alongside other Fusion applications, because it is a Fusion application. 13:43 Did you know that the Oracle University Learning Community regularly holds live events hosted by Oracle expert instructors. Find out how to prepare for your certification exams. Learn about the latest technology advances and features. Ask questions in real time and learn from an Oracle subject matter expert. From Ask Me Anything about certification to Ask the Instructor coaching sessions, you'll be able to achieve your learning goals for 2024 in no time. Join a live event today and witness firsthand the transformative power of the Oracle University Learning Community. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started.  14:24 Nikita: Welcome back! So Joe, it sounds like there are two different paths or life cycles to create extensions for future applications in Visual Builder Studio. Is that correct? Joe: Yes, exactly. So one path to extending the functionality of Fusion apps is to edit the page in Visual Builder Studio, which opens the page in Visual Builder Designer, and you then make changes to the existing pages, depending on what the development team has made extendable.  14:49 Nikita: But you can't create new pages and flows in this scenario, right? Joe: This is strictly about modifying an existing page. The other path is creating a new application extension, which is a new application from scratch or extending an existing Oracle application or even an existing partner or customer application. Again, we're not seeing this typically being done too much. Most partners and customers create new applications or make customizations to existing pages. But the architecture does support it. So, your partner might create a new application based on the production app released by Oracle, and you could extend their application. Or a development team at your site could extend Oracle's application and you could then extend that team's application. This is mechanically possible, although I question the use case behind that. Usually, we see our apps being extended – becoming a dependency when there's code that can be leveraged or reused for a new app and its new App UI. 15:40 Lois: Joe, what did you mean when you say one extension is a dependency of another? Can you talk a bit about dependencies, what that means, how it looks to the developer? Joe: When you extend an application, it becomes a dependency to your application, and you get access to all the resources within that dependency that are marked as extendable by the developer who created that extension. Most useful are things like service connections to REST APIs from Fusion apps data sources, reusable code fragments, and layouts that you can leverage in those cases where you want to create a new App UI. When an extension is listed as a dependency, you'll see this graphically in Visual Builder Studio Designer. When you see an extension listed as a dependency, it means you can reference any of that extension's resources that have been marked extendable by the developer. Recall all resources are closed off or hidden by default, but development teams can mark resources as open to being extended and reused, and then you can see and use those resources. So, you can easily add and remove extensions as dependencies in Visual Builder Designer as needed. Now, this can be a nice way to modularize and reuse your resources and assets. To summarize: I can modify an existing page – this is most common, extend an existing application and create a new App UI, which is not common, or I can extend the unified app to create a new app and a new App UI and add other extensions as dependences, as needed, to leverage their services, fragments, and layouts when building my own pages – this is pretty common as well. 17:04 Nikita: There's one thing I'd like to come back to, Joe. You mentioned something called a mashup application earlier. Can you tell us a little more about that? Joe: To recap: I mentioned a couple of different ways that you can extend Fusion applications. One is changing layouts or creating rule-based layouts. You can also extend existing apps and create your own App UI on top of them or create your own Fusion app from scratch. But these are Fusion apps and they have restrictions.  These can only run within the Fusion applications ecosystem, which means they can only be accessed by people who are registered in the Fusion application ecosystem, and there are some other restrictions (for example, in terms of the APIs you can access). And you also have no access to customer data tables. Mashup applications use the stand-alone Visual Builder Cloud Service, which enables you to create custom visual applications. These are visual applications that run outside the Fusion apps ecosystem. Users only need to be identified to the Identity Cloud Service, IDCS, and then they can get access to these mashup apps, depending on the roles and privileges given to them, of course. These mashup applications can access Fusion apps API data, as well as customer database tables, Excel spreadsheet data, CSV files, and third-party APIs. And all this data can appear on the same page, in the same app, using the same Redwood components, so they look and work just like Fusion applications. 18:22 Lois: I know in the past there's been some friction to making changes in Fusion applications. Partner and customer developers use different tools than the ones Oracle engineers use and there have been some deployment issues. To wrap up things, can you tell us why customers should use Visual Builder Studio to customize Fusion apps? Joe: Glad to, Lois. The big benefit to customers is that they are using the exact same tools, Visual Builder Designer for page design work and Visual Builder Studio for project and code management, to build the customizations and extensions that Oracle is using to create the applications and extensions that are delivered to them. I can't emphasize enough how big a deal this is and how wonderful it is for the customer. We're constantly making the Visual Builder Designer interface easier and easier to work with. We're currently releasing a new version of Visual Builder Designer—the Express mode version. This version of Designer is lightweight and has only the necessary features required to allow you to make changes to pages and layouts, and create and manage dynamic rule-based layouts. If you need more (for example, you need to create service connections, fragments, and do a lot more of that type of advanced work), then use the advanced version of the Designer. Both are available to you, assuming that your user has the appropriate permission and the Fusion app you are using has implemented Express Designer. 19:37 Lois: OK Joe, what courses does Oracle University offer for me if I wanted to learn more about developing extensions for Fusion apps and creating mashup apps using Visual Builder Studio? Joe: Oracle University has several courses. We have the Develop Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio, which focuses on creating the stand-alone custom bespoke mashup visual applications. We also have our Design and Develop Redwood Applications course, which goes into detail about working with the Redwood page templates and components. All these courses are free and available today. And all you need to do is log in to mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 20:10 Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. Just a quick reminder before we close about the short survey we've put together to get your thoughts on the podcast. It'll take just a few minutes and will help us make the podcast even better. Just click the link in the show notes to participate. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham... Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 20:33 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

The next generation of front-end user interfaces for Oracle Fusion Applications is being built using Visual Builder Studio and Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit. However, many of the terms associated with these tools can be confusing.   In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald. Together, they take you through the different terminologies, how they relate to each other, and how they can be used to deliver the new Oracle Fusion Applications as well as stand-alone, bespoke visual web applications.   Survey: https://customersurveys.oracle.com/ords/surveys/t/oracle-university-gtm/survey?k=focus-group-2-link-share-5   Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/develop-fusion-applications-using-visual-builder-studio/138392/   Build Visual Applications Using Oracle Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/build-visual-applications-using-oracle-visual-builder-studio/137749/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started. 00:26 Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! If you've been following along with us, you'll know that we've had some really interesting seasons this year. We covered Autonomous Database, Artificial Intelligence, Visual Builder Studio and Redwood, OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes, and Oracle Database 23ai New Features. Nikita: And we've had some pretty awesome special guests. Do go back and check out those episodes if any of those topics interest you. 01:04 Lois: As we close out the year, we thought this would be a good time to revisit some of our best episodes. Over the next few weeks, you'll be able to listen to four of our most popular episodes of the year.  Nikita: Right, this is the best of the best–according to you–our listeners.   Lois: Today's episode is #1 of 4 and is a throwback to a discussion with Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald on Visual Builder Studio. Nikita: We asked Joe about Visual Builder Studio and Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit, also known as JET. Together, they form the basis of the technology for the next generation of front-end user interfaces for Oracle Fusion Applications, as well as many other Oracle applications, including most Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) interfaces. 01:48 Lois: We looked at the different terminologies and technologies, how they relate to each other, and how they deliver the new Oracle Fusion Applications and stand-alone, bespoke visual web applications.  So, let's dive right in. Nikita: Joe, I'm somewhat thrown by the terminology around Visual Builder, Visual Studio, and JET. Can you help streamline that for us? Lois: Yeah, things that are named the same sometimes refer to different things, and sometimes things with a different name refer to the same thing. 02:18 Joe: Yeah, I know where you're coming from. So, let's start with Visual Builder Studio. It's abbreviated as VBS and can go by a number of different names. Some of the most well-known ones are Visual Builder Studio, VBS, Visual Builder, Visual Builder Stand-Alone, and Visual Builder Cloud Service. Clearly, this can be very confusing. For the purposes of these episodes as well as the training courses I create, I use certain definitions.  02:42 Lois: Can you take us through those? Joe: Absolutely, Lois. Visual Builder Studio refers to a product that comes free with an OCI account and allows you to manage your project-related assets. This includes the project itself, which is a container for all of its assets. You can assign teams to your projects, as well as secure the project and declare roles for the different team members. You manage GIT repositories with full graphical and command-line GIT support, define package, build, and deploy jobs, and create and run continuous integration/continuous deployment graphical and code-managed pipelines for your applications. These can be visual applications, created using the Visual Builder Integrated Development Environment, the IDE, or non-visual apps, such as Java microservices, docker builds, NPM apps, and things like that. And you can define environments, which determine where your build jobs can be deployed. You can also define issues, which allow you to identify, track, and manage things like bugs, defects, and enhancements. And these can be tracked in code review merge requests and build jobs, and be mapped to agile sprints and scrum boards. There's also support for wikis for team collaboration, code snippets, and the management of the repository and the project itself. So, VBS supports code reviews before code is merged into GIT branches for package, build, and deploy jobs using merge requests. 04:00 Nikita: OK, what exactly do you mean by that? Joe: Great. So, for example, you could have developers working in one GIT branch and when they're done, they would push their private code changes into that remote branch. Then, they'd submit a merge request and their changes would be reviewed. Once the changes are approved, their code branch is merged into the main branch and then automatically runs a CI/CD package (continuous integration/continuous deployment) package, build, and deploy job on the code. Also, the CI/CD package, build, and deploy jobs can run against any branches, not just the main branch. So Visual Builder Studio is intended for managing the project and all of its assets. 04:37 Lois: So Joe, what are the different tools used in developing web applications? Joe: Well, Visual Builder, Visual Builder Studio Designer, Visual Builder Designer, Visual Builder Design-Time, Visual Builder Cloud Service, Visual Builder Stand-Alone all kind of get lumped together. You can kinda see why. What I'm referring to here are the tools that we use to build a visual web application composed of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) for metadata. I call this Visual Builder Designer. This is an Integrated Development Environment, it's the “IDE” which runs in your browser. You use a combination of drag and drop, setting properties, and writing and modifying custom and generated code to develop your web applications. You work within a workspace, which is your own private copy of a remote Git branch. When you're ready to start development work, you open an existing workspace or create a new one based on a clone of the remote branch you want to work on. Typically, a new branch would be created for the development work or you would join an existing branch. 05:38 Nikita: What's a workspace, Joe? Is it like my personal laptop and drive? Joe: A workspace is your own private code area that stores any changes you make on the Oracle servers, so your code changes are never lost—even when working in a browser-based, network-based tool. A good analogy is, say I was working at home on my own machine. And I would make a copy of a remote GIT branch and then copy that code down to my local machine, make my code changes, do my testing, etc. and then commit my work—create a logical save point periodically—and then when I'm ready, I'd push that code up into the remote branch so it can be reviewed and merged with the main branch. My local machine is my workspace. However, since this code is hosted up by Oracle on our servers, and the code and the IDE are all running in your browser, the workspace is a simulation of a local work area on your own computer. So, the workspace is a hosted allocation of resources for you that's private. Other people can't see what's going on in your workspace. Your workspace has a clone of the remote branch that you're working with and the changes you make are isolated to your cloned code in your workspace. 06:41 Lois: Ok… the code is actually hosted on the server, so each time you make a change in the browser, the change is written back to the server? Is it possible that you might lose your edits if there's a networking interruption? Joe: I want to emphasize that while I started out not personally being a fan of web-based integrated development environments, I have been using these tools for over three years and in all that time, while I have lost a connection at times—networks are still subject to interruptions—I've never lost any changes that I've made. Ever. 07:11 Nikita: Is there a way to save where you are in your work so that you could go back to it later if you need to? Joe: Yes, Niki, you're asking about commits and savepoints, like in a Git repository or a Git branch. When you reach a logical stopping or development point in your work, you would create a commit or a savepoint. And when you're ready, you would push that committed code in your workspace up to the remote branch where it can be reviewed and then eventually merged, usually with the main Git branch, and then continuous integration/continuous package and deployment build jobs are run. Now, I'm only giving you a high-level overview, but we cover all this and much more in detail with hands-on practices in our Visual Builder developer courses. Right now, I'm just trying to give you a sense of how these different tools are used. 07:52 Lois: Yeah, that makes sense, Joe. It's a lot to cover in a short amount of time. Now, we've discussed the Visual Builder Designer IDE and workspace. But can you tell us more about Visual Builder Cloud Service and stand-alone environments? What are they used for? What features do they provide? Are they the same or different things? Joe: Visual Builder Cloud Service or Visual Builder Stand-Alone, as it's sometimes called, is a service that Oracle hosts on its servers. It provides hosting for the deployed web application source code as well as database tables for business objects that we build and maintain to store your customer data. This data can come from XLS or CSV files, or even your own Oracle database customer table data. A custom REST proxy makes calls to external third-party REST services on your behalf and supports several popular authentication mechanisms. There is also integration with the Identity Cloud Service (IDCS) to manage users and their access to your web apps. Visual Builder Cloud Service is a for-fee product. You pay licensing fees for how much you use because it's a hosted service. Visual Builder Studio, the project asset management aspect I discussed earlier, is free with a standard OCI license. Now, keep in mind these are separate from something like Visual Builder Design Time and the service that's running in Fusion application environments. What I'm talking about now is creating stand-alone, bespoke, custom visual applications. These are applications that are built using industry-standard HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and JSON for metadata and are hosted on the Oracle servers.  09:30 Are you looking for practical use cases to help you plan and apply configurations that solve real-world challenges?  With the new Applied Learning courses for Cloud Applications, you'll be able to practically apply the concepts learned in our implementation courses and work through case studies featuring key decisions and configurations encountered during a typical Oracle Cloud Applications implementation. Applied learning scenarios are currently available for General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Accounting Hub, Global Human Resources, Talent Management, Inventory, and Procurement, with many more to come!  Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 10:12 Nikita: Welcome back! Joe, you said Visual Builder Cloud Service or Stand-Alone is a for-fee service. Is there a way I can learn about using Visual Builder Designer to build bespoke visual applications without a fee? Joe: Yes. Actually, we've added an option where you can run the Visual Builder Designer and learn how to create web apps without using the app hosting or the business object database that stores your customer data or the REST proxy for authentication or the Identity Cloud Service. So you don't get those features, but you can still learn the fundamentals of developing with Visual Builder Designer. You can call third-party APIs, you can download the source, and run it locally, for example, in a Tomcat server. This is a great and free way to learn how to develop with the Visual Builder Designer. 10:55 Lois: Joe, I want to know more about the kinds of apps you can build in VB Designer and the capabilities that VB Cloud Service provides. Joe: Visual Builder Designer allows you to build custom, bespoke web applications made of interactive webpages; flows of pages for navigation; events that respond when things happen in the app, for example, GUI events like a button is clicked or values are entered into a text field; variables to store the state of the application and the ability to make REST calls, all from your browser. These applications have full access to the Oracle Fusion Applications APIs, given that you have the right security permissions and credentials of course. They can access your customer business data as business objects in our internally hosted database tables or your own customer database tables. They can access third-party APIs, and all these different data sources can appear in the same visual application, on the same page, at the same time. They use the Identity Cloud Service to identify which users can log in and authenticate against the application. And they all use the new Redwood graphical user interface components and page templates, so they have the same look and feel of all Oracle applications. 12:02 Nikita: But what if you're building or extending Oracle Fusion Applications? Don't things change a little bit? Joe: Good point, Niki. Yes. While you still work within Visual Builder Studio, that doesn't change, VBS maintains your project and all your project-related assets, that is still the same. However, in this case, there is no separate hosted Visual Builder Cloud Service or Stand-Alone instance. In this case, Visual Builder is hosted inside of Fusion apps itself as part of the installation. I won't go into the details of how the architecture works, but the Visual Builder instance that you're running your code against is part of Fusion applications and is included in the architecture as well as the billing. All your code changes are maintained and stored within a single container called an extension. And this extension is a Git repository that is created for you, or you can create it yourself, depending on how you choose to work within Visual Builder Studio. You create an extension to hold the source code changes that provide a customization or configuration. This means making a change to an existing page or a set of pages or even adding new pages and flows to your Oracle Fusion Applications. You use Visual Builder Studio and Visual Builder Designer in a similar way as to how you would use them for bespoke stand-alone visual applications. 13:12 Lois: I'm trying to envision how this workflow is used. How is it different from bespoke VB app development? Or is it different at all? Joe: So, recall that the Visual Builder Designer is effectively the Integrated Development Environment, the IDE, where you make your code changes by working with both the raw HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript code, if need be, or the Page Designer for drag and drop, and setting properties and then Live mode to test your work. You use a version of VB Designer to view and modify your customizations, and the code is stored in a Git repository called an extension. So, in that sense, the work of developing pages and flows and such is the same. You still start by creating or, more typically, joining a project and then either create a new extension from scratch or base it on an existing application, or go directly to the page that you want to edit and, on that page, select from your profile menu to edit in Visual Builder Studio. Now, this is a different lifecycle path from bespoke visual applications. With them, you're not extending an app or modifying individual pages in the same way. You get a choice of which project you want to add your extension to when you're working with Fusion apps and potentially which repository to store your customizations, unless one already exists and then it's assigned automatically to hold your code changes. So you make your changes and edits to the portions of the application that have been opened for extensibility by the development team. This is another difference. Once you make your code changes, the workflow is pretty much the same as for a bespoke visual application: do your development work, commit your changes, push your changes to the remote branch. And then typically, your code is reviewed and if the code passes and is approved, it's merged with the main branch. Then, the package and deploy jobs run to deploy the main code to the production environment or whatever environment you're targeting. And once the package and deploy jobs complete, the code base is updated and users who log in see the changes that you've made. 15:03 Nikita: You mentioned creating apps that combine data from Fusion cloud, applications, customer data, and third-party APIs into one page. Why is it necessary? Why can't you just do all that in one Fusion Applications extension? Joe: When you create extensions, you are working within the Oracle Fusion Applications ecosystem, that's what they actually call it, which includes a defined a set of users who have been predefined and are, therefore, known to Fusion Applications. So, if you're a user and you're not part of that Fusion Apps ecosystem, you can't access the pages. Period. That's how Fusion Apps works to maintain its security and integrity. Secondly, you're working pretty much solely with the Fusion Applications APIs data sources coming directly from Fusion Applications, which are also available to you when you're creating bespoke visual apps. When you're working with Fusion Applications in Visual Builder, you don't have access to these business objects that give you access to your own customer database data through Visual Builder-generated REST APIs. Business objects are available only to bespoke visual applications in the hosted VB Cloud Service instance. So, your data sources are restricted to the Oracle Fusion Applications APIs and some third-party APIs that work within a narrow set of authentication mechanisms currently, although there are plans to expand this in the future. A mashup app that allows you now to access all these data sources while creating apps that leverage the Redwood Component System, so they look and work like Fusion Apps. They're a highly popular option for our partners and customers. 16:28 Lois: So, to review, we have two different approaches. You can create a visual application using the for-fee, hosted Visual Builder Cloud Service/Stand-Alone or the one that comes with Oracle Integration Cloud, or you can use the extension architecture for Fusion applications, where you use the designer and create your extensions, and the code is delivered and deployed to Fusion applications code. You haven't talked about JET yet though, Joe. What is that? Joe: So, JET is an abbreviation. It stands for Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit and JET is the underlying technology that makes Visual Builder, visual applications, and Visual Builder Extensions for Fusion Applications possible. Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit provides a module-based, open-source toolkit that leverages modern JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS3, and HTML5 to deliver web applications. It's targeted at JavaScript developers working on client-side applications. It is not for backend development.  It's a collection of popular, powerful JavaScript libraries and a set of Oracle-contributed JavaScript libraries that make it very simple, easy, and efficient to build front-end applications that can consume and interact with Oracle products and services, especially Oracle Cloud services, but of course it can work with any type of third-party API. 17:44 Nikita: How are JET applications architected, Joe, and how does that relate to Visual Builder pages and flows? Joe: The architecture of JET applications is what's called a single page architecture. We've all seen these. These are where you have a single webpage—think of your index page that provides the header and footer for your webpage—and then the middle portion or the middle content of the page, represented by modules, allow you to navigate from one page or module to another. It also provides the data mapping so that the data elements in the variables and the state of the application, as well as the graphical user interface elements that provide the fields and functionality for the interface for the application, these are all maintained on the client side. If you're working in pure JET, then you work with these modules at the raw JavaScript code level. And there are a lot of JavaScript developers who want to work like this and create their custom applications from the code up, so to speak. However, it also provides the basis for Visual Builder visual applications and Fusion Apps visual extensions in Visual Builder. 18:41 Lois: How does JET support VB Apps? You didn't talk much about having to write a bunch of JavaScript and HTML5, so I got the impression that this is all done for you by VB Designer? Joe: Visual Builder applications are composed of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript code that is usually generated by the developer when she drags and drops components on to the page designer canvas or sets properties or creates action chains to respond to events. But there's also a lot of JavaScript object notation (JSON) metadata created at the time that describes the pages, the flows, the navigation, the REST services, the variables, their data types, and other assets needed for the app to function. This JSON metadata is translated at runtime using a large JavaScript extension toolkit library called the Visual Builder Runtime that runs in the browser and real time translates the metadata and other assets in the Visual Builder source code into JET code and assets, which are actually executed at runtime. And it's very quick, very fast, very efficient, and provides a layer of abstraction between the raw JET code and the Visual Builder architecture of pages, flows, action chains for executing code and events to handle things that occur in the user interface, including saving the state in variables that are mapped to GUI components. For example, if you have an Input text component, you need to have a variable to store the value that was entered into that Input text component between page refreshes. The data can move from the Input text component to the variable, and from the variable to that Input text component if it's changed programmatically, for example. So, JET manages binding these data values to variables and the UI components on the page. So, a change to a variable value or a change to the contents of the component causes the others to change automatically. Now, this is only a small part of what JET and the frameworks and libraries it uses do for the applications. JET also provides more complex GUI components like lists and tables, and selection lists, and check boxes, and all the sorts of things you would expect in a modern GUI application. 20:37 Nikita: You mentioned a layer of abstraction between Visual Builder Studio Designer and JET. What's the benefit of working in Visual Builder Designer versus JET itself? Joe: The benefit of Visual Builder is that you work at a higher level of abstraction than having to get down into the more detailed levels of deep JavaScript code, working with modules, data mappings, HTML code, single page architecture navigation, and the related functionalities. You can work at a higher level, a graphical level, where you can drag and drop things onto a design canvas and set properties. The VB architecture insulates you from the more technical bits of JET. Now, this frees the developer to concentrate more on application and page design, implementing logic and business rules, and creating a pleasing workflow and look and feel for the user. This keeps them from having to get caught up in the details of getting this working at the code level. Now if needed, you can write custom JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3 code, though much less than in a JET app, and all that is part of the VB application source, which becomes part of the code used by JET to execute the application itself. And yet it all works seamlessly together. 21:38 Lois: Joe, I know we have courses in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. But does a developer getting ready to work in Visual Builder Designer have to go take those courses first or can they start working in VB Designer right away? Joe: Yeah, that question does often comes up: Do I need to learn JET to work with Visual Builder? No, you don't. That's all taken care for you in the products themselves. I don't really think it helps that much to learn JET if you are going to be a VB developer. In some ways, it could even be a bit distracting since some of things you learn to do in JET, you would have to unlearn or not do so much because of what VB does it for you. The things you would have to do manually in code in JET are done for you. This is why we call VB a low code development tool. I mean, you certainly can if you want to, but I would spend more time learning about the different GUI components, page templates, the Visual Builder architecture — events, action chains, and the data provider variables and types. Now, I know JET myself. I started with that before learning Visual Builder, but I use very little of my JET knowledge as a VB developer. Visual Builder Designer provides a nice, abstracted, clean layer of modern visual development on top of JET, while leveraging the power and flexibility of JET and keeping the lower-level details out of my way. 22:49 Nikita: Joe, where can I go to get started with Visual Builder? Joe: Well, for more information, I recommend you take a look at our Develop Fusion Applications course if you're working with Fusion Applications and Visual Builder Studio. The other course is Develop Visual Applications with Visual Builder Studio and that's if you're creating stand-alone bespoke applications. Both these courses are free. We also have a comprehensive course that covers JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3, and while it's not required that you take that to be successful, it can be helpful down the road. I would also say that some basic knowledge of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript will certainly support you and serve you well when working with Visual Builder. You learn more as you go along and you find that you need to create more sophisticated applications. I would also mention that a lot of the look and feel of the applications in Visual Builder visual applications and Fusion apps extensions and customizations come through JET components, JET styles, and JET variables, and CSS variables, so that's something that you would want to pursue at some point. There's a JET cookbook out there. You can search for Oracle JET and look for the JET cookbook and that's a good introduction to all of that. 23:50 Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. To learn about some of the courses Joe mentioned, visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. Lois: Before we wrap up, we've got a favor to ask. We've created a short survey to capture your thoughts on the podcast. It'll only take a few minutes of your time. Just click the link in the show notes and share your feedback. We want to make sure we're delivering the best experience possible so don't hesitate to let us know what's on your mind! Thanks for your support. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 24:30 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham continue their deep dive into Oracle Database 23ai backup and recovery strategies with Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor Bill Millar.   Picking up from Part 1, they explore critical concepts such as instance recovery, checkpoint processes, and the role of redo log files. Bill shares insights into complete and incomplete recovery, flashback technologies, and lots more.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-backup-and-recovery/141127/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 
00:26 Nikita: Welcome back to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi everyone! Last week, we had a fantastic chat with Bill Millar, our Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor. We dug into the basics of backup and recovery. We touched on everything from a DBA's role in preventing data loss to handling different types of failures, and even some common mistakes that tend to pop up when managing a database. Nikita: Yeah, if you missed that episode, definitely go back and check it out. It's packed with useful info, especially if you're in charge of keeping databases safe. 01:10 Lois: Today, we're picking up where we left off. We're going to ask Bill about instance recovery and recovery strategies. Bill, can you kick things off by explaining what instance recovery is? Bill: You can understand instant recovery by becoming familiar with the checkpoint process, the redo log files, and the role of the log writer with the redo log files. Automatically instance or crash recovery. What is it doing? What are the phases of instance recovery? How we possibly can tune that instance recovery. We can use the mean time to recovery advisor that can help us determine how we might tune the instance recovery. 01:51 Nikita: OK, so let's go through some of these concepts and procedures you mentioned. What is the checkpoint process responsible for exactly? Bill: The checkpoint process itself, it's responsible for updating the data file headers with checkpoint information. When a checkpoint is taken, it is going to write into the controlfiles. It tells the DB writer to write. DB writer writes to the data files, and the checkpoint is also annotated in the data files. So updating controlfiles with that checkpoint information also, controlfiles and database files. It signals that DB writer at full check points again, hey, it's time to write. So that way, it has the latest data written to the data files. The controlfile and datafiles, those are in sync with that. 02:40 Lois: Bill, what about the log writer process and the redo log files? Bill: With the log writer process and the redo log files, the redo log files record the changes to the database himself. It should be multiplexed. 02:53 Nikita: What do you mean by that? Bill: More than one redo log group. Now, the redo log groups, it is recommended that they should be multiplexed. Each group member should be on a different disk or in a different disk group if you're using ASM. 03:10 Nikita: And why is that, Bill? Bill: Because if I lose one, if I lose one redo log group, one member, I can continue to operate with just the one. If I only have one redo log group member and the system comes around and tries to write to it, then my system is going to come to a halt. So the log writer is going to write to those redo logs whenever somebody does a commit. When that redo log buffer is 1/3 full or every three seconds and before DB writer writes. So those are the four mechanism that tells log writer to write from that log buffer to the redo log files. And it'll also write, when we do a shut down, all the buffers will be flushed. And so that way, everything will be in sync when the system is shut down. 04:01 Lois: What are the different modes of operation for a database, Bill? And how do these modes impact the recovery capabilities of the database? Bill: So we have two different modes we can operate in. One is called NOARCHIVELOG mode. It is the default. ARCHIVELOG mode, highly encouraged. But not every environment has to be in ARCHIVELOG mode. 04:21 Nikita: So with ARCHIVELOG mode… Bill: Closed database. You have to close it, recover to the last backup. That's as far as I can go. Actually, I could, depending on what happens, I might be able to apply some redo. Suitable for training and test environments or for data warehouses, we don't have a lot of frequent changes. It's mainly bulk loading data at night and querying during the day. So it might be appropriate for that. Because ARCHIVELOG mode, it is a little overhead. Yes. So with that database, it goes down while it's open. The system, when it comes up, it can recover to the last committed transaction. And this is usually the mode we want to operate in for production environments. So we have that data in the buffer cache. We have that redo being buffered. We have the undo tablespace, keeping track of what the data was before a change. The redo keeps track of what was the change. And if we're in ARCHIVELOG mode, as we switch from one redo log to another, we will generate what's referred to as archived log files, and that's what allows us to do a complete recovery. 05:33 Lois: What happens in the case of automatic instance recovery? Bill: For an automatic instance recovery or crash recovery, our system went down unexpectedly. Because it did not do a clean shutdown, the buffers were not flushed. Everything was not synchronized. So the datafile, controlfile, everything is out of sync. 05:53 Nikita: So, how do the files get synchronized then? Bill: It uses the redo log groups to synchronize the files. It's going to roll forward. It rolls forward the changes that were made. So due to different distinct operations. Roll forward applies committed and uncommitted data. And the redo does not keep track of what was committed and uncommitted. It'll keep track of, hey, I had this transaction, hey, here's a commit for that transaction. But hey, I have a transaction. That was never uncommitted. That's the job of the undo. But rolls forward all those changes. And then anything that did not actually receive a commit, it will roll back the uncommitted data, return to the original state. And that is the job of the undo tablespace. 06:37 Lois: Bill, is it possible to tune instance recovery for better performance? Bill: You can try to tune this instance recovery. Tuning it is touchy. Be careful because you can cause more harm than what you think you might be doing good. The instance recovery, what we're doing, we're trying to-- the transactions between checkpoints. When was the last checkpoint? Because the items between the checkpoints, that's what has to be reapplied. So the last checkpoint to the last redo log, what is that time frame there between those? Well, what we're going to do, we're going to try to control that. We're going to try to control the difference between the checkpoint and the end of the redo log. There is a mean-time recovery advisor. You specify the desired times in seconds or minutes that how often you want that checkpoint to occur. There is a parameter, FAST_START_MTTR parameter that you can set. The default value is zero saying, hey, I'm going to let the system take care of it. And the maximum you can set it is to one hour. 07:46 Nikita: And why 1 hour?
 Bill: The reason being, if I set that to one hour and I have a lot of activity, how long is it going to take? How many transactions can happen within that hour? Yeah, I'm not doing a checkpoint as often, so I'm eliminating that workload. But if it has to recover, how long is it going to take? If I set it too small, the system says, hey, right now, it's going to take me 19 seconds based off statistics. If I said, OK, I want it in five seconds. So what does that mean? Every five seconds, I'm saying do a checkpoint. So what is it doing? OK, time to do a checkpoint. OK, time to go ahead and OK, DB writer write. OK, log writer write. OK, let me update the datafiles and the controlfiles. So you're just thrashing your system. So be careful if you decide to try to manually tune it. And when you go out and look at this mean time to recover, and even if you do it through the command line, you'll see that, that value is most likely going to change throughout the day, depending on the workload that you have. 08:46 Lois: How does the process of restoring and recovering data typically work? Bill: So when we restore, we're restoring our datafiles. All the datafiles, tablespace, controlfiles, archived redo log, server parameter file. Then when we recover, it involves depending on the backup that we use and other factors in there, it is going to apply the redo. So automatically done by RMAN. So I tell it, this is what I want to do. Hey, I want to restore a database. OK, RMAN says, all right, what backup are you going to use? What is it I need to restore? And then we tell it to recover. OK, I know what I need to use to recover. So RMAN can do the work for you. So when we restore and recover due to a manual process and there's different methods that we can use, and depending on the failure, we'll drive what type of restore and recovery we might perform. 09:40 Are you looking for practical use cases to help you plan and apply configurations that solve real-world challenges? With the new Applied Learning courses for Cloud Applications, you'll be able to practically apply the concepts learned in our implementation courses and work through case studies featuring key decisions and configurations encountered during a typical Oracle Cloud Applications implementation. Applied learning scenarios are currently available in General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Accounting Hub, Global Human Resources, Talent Management, Inventory, and Procurement, with many more to come! Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 10:22 Nikita: Welcome back! Can you talk about the different types of recovery scopes, Bill? How do they compare? Bill: Recovery can have two kinds of scope. All right. One is the complete recovery. We are getting the database back to the current time of the crash with no loss of data. We're going to again bring everything back to the present. Incomplete or point-in-time recovery. We're going to take a database or maybe a tablespace or even a table back to a point-in-time in the past. So from the time that we select to take it to recover, everything that was done after that is null and void, is gone missing. That's why it's called incomplete recovery, because it's not complete. 11:09 Lois: What are the steps that take place during complete recovery? Bill: We restore the datafiles. Changes are applied. We're applying the redo. The datafiles contained committed and uncommitted transactions. The undo is applied. Anything that did not receive an actual commit will take back to the original value. And we have our datafiles recovered. 11:33 Nikita: And what about point-in-time recovery? Bill: Point-in-time recovery, very similar. We're going to restore the datafiles from as far back as necessary. Changes are applied. So the data files are going to contain the committed and uncommitted up to that point-in-time. Database is open, that redo, that undo, anything that did not actually receive a commit. The undo is applied. The point-in-time recovered is complete. We're not applying all the redo, all the changes, only up to the time that we specify. 12:08 Lois: Are there any features that can make point-in-time recovery quicker? Bill: We also have the ability to use flashback database. It is an optional feature. And it can be a quick way to do that point-in-time recovery. It is an alternative to that database point-in-time recovery we just looked at. Faster. No restore is required. It's going to rewind the database. It does require some configuration in the environment. We do have to set up in order to use flashback database. 12:41 Nikita: I want to talk about Oracle's data protection solutions, particularly when it comes to backup and recovery or disaster recovery. Bill: So for physical data protection-- backup and recovery objective. Yep, that works for both physical and logical. My recovery time, hours to days. Possibly minutes to hours for the logical. And Oracle solution, we have the Recovery Manager that's out of the box, RMAN. Oracle Secure Backup, that is Oracle's media management library system backing up to tape. The logical protection, yes, flashback technologies can help me take care of that very easily. For disaster recovery, physical data protection, recovery time objective, seconds to minutes. We're not going to accomplish that with RMAN. You're going to want to use our Data Guard with the Active Data Guard feature to be able to switch over to a standby database within seconds of a failure. 13:41 Lois: Why would someone choose to use flashback technologies for recovery, Bill? Bill: With the flashback technologies, we can use it for viewing data as past dates. What did it look like? We can wind the database back and forth in time. Assist users in an error analysis and recovery, because we have different technologies. This flashback query, version query, transaction query, those allow me to view what was the value of a row at a time. I can even see what were the changes to a row over a period of time? I can also view the query that caused that change. For error recovery, I can back out a transaction. I can take a table back to a non-current time. I can also flashback a table that was dropped. And I can also take an entire database by using flashback. So the different recovery options I might have with the flashback technology. 14:44 Lois: Thank you so much, Bill. These last two episodes have been so insightful, right Niki? Nikita: I couldn't agree more, Lois! If you want to know more about backup and recovery configuration and other concepts, visit mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Database 23ai: Backup and Recovery course. Our upcoming episode is a very special one, where we'll be discussing Oracle AI in Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management. So, watch out for that! Until next week, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off!
 15:16 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Senior Principal Database & Security Instructor Ron Soltani, as they discuss how the new Automatic SQL Plan Management feature in Oracle Database 23ai improves performance consistency and simplifies management. Then, Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor Bill Millar shares insights into two new features: one that enhances SecureFiles LOB Write Performance, improving read and write speeds, and another that increases the column limit in a table to 4,096, making it easier to handle complex data.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-new-features-for-administrators/137192/207062   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   X: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and joining me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi there! Last week, we looked at the Oracle Database 23ai enhancements that have been made to Hybrid Columnar Compression and Fast Ingest. In today's episode, we'll talk about the 23ai new feature for Automatic SQL Plan Management with Ron Soltani, a Senior Principal Database & Security Instructor with Oracle University.  01:01 Nikita: And later on, we'll be joined by Bill Millar, another Senior Principal Database & MySQL Instructor, who will tell us about the 23ai automatic feature that enhances SecureFiles LOB Write Performance. We'll also get him to talk about the Wide Columns update. So, let's get started. Hi Ron! What have been the common challenges with SQL plans and database performance? Ron: One of the problems that we have always had, if you remember, was when data changes, database setting configuration, parameter changes, SQL that were operating very well could now behave badly using the SQL plan that were associated to them. And remember, the same SQL plan generally Oracle likes to continuously reuse.  So the SQL plans were put in the baseline in the past, and we could have those SQL plan baseline, which are a set of approved plans to be used for a SQL from the SQL history stored in AWR, then could be used for the optimizer to choose from. However, which plan to choose and which one would be the best one to use, this is what the problem has been in managing the SQL plan baselines, and a lot of the operation would have been done manually.  02:22 Lois: And what have we done to overcome this?  Ron: So now this new system will going to perform all of those operations automatically for us. Now it can search the Automatic Workload Repository. It can find SQL plans for a particular SQL statement, then look for any alternative plans that may available in alternate sources like SQL tuning sets. And then validate those plans and see if those plans are going to be good and to be used as SQL plan baseline for executing SQL statement by the optimizer. 03:00 Nikita: So we now have the Automatic SQL Plan Management Evolve Advisor to help manage operations automatically, right? Can you tell us a little more about it? How does it ensure optimal performance? Ron: This is an automatic advisor that is created that can go look for different plans and validate the plans by examining them, making sure that they are not causing any regression compared to the previous operation, and then evolve that plan into a good baseline.  This simplifies management of the baseline repository for a SQL statement. So as data changes, as parameters changes, optimizer could come up with different type of plans that are set within this baseline that has been validated to be good baseline for each situational operation. So this way you reduce a lot of hard parsing operations.  04:00 Lois: And how does the SQL Evolve Advisor work, Ron? Ron: First, it will check the AWR to find what are the top SQLs that has been found. Then it will look to see if these top SQLs who did not perform well with the plan that they have, that's why they're top SQL, have other alternative plans that are stored in the SQL plan history, in AWR, or available in any other sources.  Then if it finds any additional plans, it will go ahead and add all of those plans into the plan history. So in the plan history, now you have accumulation of all the plans available in AWR and anything that has been brought from other sources. Then it will test every one of those plans and validate that by use of the plan, the SQL statement will not deprivate and get slower. The performance is either similar or actually better. So normally, there is a percentage that the SQL should improve. So we will then validate these baselines.  And finally, once the baselines or those plans have been validated, they will be accepted, and then they will be added as SQL plan baselines. They will remain in the statement history, in the AWR, and will be available for optimizer for the future use.  05:28 Nikita: What are the benefits of this? Ron: Number one is Autonomous Database. As you know, they want to automate all management, including management of the SQL execution due to changes that are happening for the application, for the data, or the database and its environment.  It totally eliminates any manual intervention for management of the statement, and it can transparently repair any statement that had been affected by a major change.  06:00 Lois: What sort of problems does this feature solve for us? Ron: Of course, this is a performance consistency. We want to make sure that every statement performed to its best performance and any specific changes that may impact those SQL statements would be taken into an account, and a better plan, if available, would then be available for use.  It also improves the application performance level, therefore database service level will get much improvement. And the SQL execution plans will be automatically managed behind the scene by expanding these baselines, by managing all of these baseline history and all of that that is managed by this automatic SQL plan management environment automatically.  06:50 Nikita: And when do we use this?  Ron: If there is a change in a database environment, like you add SGA, the change into the shared pool, change in the size of the buffer cache or any type of storage effects. So all of those can actually affect the SQL execution.  Now all of those changes, including data changes, can cause a SQL plan to not behave very well or behave as well as it was doing before. Therefore, if particular plans do not perform as well as they did before, that affects the performance of the application. This also affects the performance of the database and the instance.  07:35 Lois: So, how do we use this environment?  Ron: Well, best news that I have for you in that is that there is nothing manual needs to be done. All we need to do is, number one, make sure that we enable foreground automatic SQL plan management that we done through the package for the DBMS SPM for SQL plan management.  You will use the package with the configure option, and you enable the auto SPM evolve task, and you set it to auto. Once this is done, now the SQL evolve plan management and advisor are enabled, and they will then monitor your statements, review all of the top SQLs as they are found with all of the ADDM operation, and then do their work in looking for better plans and being able to maintain the SQL plan baselines we talked about.  Now for you to be able to view, monitor, and see how these operations are going, if it is enabled, you can take a look at the DBA SQL plan baseline's view. There are many, many columns in that particular baseline, and there are also columns that has been added that tell you where is the plan generated from, if a plan is approved, and any other user interaction with the plan or settings can then be verified using that DBA SQL plan baseline view.  09:13 Are you looking for practical use cases to help you plan and apply configurations that solve real-world challenges? With the new Applied Learning courses for Cloud Applications, you'll be able to practically apply the concepts learned in our implementation courses and work through case studies featuring key decisions and configurations encountered during a typical Oracle Cloud Applications implementation. Applied learning scenarios are currently available for General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Accounting Hub, Global Human Resources, Talent Management, Inventory, and Procurement, with many more to come! Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 09:54 Nikita: Welcome back! Let's bring Bill into the conversation. Hi  Bill! Can you tell us about the 23ai automatic feature that enhances SecureFiles LOB Write Performance?  Bill: The key here is that it is automatic and transparent. There's no parameters set. Nothing to configure in table, no hints, and nothing that you have to do with these improvements. It is tightly integrated with SecureFiles LOB infrastructure.  So now, multiple LOBs can be handled in a single transaction and can be buffered simultaneously. This will help with mixed workloads, switching between the LOBs that are writing in a single transaction. The PGA will adaptively resize based off the size for these large writes for the LOBs if you're using the No Cache option. Remember, no cache is going to bypass the buffer cache and does direct reads and writes from the PGA.  JSON type will be transformed into the OSON Oracle data type. It is an optimized native binary storage format for JSON data.  11:15 Lois: Ok. So, going forward, there will be better read and write performance for LOBs. Bill: Multiple LOBs in a single transaction can be buffered simultaneously, improving mixed workloads. We just talked about the PGA. Automatically, the buffer is automatically resized.  And the improved JSON support. The reason it will recognize, hey, this is a JSON data type. But traditionally, JSON data types were small.  So they were small to medium size. So the range from 32k to 32 meg was considered small to medium whereas LOBs were designed for data types larger than 100 meg. So by recognizing this a JSON data type, it can take advantage of the LOB architecture.  Other enhancements will also include the acceleration of compressed LOBs, the pen and compression caching, and improves the poor performance of your reads and writes to compressed LOBs. It's faster than previously.  12:24 Nikita: Bill, what do you think about the recent increase in the column limit? Previously, the limit was 1000 columns per table, which sometimes posed issues when migrating from other systems that allowed more than 1,000 columns, right?  Bill: Maybe because of workload requirements, the whole machine learning, the internet of things workloads, IOTs can have hundreds of thousands of attributes, dimensional attribute columns for that. And even our very own blockchain tables reserves up to 40 hidden virtual columns, so that takes away from the total amount.  Virtual columns count towards the column limits and some applications as they drop columns, what it does, it just converts them to unused, and it still applies towards the limit the number of columns that you can have to that limit. There were workarounds. However, they were most likely not the best way to do it, like column switching, table splitting for that. But big data really use cases, really saw where files have or required more than 1,000 columns.  13:42 Lois: So, now that we can have 4,096 columns in a table, I'm sure it's made handling complex data a lot easier.  Bill: So by increasing this, since other systems do support higher column limits, it can-- the increase can make migration from other systems easier and possibly even a little bit more attractive while it can make applications a little bit simpler because the 1,000 column limit was not always optimal for analytics. Where 1,000 might have been plenty for OLTP type environments, but not for the analytics, especially when it comes to machine learning and those internet of things that we talked about, where the previous workarounds, like splitting the tables, really caused more performance issue than anything else.  So we want to avoid those suboptimal workarounds. And the nice thing is there's no change to the SQL. So once you have that-- well, if we were doing SQL, if we had tables that were split and we're trying to do things that is actually going to help improve that SQL, now, we don't have multiple objects that we're dealing with.  14:57 Nikita: How do we actually go about increasing the column limit to 4,096? Bill: You do have to have the compatibility set to 23c. Why? Because it's a new feature. There is a new initialization parameter called Max columns, and you do set that. There's two different ways, two different values. We can set it to standard or we can set it to extended.  It is dynamic. When it's set to standard, it's only 1,000. When we set it to extended, it's going to allow the 4,096. It is modifiable at the PDB level. However, it will inherit what's at the root level, if it's not explicitly set at a PDB. It can't alter it in a session for that. And multiple instances of the RAC environment must use the same value.  Now one thing, notice that it cannot be set to standard if I created a table that had more than 1,000 columns. One thing that might get you, when you drop a table that has more 1,000 columns and you try to set it back to standard, it might tell you, hey, you have tables that have more than 1,000 columns. Don't forget your recycle bin unless you did a drop table purge.  16:09 Lois: Are there any performance considerations to keep in mind, Bill? Bill: There's really no DML or query performance degradation for the tables. However, it might require, as you would expect, the increase in memory when we have the new column limits. It might require additional shared pool, additional SGA with the additional columns, more buffer cache as we're bringing blocks in.  So that's shared pool along with the PGA. And also we can add in buffer cache in there, because that increased column count is going to be increase in the total PGA memory usage. And those are kind of expected for that. But the big advantage is it gives us the ability to eliminate some of these suboptimal workarounds that we had in the past.  17:02 Nikita: Ok! We covered a lot today so thank you Bill and Ron.  Lois: To learn more about what we discussed today, visit mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Database 23ai New Features for Administrators course. Join us next week for a discussion on some more Oracle Database 23ai new features. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham signing off! 17:27 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Redwood is a state-of-the-art graphical interface that defines the look and feel of the new Oracle Cloud Redwood Applications.  In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald, take a closer look at the intent behind the design and development aspects of the new Redwood experience. They also explore Redwood page templates and components.  Developing Redwood Applications with Visual Builder: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/learning-path/developing-redwood-applications-with-visual-builder/112791 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started. 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week, we discussed how Visual Builder Studio can be used to extend Oracle Fusion Apps.  Lois: That's right, Niki. In today's episode, we will focus on Oracle's Redwood design system and how it helps us create stunning, world-class enterprise applications and user experiences.  00:56 Nikita: Yeah, Redwood is the basis for all the new Oracle Cloud Applications being re-designed, developed, and delivered. To tell us more, we have Senior OCI Learning Solutions Architect and Principal Instructor Joe Greenwald, who's been working with Oracle software development tools since the early 90s and is responsible for OU's Visual Builder Studio and Redwood course content. Lois: Hi Joe! Thanks for being with us today. 01:21 Joe: Hi Lois. Hi Niki. I am excited to join you on this episode because with the release of 24A Fusion applications, we are encouraging all our customers to adopt the new Redwood design system and components, and take advantage of the world-class look and feel of the new Redwood user experience. Redwood represents a new approach and direction for us at Oracle, and we're excited to have our customers benefit from it. 01:44 Nikita: Joe, you've been working with Oracle user interface development tools and frameworks for a long time. How and why is Redwood different? Joe: I joined Oracle in 1992, and the first Oracle user interface I experienced was Oracle Forms. And that was the character mode. I came from a background of Smalltalk and its amazing, pioneering graphical user interface (GUI) design capabilities. I worked at Apple and I developed my own GUIs for a few years on PCs and Macs. So, Character Mode Forms, what we used to call DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) screens, was a shock, to say the least. Since then, I've worked with almost every user interface and development platform Oracle has created: Character Mode Forms, GUI Forms, Power Objects, HyperCard on the Macintosh, that was pre-OS X by the way, Sedona, written in native C++ and ActiveX and OLE, which didn't make it to a product but appeared in other things later, ADF Faces, which uses Java to generate HTML pages, and APEX, which uses PL/SQL to generate HTML pages. And I've worked with and wrote training classes for Java Swing, an excellent GUI framework for event-driven desktop and enterprise applications, but it wasn't designed for the web. So, it's with pleasure that I introduce you to the Redwood design system, easily the best effort I've ever seen, from the look and feel of holistic user-goal-centered design philosophy and approach to the cutting-edge WYSIWYG design tools.  03:11 Lois: Joe, is Redwood just another set of styles, colors, and fonts, albeit very nice-looking ones? Joe: The Redwood platform is new for Oracle, and it represents a significant change, not just in the look and feel, colors, fonts, and styles, I mean that too, but it's also a fundamental change in how Oracle is creating, designing, and imagining user interfaces. As you may be aware, all Oracle Cloud Applications are being re-designed, re-engineered, and re-rebuilt from the ground up, with significant changes to both back-end and front-end architectures. The front end is being redesigned, re-developed, and re-created in pure HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript using Visual Builder Studio and its design-time browser-based Integrated Development Environment. The back end is being re-architected, re-designed, and implemented in a modern microservice architecture for Oracle Cloud using Kubernetes and other modern technologies that improve performance and work better in the cloud than our current legacy architecture. The new Oracle Cloud Applications platform uses Redwood for its design system—its tools, its patterns, its components, and page templates. Redwood is a richer and more productive platform to create solutions while still being cost-effective for Oracle. It encourages a transformation of the fundamental user experience, emphasizing identifying, meeting, and understanding end users' goals and how the applications are used.  04:34 Nikita: Joe, do you think Oracle's user interface has been improved with Redwood? In what ways has the UI changed? Joe: Yes, absolutely. Redwood has changed a lot of things. When I joined Oracle back in the '90s, there was effectively no user interface division or UI team. There was no user interface lab—and that was started in the mid-‘90s—and I was asked to give product usability feedback and participate in UI tests and experiments in those labs. I also helped test the products I was teaching at the time. I actually distinctly remember having to take a week to train users on Oracle's Designer CASE tool product just to prep the participants enough to perform usability testing. I can still hear the UI lab manager shaking her head and saying any product that requires a week of training to do usability testing has usability issues! And if you're like me and you've been around Oracle long enough, you know that Oracle's not always been known for its user interfaces and been known to release products that look like they were designed by two or more different companies. All that has changed with Redwood. With Redwood, there's a new internal design group that oversees the design choices of all development teams that develop products. This includes a design system review and an ongoing audit process to ensure that all the products being released, whether Fusion apps or something else, all look and feel similar so it looks like it's designed by a single company with a single thought in mind. Which it is. 06:00 Joe: There's a deeper, consistent commitment in identifying user needs, understanding how the applications are being used, and how they meet those user needs through things like telemetry: gathering metrics from the actual components and the Redwood system itself to see how the applications are being used, what's working well, and what isn't.  This telemetry is available to us here at Oracle, and we use it to fine tune the applications' usability and purpose.  06:25 Lois: That's really interesting, Joe. So, it's a fundamental change in the way we're doing things. What about the GUI components themselves? Are these more sophisticated than simple GUI components like buttons and text fields? Joe: The graphical components themselves are at a much higher level, more comprehensive, and work better together. And in Redwood, everything is a component. And I'm not just talking about things like input text fields and buttons, though it applies to these more fine-grained components as well. Leveraging Oracle's deep experience in building enterprise applications, we've incorporated that knowledge into creating page templates so that the structure and look and feel of the page is fixed based on our internal design standards. The developer has control over certain portions of it, but the overall look and feel of the page is controlled by Oracle. So there is consistency of look and feel within and across applications. These page templates come with predefined functionalities: headers, titles, properties, and variables to manipulate content and settings, slots for other components to hold like search fields, collections, contextual information, badges, and images, as well as primary and secondary actions, and variables for events and event handling through Visual Builder action chains, which handle the various actions and processing of the request on the page. And all these page templates and components are responsive, meaning they respond to the change in the size of the page and the orientation. So, when you move from a desktop to a handheld mobile device or a tablet, they respond appropriately and consistently to deliver a clean, easy-to-use interface and experience. 07:58 Nikita: You mentioned WYSIWYG design tools and their integration with Visual Builder Studio's integrated development environment. How does Redwood work with Visual Builder Studio? Joe: This is easily one of my most favorite aspects about Redwood and the integration with Visual Builder Studio Designer. The components and page templates are responsive at runtime as well as responsive at design time! In over 30 years of working with Oracle software development products, this is the first development system and integrated development environment I've seen Oracle produce where what you see is what you get at design time. Now, with products such as Designer and JDeveloper ADF Faces and even APEX—all those page-generation types of products—you have to generate the page, deploy it, and only then can you view the final page to see whether it meets the needs of your user interface. For example, with Designer, there were literally hundreds of configuration parameters that you could set to control how forms and reports looked when they were generated —down to how many buttons on a row or how many rows to a page, that sort of thing, all done in text mode. Then you'd generate and run the page to see what the result was and then go back and modify things until you got what you wanted. 09:05 Joe: I remember hearing the product managers for Oracle ADF Faces being asked…well, a customer asked, “What happens if I put this component here and this component here? What will the page look like?” and they'd say, “I don't know. Render the page and let's see.” That's just crazy talk. With Redwood and its integration with Visual Builder Studio Designer, what you see on the page at design time is literally what you get. And if I make the page narrower or I even convert it to a mobile display while in the Designer itself, I immediately see what the page looks like in that new mode. Everything just moves accordingly, at design time. For example, when changing to a mobile UI, everything stacks up nicely; the components adjust to the page size and change right there in the design environment. Again, I can't emphasize enough the simple luxury of being able to see exactly what the user is going to see on my page and having the ability to change the resolution, orientation, and screen size, and it changes right there immediately in my design environment. 10:01 Lois: I'm intrigued by the idea of page templates that are managed by Oracle but still leave room for the developer to customize aspects of the look and feel and functionality. How does that work? Joe: Well, the page templates themselves represent the typical pages you would most likely use in an enterprise application. Things like a welcome page, a search page, and edit and create pages, and a couple of different ways to display summary information, including foldout pages, though this is not an exhaustive list of course. Not only do they provide a logical and complete starting point for the layout of the page itself, but they also include built-in functionality. These templates include functionality for buttons, primary and secondary actions, and areas for holding contextual information, badges, avatars, and images. And this is all built right into the page, and all of them use variables to describe the contents for the various parts, so the contents can change programmatically as the variables' contents change, if necessary. 10:59 Do you have an idea for a new course or learning opportunity? We'd love to hear it! Visit the Oracle University Learning Community and share your thoughts with us on the Idea Incubator. Your suggestion could find a place in future development projects. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started.  11:19 Nikita: Welcome back! So, Joe, let's say I'm a developer. How do I get started working with Redwood? Joe: One of the easiest ways to do it is to use Visual Builder Studio Designer and create a new visual application. If you're creating a standalone, bespoke custom application, you can choose a Redwood starter template, which will include all the Redwood components and page templates automatically. Or, if you're extending and customizing an Oracle Fusion application, Redwood is already included.  Either way, when you create a new page, you have a choice of different page templates—welcome page templates, edit pages, search pages, etc. —and all you have to do is choose a page that you want and begin configuring it. And actually if you make a mistake, it's easy to switch page templates. All the components, page templates, and so on have documentation right there inside Visual Builder Studio Designer, and we do recommend that you read through the documentation first to get an understanding of what the use case for that template is and how to use it. And some components are more granular, like a collection container which holds a collection of rows of a list or a table and provides capabilities like toolbars and other actions that are already built and defined. You decide what actions you want and then use predefined event listeners that are triggered when an event occurs in the application—like a button being clicked or a row being selected—which kicks off a series of actions to be performed. 12:38 Lois: That sounds easy enough if you know what you're doing. Joe, what are some of the more common pages and what are they used for?  Joe: Redwood page templates can be broken down into categories. There are overview templates like the welcome page template, which has a nice banner, colors, and illustrations that can be used for a welcoming page—like for entering a new application or a new logical section of the application. The dashboard landing page template displays key information values and their charts and graphs, which can come from Oracle Analytics, and automatically switches the display depending on which set of data is selected.  The detail templates include a general overview, which presents read-only information related to a single record or resource. The item overview gives you a small panel to view summary information (for example, information on a customer) and in the main section, you can view details like all the orders for that customer. And you can even navigate through a set of customers, clicking arrows for next-previous navigation. And that's all built in. There's no programming required. The fold-out page template folds out horizontally to show you individual panels with more detail that can be displayed about the subject being retrieved as well as overflow and drill-down areas. And there's a collection detail template that will display a list with additional details about the selected item (for example, an order and its order line items). 13:52 Joe: The smart search page does exactly what it says. It has a search component that you use to filter or search the data coming back from the REST data sources and then display the results in a list or a table. You define the filter yourself and apply it using different kinds of comparators, so you can look for strings that start with certain values or contain values, or numerical values that are equal to or less than, depending on what you're filtering for. And then there are the transactional templates, which are meant to make changes. This includes both the simple create and edit and advanced create and edit templates.  The simple create and edit page template edits a single record or creates a single record. And the advanced page template works well if you're working with master-detail, parent-child type relationships. Let's say you want to view the parent and create children for it or even create a parent and the children at the same time. And there's a Gantt chart page for project management–type tracking and a guided process page for multiple-step processes and there's a data management page template specifically for viewing and editing data collections like Excel spreadsheets. 14:50 Nikita: You mentioned that there's a design system behind all this. How is this used, and how does the customer benefit from it? Joe: Redwood comprises both a design system and a development system. The design system has a series of steps that we follow here at Oracle and can suggest that you, our customers and partners, can follow as well. This includes understanding the problem, articulating the vision for the page and the application (what it should do), identifying the proper Redwood page templates to use, adding detail and refining the design and then using a number of different mechanisms, including PowerPoint or Figma design tools to specify the design for development, and then monitor engagement in the real world. These are the steps that we follow here at Oracle. The Redwood development process starts with learning how to use Redwood components and templates using the documentation and other content from redwood.oracle.com and Visual Builder Studio. Then it's about understanding the design created by the design team, learning more about components and templates for your application, specifically the ones you're going to use, how they work, and how they work together. Then developing your application using Visual Builder Studio Designer, and finally improving and refining your application. Now, right now, as I mentioned, telemetry is available to us here at Oracle so we can get a sense of the feedback on the pages of how components are being used and where time is being spent, and we use that to tune the designs and components being used. That telemetry data may be available to customers in the future. Now, when you go to redwood.oracle.com, you can access the Redwood pattern book that shows you in detail all the different page templates that are available: smart search page, data grid, welcome page, dashboard landing page, and so on, and you can select these and read more about them as well as the actual design specifications that were used to build the pages—defining what they do and what they respond to. They provide a lot of detailed information about the templates and components, how they work and how they're intended to be used. 16:45 Lois: That's a lot of great resources available. But what if I don't have access to Visual Builder Studio Designer? Can I still see how Redwood looks and behaves? Joe: Well, if you go to redwood.oracle.com, you can log in and work with the Redwood reference application, which is a live application working with live data. It was created to show off the various page templates and components, their look and feel and functionality from the Redwood design and development systems. This is an order management application, so you can do things like view filtered pending orders, create new orders, manage orders, and view information about customers and inventory. It uses the different page templates to show you how the application can perform. 17:23 Nikita: I assume there are common aspects to how these page templates are designed, built, and intended to be used. Is that a good way to begin understanding how to work with them? Becoming familiar with their common properties and functionality? Joe: Absolutely! Good point! All pages have titles, and most have primary and secondary actions that can be triggered through a variety of GUI events, like clicking a button or a link or selecting something in a list or a table. The transactional page templates include validation groups that validate whether the data is correct before it is submitted, as well as a message dialog that can pop up if there are unsaved changes and someone tries to leave the page. All the pages can use variables to display information or set properties and can easily display specific contextual information about records that have been retrieved, like adding the Order Number or Customer Name and Number to the page title or section headers. 18:13 Lois: If I were a developer, I'd be really excited to get started! So, let's say I'm a developer. What's the best way to begin learning about Redwood, Joe? Joe: A great place to start learning about the Redwood design and development system is at the redwood.oracle.com page I mentioned. We have many different pages that describe the philosophy and fundamental basis for Redwood, the ideas and intent behind it, and how we're using it here at Oracle. It also has a list of all the different page templates and components you can use and a link to the Redwood reference application where you can sign in and try it yourself. In addition, we at Oracle University offer a course called Design and Develop Redwood Applications, and in there, we have both lecture content as well as hands-on practices where you build a lightweight version of the Redwood reference application using data from the Fusion apps application, as well as the pages that I talked about: the welcome page, detail pages, transactional pages, and the dashboard landing page.  And you'll see how those pages are designed and constructed while building them yourself.  It's very important though to take one of the free Visual Builder Developer courses first: either Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio and/or Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio before you try to work through the practices in the Redwood course because it uses a lot of Visual Builder Designer technology.  You'll get a lot more out of the Redwood practices if you understand the basics of Visual Builder Studio first. The Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio course is probably a better place to start unless you know for a fact you will be focusing on extending Oracle Fusion Applications using Visual Builder Studio. Now, a lot of the content is the same between the two courses as they share much of the same technology and architectures. 19:53 Lois: Ok, so Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio and Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio…all on mylearn.oracle.com and all free for anyone who wants to take them, right? Joe: Yes, exactly. And the free Redwood learning path leads to an Associate certification. While our courses are a great place to start in preparing for your certification exam, they are not, of course, by themselves sufficient to pass and you will want to study and be familiar with the redwood.oracle.com content as well. The learning path is free, but you do have to pay for the certification exam. 20:29 Nikita: Thanks for those tips, Joe, and we appreciate you joining us today. Joe: Thanks for having me! Lois: Join us next week when we'll discuss how model-based development is still alive and well today. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 20:45 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

What do you need to start customizing the next generation of Oracle Fusion Apps? How do you create new pages for business processes? What level of expertise do you require for this? Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham as they get answers to all these questions and more from Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald. Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/develop-fusion-applications-using-visual-builder-studio/122614/ Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/build-visual-applications-using-oracle-visual-builder-studio/110035/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this  series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular  Oracle technologies. Let's get started. 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week, we were introduced to Visual Builder Studio and the Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit, also known as JET. Lois: Our friend and Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald is back with us today to talk about how to extend Oracle Cloud Applications that are being built using Visual Builder for its front-end. Nikita: That's right. All Fusion Applications are being redesigned and rebuilt using Visual Builder. And we'll find out more about that from Joe. Hi Joe! Thanks for being with us today. Joe: Hi Lois! Hi Niki! My pleasure to be here. 01:09 Nikita: Joe, tell us a little about what's happening with the redesign and re-architecture of Oracle Cloud Applications using Visual Builder Studio, or VBS. I hear some very exciting changes are coming that are important for our customers and partners. Joe: That's right, Niki. Oracle is redesigning and rebuilding its entire suite of Fusion Cloud Applications, over 330 different products, utilizing over 60,000 engineers — that is “60,” not “16” — at Oracle to develop the next generation of Oracle Fusion Applications. What's most exciting is that the same tools the engineers are using to accomplish this are available to our partners and our customers to use to extend the functionality and capabilities of Fusion Applications to meet their custom needs and processes.  01:54 Lois: That's pretty awesome! We want to use this time today to ask you about extensions, the types of extensions you can create, and how to use Visual Builder Studio to create those extensions. Nikita: Yeah, can we start with you telling us what an extension is? I've gotten the sense that Oracle uses the term extension as both a noun and a verb and that's a bit confusing to me. 02:15 Joe: Yeah, good catch, Niki. Yes, Oracle does use the term extension in two ways: both as a noun and a verb. As a noun, an extension is a container for the code changes that you make to your applications. Basically, it's a Git repository that Oracle creates and manages for you. So, the extension container holds the code changes you make to your page layouts: the fields, their positioning, showing and hiding fields, that sort of thing, as well as page functionality. These code changes you make are stored in the extension and it is this extension with your code changes that is merged with the main Git branch eventually and then deployed using continuous integration/continuous deployment jobs defined in Visual Builder Studio, which manages the project and its assets. Your extension is a Git branch that is an asset of the project. Once your extension code is merged with the main branch and deployed, then the next time someone brings up the application, they'll see the changes you've made in the app. 03:08 Lois: And as a verb? Joe: As a verb, extension means to extend the functionality and the look and feel of the application, though I prefer the term customization or configuration to describe this aspect, as the documentation does, and to avoid confusion, though I'll admit I'm not always consistent about the terms I use. 03:26 Lois: What types of customizations, or extensions, and I'm using the verb now, are available for Fusion Apps in Visual Builder Studio? Joe: There are three different ways Fusion Apps can be customized effectively, configured, or extended. The first way is what we call a basic extension, where you're rearranging hiding, or showing, or moving around fields and sections on the page that have been set up to be extendable by the Fusion Application development teams. Things like hiding fields, showing fields, hiding sections, showing sections…  Nikita: So fairly basic actions… Joe: Yeah exactly and they can be done in Visual Builder Studio Designer by people with minimal VB training, Visual Builder training. And, most recently, if you have access to it, you can do it in the new Express mode, where the page shows you just those things you can work with and just the tools you need to work with the page. This is new and makes it much easier for folks who are not highly technical to make basic changes to the page layout. 04:18 Lois: People like me! That sounds easy enough. Joe: And the next type of extension is more of an intermediate change and requires some training with Visual Builder Studio because you're creating rules that govern the display of layouts based on certain conditions on the page. These are highly flexible, powerful, and useful for creating customized page layouts based on a variety of factors from page size and orientation to the role of the person using it to values in the actual fields on the page itself. These rules can be combined to create complex rule-based conditions that display exactly what the user should see, given the conditions of the page and their role. I would also include making changes to action chains, which execute sequences of behaviors and navigation, and the actual structure of the application, but this is more advanced.  Lastly, is creating mashup applications, which are stand-alone Visual Builder visual applications, which use data from Fusion apps, and customer data sources, like their own database tables, and potentially third-party APIs to create brand new pages and applications with new functionality, new processes, new procedures, new displays, all of which look just like Fusion Applications and use the same data as Fusion applications. 05:27 Lois: Joe, how do I get started if I want to extend a page?  Joe: The easiest way to do it is to open a page in Fusion Applications and then select Edit Page in Visual Builder Studio from the Profile menu. You're then prompted for a project to hold the Git repository for the extension container. And since there's probably already one that exists, after you select the project, an extension Git container is assigned to you. Unless this is the very first time the application has been extended in which case it creates an extension for you. When creating customizations or configurations, we recommend that each application be done in its own separate project. So, for example, if you're working on Customer Experience Sales, you might do it in Project A and if you're working on extensions with HCM, you might do it in Project B. And if you decide to create your own pages and flows in your own app, you might do that in Project C.  06:13 Nikita: But why do you need to do this? Joe: That's just to keep things nice and separate and organized. The tool, Visual Builder Studio, doesn't really care, but it makes for cleaner development and can help with the management of the development teams. 06:23 Nikita: Ok, Joe, I have a question. How do I know if the page I'm on in Fusion Apps can be edited in Visual Builder? I know there are a lot of legacy pages still out there and they can co-exist with the new VB-based pages. Joe: If the URL of the page you're on has the word /Redwood in it instead of /faces, then you know this is a page that was created using Visual Builder Studio and you'll be able to extend it and make changes to it using the Edit in Visual Builder Studio option. So, if you select Edit in Visual Builder Studio, then the page you are on opens inside Visual Builder Studio Designer and you can make changes to any part of the page that has been explicitly enabled for extension by the development team. 07:02 Lois: That's an important part, right? The application is not extendable by default.  Joe: That's right, Lois. It is all locked down and you can't make any changes to it by default. The development team must specifically enable certain parts of the page: sections, fields, layouts, variables, types, action chains, etc. as extendable for you to be able to make changes to it. This ensures the changes the development team makes to the application in the future won't break your extensions. And conversely, the development team can choose to not extend portions that they do not want you to touch or mess with. Then if they do change that bit of the app in the future, it won't break the application and you won't get a big surprise. So, using the Edit page in Visual Builder Studio, you can make both basic changes, like moving, showing, and hiding fields and sections, as well as the more intermediate types of configurations, like using dynamic components to create rule-based layouts that change dynamically based on several conditions such as page size, roles of the user, and field values on the page itself. 08:00 Nikita: What happens if two developers make changes and essentially overwrite each other's customizations — say one hides a field and another later exposes it? Joe: Well, whoever commits their changes and deploys last wins. The other developer's changes get overwritten. So, this is something the team would want to consider carefully. It is possible to roll back to an earlier version if one must. And this can be done in Visual Builder Studio — the part that manages project assets like Git repositories. And there are Oracle blog posts about how to do that if you're interested in learning more. 08:29 Lois: Joe, earlier you mentioned creating new pages and flows, but so far you've only talked about modifying existing extendable pages. How do I create new pages and flows? Joe: In a Visual Builder extension, a set of pages and flows is called an App UI. When I use the terms pages and flows, what I'm talking about is a set of pages that are logically related—whatever logical means to the designer and developer—in a group called a flow that you can navigate between. But you can also navigate between flows and even between applications. So, without getting too technical, each application has a default flow, which has a default page where that flow starts when the app first comes up. So, you can think of an App UI as a collection of flows and their pages, and a URL that accesses the default flow and its default page. That's the page you would see first when accessing that URL. Of course, this can be configured and changed by the developer, as needed. Now, when Oracle creates the original application (for example, digital sales, helpdesk, or something like that), we create an App UI, which contains the pages and flows for that application and is the “entry point” into the app, accessing that App UI's default flow and its default page and then things flow on from there. 09:40 Joe: Partners and customers can create their own application extensions that are dependent on an Oracle application and even create their own App UI – their own sets of pages and flows to accommodate their own processing and workflow needs. This gives them the ability to add their own processes and rules, and still leverage and navigate to the core application that Oracle built. For example, say Oracle delivered digital sales as an Oracle Cloud Application built using Visual Builder to a customer and the customer needs to add a few pages to do some validation or other type of business processing before entering the digital sales application. What the customer does, in this case, is create a new extension of the Oracle Digital Sales app and an App UI of their own, which would be the set of pages and flows that contain the processing they want to start with before then navigating into the digital sales app to use Oracle's application. 10:31 Nikita: Wait, did I hear that correctly? We're creating an extension of an extension or creating an extension on an existing extension? Joe: I know, right? I realize this can sound confusing the first time you hear it or the second time or even the third time. It took me a while to get my head around what they're talking about. Let's start with a Fusion application. In a Fusion application, everything is an extension of something. This is just how the code base and the architecture are organized and how they manage the Git repositories and the code base itself. So, Oracle created a base application called the Unified App. The Unified Application contains the basic page structure and common functionality needed for all applications. For example, it contains the header at the top that has the profile and the footer at the bottom of the page that has that little Ask Oracle icon. 11:16 Joe: Within that page, between the header and the footer, are the pages that are created by the developers, whether they be Oracle engineers or partners or customers. They display the contents of the page with the data and the layouts and all of that. In a sense, you can think of the Unified App as an index page, the starting page of the web application. Though that's not completely true technically, it's good enough for illustrative purposes. So, Oracle starts with the Unified App and then a development team extends that Unified App to build their product. This is how digital sales did it. This is how customer experience did it. This is how helpdesk did it. They start with the Unified App and they extend that and create an App UI that contains the flows and pages for their specific application, and then add functionality for all the pages and flows, as needed for the design. Partners and customers can then create a new extension that extends the Oracle Application and add their own App UI and their own URL if they want their pages accessed first, before navigating to the Oracle application. For example, if the digital sales application has functionality you'd like to leverage, like it has data services or fragments or page layouts that you want to reuse or other things, you extend the digital sales application, and this extension holds your code changes. You could then create a new App UI, and once deployed, users can use that URL for the new App UI to access your new pages. And your page can then navigate to the Oracle app when it needs to. Though I will say to date, we're really not seeing much demand for this particular use case, but it is possible. 12:42 Lois: Is that the only option available to customers and partners—to extend an existing Oracle application? Joe: No, Lois. We're seeing customers and partners create brand new Fusion applications of their own, based on the Unified App Oracle created. In a sense, doing the same thing that our development teams here are doing.  Remember, I said an Oracle development team starts with the Unified App, which has common functionality and look and feel for all applications, and then extends that to add business rules processing, flows, App UI, whatever they need for their specific Oracle application. We're seeing our partners and customers wanting to build their own applications. Maybe a customer or partner wants to create a Time & Expense application and leverage the Fusion application data and the APIs available, but define their own flows, their own pages, their own processing. This is very easy to do. They'd start by extending the Unified App just like the Oracle development teams do, and then build their own App UI and within that, their own flows, pages, and custom processing. The nice thing about it is that the application looks and works and feels just like a Fusion application and it appears alongside other Fusion applications, because it is a Fusion application. 13:52 Did you know that the Oracle University Learning Community regularly holds live events hosted by Oracle expert instructors. Find out how to prepare for your certification exams. Learn about the latest technology advances and features. Ask questions in real time and learn from an Oracle subject matter expert. From Ask Me Anything about certification to Ask the Instructor coaching sessions, you'll be able to achieve your learning goals for 2024 in no time. Join a live event today and witness firsthand the transformative power of the Oracle University Learning Community. Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started.  14:33 Nikita: Welcome back! So Joe, it sounds like there are two different paths or life cycles to create extensions for future applications in Visual Builder Studio. Is that correct? Joe: Yes, exactly. So one path to extending the functionality of Fusion apps is to edit the page in Visual Builder Studio, which opens the page in Visual Builder Designer, and you then make changes to the existing pages, depending on what the development team has made extendable.  14:58 Nikita: But you can't create new pages and flows in this scenario, right? Joe: This is strictly about modifying an existing page. The other path is creating a new application extension, which is a new application from scratch or extending an existing Oracle application or even an existing partner or customer application. Again, we're not seeing this typically being done too much. Most partners and customers create new applications or make customizations to existing pages. But the architecture does support it. So, your partner might create a new application based on the production app released by Oracle, and you could extend their application. Or a development team at your site could extend Oracle's application and you could then extend that team's application. This is mechanically possible, although I question the use case behind that. Usually, we see our apps being extended – becoming a dependency when there's code that can be leveraged or reused for a new app and its new App UI. 15:49 Lois: Joe, what did you mean when you say one extension is a dependency of another? Can you talk a bit about dependencies, what that means, how it looks to the developer? Joe: When you extend an application, it becomes a dependency to your application, and you get access to all the resources within that dependency that are marked as extendable by the developer who created that extension. Most useful are things like service connections to REST APIs from Fusion apps data sources, reusable code fragments, and layouts that you can leverage in those cases where you want to create a new App UI. When an extension is listed as a dependency, you'll see this graphically in Visual Builder Studio Designer. When you see an extension listed as a dependency, it means you can reference any of that extension's resources that have been marked extendable by the developer. Recall all resources are closed off or hidden by default, but development teams can mark resources as open to being extended and reused, and then you can see and use those resources. So, you can easily add and remove extensions as dependencies in Visual Builder Designer as needed. Now, this can be a nice way to modularize and reuse your resources and assets. To summarize: I can modify an existing page – this is most common, extend an existing application and create a new App UI – which is not common, or I can extend the unified app to create a new app and a new App UI and add other extensions as dependencies, as needed, to leverage their services, fragments, and layouts when building my own pages – this is pretty common as well. 17:14 Nikita: There's one thing I'd like to come back to, Joe. You mentioned something called a mashup application earlier. Can you tell us a little more about that? Joe: To recap: I mentioned a couple of different ways that you can extend Fusion applications. One is changing layouts or creating rule-based layouts. You can also extend existing apps and create your own App UI on top of them or create your own Fusion app from scratch. But these are Fusion apps and they have restrictions.  These can only run within the Fusion applications ecosystem, which means they can only be accessed by people who are registered in the Fusion application ecosystem, and there are some other restrictions (for example, in terms of the APIs you can access). And you also have no access to customer data tables.   Mashup applications use the stand-alone Visual Builder Cloud Service, which enables you to create custom visual applications. These are visual applications that run outside the Fusion apps ecosystem. Users only need to be identified to the Identity Cloud Service, IDCS, and then they can get access to these mashup apps, depending on the roles and privileges given to them, of course. These mashup applications can access Fusion apps API data, as well as customer database tables, Excel spreadsheet data, CSV files, and third-party APIs. And all this data can appear on the same page, in the same app, using the same Redwood components, so they look and work just like Fusion applications. 18:32 Lois: I know in the past there's been some friction to making changes in Fusion applications. Partner and customer developers use different tools than the ones Oracle engineers use and there have been some deployment issues. To wrap up things, can you tell us why customers should use Visual Builder Studio to customize Fusion apps? Joe: Glad to, Lois. The big benefit to customers is that they are using the exact same tools, Visual Builder Designer for page design work and Visual Builder Studio for project and code management, to build the customizations and extensions that Oracle is using to create the applications and extensions that are delivered to them. I can't emphasize enough how big a deal this is and how wonderful it is for the customer. We're constantly making the Visual Builder Designer interface easier and easier to work with. We're currently releasing a new version of Visual Builder Designer—the Express mode version. This version of Designer is lightweight and has only the necessary features required to allow you to make changes to pages and layouts, and create and manage dynamic rule-based layouts. If you need more (for example, you need to create service connections, fragments, and do a lot more of that type of advanced work), then use the advanced version of the Designer. Both are available to you, assuming that your user has the appropriate permission and the Fusion app you are using has implemented Express Designer. 19:46 Lois: OK Joe, what courses does Oracle University offer for me if I wanted to learn more about developing extensions for Fusion apps and creating mashup apps using Visual Builder Studio? Joe: Oracle University has several courses. We have the Develop Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio, which focuses on creating the stand-alone custom bespoke mashup visual applications. We also have our Design and Develop Redwood Applications course, which goes into detail about working with the Redwood page templates and components. All these courses are free and available today. And all you need to do is log in to mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 20:19 Nikita: Thank you so much, Joe, for joining us today. This has been so educational. Joe: It's been lovely talking to you both. Thank you. Lois: Yeah, my brain is full. Thanks Joe. Until next week, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 20:32 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

The next generation of front-end user interfaces for Oracle Fusion Applications is being built using Visual Builder Studio and Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit. However, many of the terms associated with these tools can be confusing. In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by Senior Principal OCI Instructor Joe Greenwald. Together, they take you through the different terminologies, how they relate to each other, and how they can be used to deliver the new Oracle Fusion Applications as well as stand-alone, bespoke visual web applications. Develop Fusion Applications Using Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/develop-fusion-applications-using-visual-builder-studio/122614/ Build Visual Applications Using Visual Builder Studio: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/build-visual-applications-using-oracle-visual-builder-studio/110035/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. --------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this  series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular  Oracle technologies. Let's get started. 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! Today, we're starting a new season on building the next generation of Oracle Cloud Apps with Visual Builder Studio. 00:45 Lois: And I'm so excited that we have someone really special to take us through the next few episodes. Joe Greenwald is joining us. Joe is a Senior Principal OCI Instructor with Oracle University. He joined Oracle in 1992 with an extensive background in CASE tools. Since then, he has used and taught all of Oracle's software development tools, including Oracle Forms, APEX, JDeveloper ADF, as well as all the Fusion Middleware courses. Currently, Joe is responsible for the Visual Builder Studio and Redwood development courses, including extending Fusion Applications with Visual Builder. 01:22 Nikita: In today's episode, we're going to ask Joe about Visual Builder Studio and Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit, also known as JET. Together, they form the basis of the technology for the next generation of front-end user interfaces for Oracle Fusion Applications, as well as many other Oracle applications, including most Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) interfaces.  Lois: We'll look at the different terminologies and technologies, how they relate to each other, and how they deliver the new Oracle Fusion applications and stand-alone, bespoke visual web applications. Hi Joe! Thanks for being with us today. 01:57 Joe: Hi Lois! Hi Niki! I'm glad to be here. Nikita: Joe, I'm somewhat thrown by the terminology around Visual Builder, Visual Studio, and JET. Can you help streamline that for us?  Lois: Yeah, things that are named the same sometimes refer to different things, and sometimes things with a different name refer to the same thing.  02:15 Joe: Yeah, I know where you're coming from. So, let's start with Visual Builder Studio. It's abbreviated as VBS and can go by a number of different names. Some of the most well-known ones are Visual Builder Studio, VBS, Visual Builder, Visual Builder Stand-Alone, and Visual Builder Cloud Service. Clearly, this can be very confusing. For the purposes of these episodes as well as the training courses I create, I use certain definitions.  02:39 Lois: Can you take us through those? Joe: Absolutely, Lois. Visual Builder Studio refers to a product that comes free with an OCI account and allows you to manage your project-related assets. This includes the project itself, which is a container for all of its assets. You can assign teams to your projects, as well as secure the project and declare roles for the different team members. You manage GIT repositories with full graphical and command-line GIT support, define package, build, and deploy jobs, and create and run continuous integration/continuous deployment graphical and code-managed pipelines for your applications. These can be visual applications, created using the Visual Builder Integrated Development Environment, the IDE, or non-visual apps, such as Java microservices, docker builds, NPM apps, and things like that. And you can define environments, which determine where your build jobs can be deployed. You can also define issues, which allow you to identify, track, and manage things like bugs, defects, and enhancements. And these can be tracked in code review merge requests and build jobs, and be mapped to agile sprints and scrum boards. There's also support for wikis for team collaboration, code snippets, and the management of the repository and the project itself. So, VBS supports code reviews before code is merged into GIT branches for package, build, and deploy jobs using merge requests.  03:57 Nikita: OK, what exactly do you mean by that? Joe: Great. So, for example, you could have developers working in one GIT branch and when they're done, they would push their private code changes into that remote branch. Then, they'd submit a merge request and their changes would be reviewed.  Once the changes are approved, their code branch is merged into the main branch and then automatically runs a CI/CD package (continuous integration/continuous deployment) package, build, and deploy job on the code. Also, the CI/CD package, build, and deploy jobs can run against any branches, not just the main branch. So Visual Builder Studio is intended for managing the project and all of its assets. 04:37 Lois: So Joe, what are the different tools used in developing web applications? Joe: Well, Visual Builder, Visual Builder Studio Designer, Visual Builder Designer, Visual Builder Design-Time, Visual Builder Cloud Service, Visual Builder Stand-Alone all kind of get lumped together. You can kinda see why. What I'm referring to here are the tools that we use to build a visual web application composed of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) for metadata. I call this Visual Builder Designer. This is an Integrated Development Environment, it's the “IDE” which runs in your browser. You use a combination of drag and drop, setting properties, and writing and modifying custom and generated code to develop your web applications. You work within a workspace, which is your own private copy of a remote Git branch. When you're ready to start development work, you open an existing workspace or create a new one based on a clone of the remote branch you want to work on. Typically, a new branch would be created for the development work or you would join an existing branch. 05:35 Nikita: What's a workspace, Joe? Is it like my personal laptop and drive?  Joe: A workspace is your own private code area that stores any changes you make on the Oracle servers, so your code changes are never lost—even when working in a browser-based, network-based tool. A good analogy is, say I was working at home on my own machine. And I would make a copy of a remote GIT branch and then copy that code down to my local machine, make my code changes, do my testing, etc. and then commit my work—create a logical save point periodically—and then when I'm ready, I'd push that code up into the remote branch so it can be reviewed and merged with the main branch. My local machine is my workspace. However, since this code is hosted up by Oracle on our servers, and the code and the IDE are all running in your browser, the workspace is a simulation of a local work area on your own computer. So, the workspace is a hosted allocation of resources for you that's private. Other people can't see what's going on in your workspace. Your workspace has a clone of the remote branch that you're working with and the changes you make are isolated to your cloned code in your workspace. 06:38 Lois: Ok… the code is actually hosted on the server, so each time you make a change in the browser, the change is written back to the server? Is it possible that you might lose your edits if there's a networking interruption? Joe: I want to emphasize that while I started out not personally being a fan of web-based integrated development environments, I have been using these tools for over three years and in all that time, while I have lost a connection at times—networks are still subject to interruptions—I've never lost any changes that I've made. Ever. 07:08 Nikita: Is there a way to save where you are in your work so that you could go back to it later if you need to? Joe: Yes, Niki, you're asking about commits and savepoints, like in a Git repository or a Git branch. When you reach a logical stopping or development point in your work, you would create a commit or a savepoint. And when you're ready, you would push that committed code in your workspace up to the remote branch where it can be reviewed and then eventually merged, usually with the main Git branch, and then continuous integration/continuous package and deployment build jobs are run. Now, I'm only giving you a high-level overview, but we cover all this and much more in detail with hands-on practices in our Visual Builder developer courses. Right now, I'm just trying to give you a sense of how these different tools are used. 07:49 Lois: Yes, that makes sense, Joe. It's a lot to cover in a short amount of time. Now, we've discussed the Visual Builder Designer IDE and workspace. But can you tell us more about Visual Builder Cloud Service and stand-alone environments? What are they used for? What features do they provide? Are they the same or different things? Joe: Visual Builder Cloud Service or Visual Builder Stand-Alone, as it's sometimes called, is a service that Oracle hosts on its servers. It provides hosting for the deployed web application source code as well as database tables for business objects that we build and maintain to store your customer data. This data can come from XLS or CSV files, or even your own Oracle database customer table data.  A custom REST proxy makes calls to external third-party REST services on your behalf and supports several popular authentication mechanisms. There is also integration with the Identity Cloud Service (IDCS) to manage users and their access to your web apps. 08:47 Joe: Visual Builder Cloud Service is a for-fee product. You pay licensing fees for how much you use because it's a hosted service. Visual Builder Studio, the project asset management aspect I discussed earlier, is free with a standard OCI license. Now, keep in mind these are separate from something like Visual Builder Design Time and the service that's running in Fusion application environments. What I'm talking about now is creating standalone, bespoke, custom visual applications. These are applications that are built using industry-standard HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and JSON for metadata and are hosted on the Oracle servers. 09:27 Are you looking for practical use cases to help you plan and apply configurations that solve real-world challenges?  With the new Applied Learning courses for Cloud Applications, you'll be able to practically apply the concepts learned in our implementation courses and work through case studies featuring key decisions and configurations encountered during a typical Oracle Cloud Applications implementation. Applied learning scenarios are currently available for General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Accounting Hub, Global Human Resources, Talent Management, Inventory, and Procurement, with many more to come!  Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. 10:09 Nikita: Welcome back! Joe, you said Visual Builder Cloud Service or Stand-Alone is a for-fee service. Is there a way I can learn about using Visual Builder Designer to build bespoke visual applications without a fee? Joe: Yes. Actually, we've added an option where you can run the Visual Builder Designer and learn how to create web apps without using the app hosting or the business object database that stores your customer data or the REST proxy for authentication or the Identity Cloud Service. So you don't get those features, but you can still learn the fundamentals of developing with Visual Builder Designer. You can call third-party APIs, you can download the source, and run it locally, for example, in a Tomcat server. This is a great and free way to learn how to develop with the Visual Builder Designer. 10:52 Lois: Joe, I want to know more about the kinds of apps you can build in VB Designer and the capabilities that VB Cloud Service provides. Joe: Visual Builder Designer allows you to build custom, bespoke web applications made of interactive webpages; flows of pages for navigation; events that respond when things happen in the app, for example, GUI events like a button is clicked or values are entered into a text field; variables to store state and the ability to make REST calls, all from your browser. These applications have full access to the Oracle Fusion Applications APIs, given that you have the right security permissions and credentials of course. They can access your customer business data as business objects in our internally hosted database tables or your own customer database tables. They can access third-party APIs, and all these different data sources can appear in the same visual application, on the same page, at the same time. They use the identity cloud service to identify which users can log in and authenticate against the application. And they all use the new Redwood graphical user interface components and page templates, so they have the same look and feel of all Oracle applications. 11:59 Nikita: But what if you're building or extending Oracle Fusion Applications? Don't things change a little bit? Joe: Good point, Niki. Yes. While you still work within Visual Builder Studio, that doesn't change, VBS maintains your project and all your project-related assets, that is still the same. However, in this case, there is no separate hosted Visual Builder Cloud Service or Stand-Alone instance. In this case, Visual Builder is hosted inside of Fusion apps itself as part of the installation. I won't go into the details of how the architecture works, but the Visual Builder instance that you're running your code against is part of Fusion applications and is included in the architecture as well as the billing. All your code changes are maintained and stored within a single container called an extension. And this extension is a Git repository that is created for you, or you can create it yourself, depending on how you choose to work within Visual Builder Studio. You create an extension to hold the source code changes that provide a customization or configuration. This means making a change to an existing page or a set of pages or even adding new pages and flows to your Oracle Fusion Applications. You use Visual Builder Studio and Visual Builder Designer in a similar way as to how you would use them for bespoke stand-alone visual applications.  13:10 Lois: I'm trying to envision how this workflow is used. How is it different from bespoke VB app development? Or is it different at all? Joe: So, recall that the Visual Builder Designer is effectively the Integrated Development Environment, the IDE, where you make your code changes by working with both the raw HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript code, if need be, or the Page Designer for drag and drop, and setting properties and then Live mode to test your work. You use a version of VB Designer to view and modify your customizations, and the code is stored in a Git repository called an extension. So, in that sense, the work of developing pages and flows and such is the same.  You still start by creating or, more typically, joining a project and then either create a new extension from scratch or base it on an existing application, or go directly to the page that you want to edit and, on that page, select from your profile menu to edit in Visual Builder Studio. Now, this is a different lifecycle path from bespoke visual applications. With them, you're not extending an app or modifying individual pages in the same way. 14:11 Joe: You get a choice of which project you want to add your extension to when you're working with Fusion apps and potentially which repository to store your customizations, unless one already exists and then it's assigned automatically to hold your code changes. So you make your changes and edits to the portions of the application that have been opened for extensibility by the development team. This is another difference. Once you make your code changes, the workflow is pretty much the same as for a bespoke visual application: do your development work, commit your changes, push your changes to the remote branch. And then typically, your code is reviewed and if the code passes and is approved, it's merged with the main branch. Then, the package and deploy jobs run to deploy the main code to the production environment or whatever environment you're targeting. And once the package and deploy jobs complete, the code base is updated and users who log in see the changes that you've made. 15:00 Nikita: You mentioned creating apps that combine data from Fusion cloud, applications, customer data, and third-party APIs into one page. Why is it necessary? Why can't you just do all that in one Fusion Applications extension? Joe: When you create extensions, you are working within the Oracle Fusion Applications ecosystem, that's what they actually call it, which includes a defined a set of users who have been predefined and are, therefore, known to Fusion Applications. So, if you're a user and you're not part of that Fusion Apps ecosystem, you can't access the pages. Period. That's how Fusion Apps works to maintain its security and integrity. Secondly, you're working pretty much solely with the Fusion Applications APIs data sources coming directly from Fusion Applications, which are also available to you when you're creating bespoke visual apps. When you're working with Fusion Applications in Visual Builder, you don't have access to these business objects that give you access to your own customer database data through Visual Builder-generated REST APIs. Business objects are available only to bespoke visual applications in the hosted VB Cloud Service instance.  So, your data sources are restricted to the Oracle Fusion Applications APIs and some third-party APIs that work within a narrow set of authentication mechanisms currently, although there are plans to expand this in the future. A mashup app that allows you now to access all these data sources while creating apps that leverage the Redwood Component System, so they look and work like Fusion Apps. They're a highly popular option for our partners and customers. 16:25 Lois: So, to review, we have two different approaches. You can create a visual application using the for-fee, hosted Visual Builder Cloud Service/Stand-Alone or the one that comes with Oracle Integration Cloud, or you can use the extension architecture for Fusion applications, where you use the designer and create your extensions, and the code is delivered and deployed to Fusion applications code.  You haven't talked about JET yet though, Joe. What is that? Joe: So, JET is an abbreviation. It stands for Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit and JET is the underlying technology that makes Visual Builder, visual applications, and Visual Builder Extensions for Fusion Applications possible. Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit provides a module-based, open-source toolkit that leverages modern JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS3, and HTML5 to deliver web applications. It's targeted at JavaScript developers working on client-side applications. It is not for backend development.  It's a collection of popular, powerful JavaScript libraries and a set of Oracle-contributed JavaScript libraries that make it very simple, easy, and efficient to build front-end applications that can consume and interact with Oracle products and services, especially Oracle Cloud services, but of course it can work with any type of third-party API. 17:42 Nikita: How are JET applications architected, Joe, and how does that relate to Visual Builder pages and flows? Joe: The architecture of JET applications is what's called a single page architecture. We've all seen these. These are where you have a single web page—think of your index page that provides the header and footer for your web page—and then the middle portion or the middle content of the page, represented by modules, allow you to navigate from one page or module to another. It also provides the data mapping so that the data elements in the variables and the state of the application, as well as the graphical user interface elements that provide the fields and functionality for the interface for the application, these are all maintained on the client side. If you're working in pure JET, then you work with these modules at the raw JavaScript code level. And there are a lot of JavaScript developers who want to work like this and create their custom applications from the code up, so to speak. However, it also provides the basis for Visual Builder visual applications and Fusion Apps visual extensions in Visual Builder. 18:38 Lois: How does JET support VB Apps? You didn't talk much about having to write a bunch of JavaScript and HTML5 so I got the impression that this is all done for you by VB Designer? Joe: Visual Builder applications are composed of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript code that is usually generated by the developer when she drags and drops components on to the page designer canvas or sets properties or creates action chains to respond to events. But there's also a lot of JavaScript object notation (JSON) metadata created at the time that describes the pages, the flows, the navigation, the REST services, the variables, their data types, and other assets needed for the app to function. This JSON metadata is translated at runtime using a large JavaScript extension toolkit library called the Visual Builder Runtime that runs in the browser and real time translates the metadata and other assets in the Visual Builder source code into JET code and assets, which are actually executed at runtime. And it's very quick, very fast, very efficient, and provides a layer of abstraction between the raw JET code and the Visual Builder architecture of pages, flows, action chains for executing code and events to handle things that occur in the user interface, including saving the state in variables that are mapped to GUI components. For example, if you have an Input text component, you need to have a variable to store the value that was entered into that Input text component between page refreshes. The data can move from the Input text component to the variable, and from the variable to that Input text component if it's changed programmatically, for example. So, JET manages binding these data values to variables and the UI components on the page. So, a change to a variable value or a change to the contents of the component causes the others to change automatically. Now, this is only a small part of what JET and the frameworks and libraries it uses do for the applications.  JET also provides more complex GUI components like lists and tables, and selection lists, and check boxes, and all the sorts of things you would expect in a modern GUI application. 20:34 Nikita: You mentioned a layer of abstraction between Visual Builder Studio Designer and JET. What's the benefit of working in Visual Builder Designer versus JET itself? Joe: The benefit of Visual Builder is that you work at a higher level of abstraction than having to get down into the more detailed levels of deep JavaScript code, working with modules, data mappings, HTML code, single page architecture navigation, and the related functionalities. You can work at a higher level, a graphical level, where you can drag and drop things onto a design canvas and set properties. The VB architecture insulates you from the more technical bits of JET. Now, this frees the developer to concentrate more on application and page design, implementing logic and business rules, and creating a pleasing workflow and look and feel for the user. This keeps them from having to get caught up in the details of getting this working at the code level.  Now if needed, you can write custom JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3 code, though much less than in a JET app, and all that is part of the VB application source, which becomes part of the code used by JET to execute the application itself. And yet it all works seamlessly together. 21:35 Lois: Joe, I know we have courses in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. But does a developer getting ready to work in Visual Builder Designer have to go take those courses first or can they start working in VB Designer right away? Joe: Yeah, that question does often comes up: Do I need to learn JET to work with Visual Builder? No, you don't. That's all taken care for you in the products themselves. I don't really think it helps that much to learn JET if you are going to be a VB developer. In some ways, it could even be a bit distracting since some of things you learn to do in JET, you would have to unlearn or not do so much because of what VB does it for you. The things you would have to do manually in code in JET are done for you. This is why we call VB a low code development tool.  I mean, you certainly can if you want to, but I would spend more time learning about the different GUI components, page templates, the Visual Builder architecture — events, action chains, and the data provider variables and types. Now, I know JET myself. I started with that before learning Visual Builder, but I use very little of my JET knowledge as a VB developer. Visual Builder Designer provides a nice, abstracted, clean layer of modern visual development on top of JET, while leveraging the power and flexibility of JET and keeping the lower-level details out of my way. 22:46 Nikita: Joe, where can I go to get started with Visual Builder? Joe: Well, for more information, I recommend you take a look at our Develop Fusion Applications course if you're working with Fusion Applications and Visual Builder Studio. The other course is Develop Visual Applications with Visual Builder Studio and that's if you're creating stand-alone bespoke applications. Both these courses are free. We also have a comprehensive course that covers JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3, and while it's not required that you take that to be successful, it can be helpful down the road. I would say that some basic knowledge of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript will certainly support you and serve you well when working with Visual Builder. You learn more as you go along and you find that you need to create more sophisticated applications. I would also mention that a lot of the look and feel of the applications in Visual Builder visual applications and Fusion apps extensions and customizations come through JET components, JET styles, and JET variables, and CSS variables, so that's something that you would want to pursue at some point. There's a JET cookbook out there. You can search for Oracle JET and look for the JET cookbook and that's a good introduction to all of that. 23:47 Lois: Joe, thank you so much for joining us today. We're really looking forward to having you back next week to discuss extending Oracle Fusion Applications with Visual Builder Studio. Joe: Thanks for having me. Nikita: And if you want to learn about some of the courses Joe mentioned, visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started. Until next time, this is Nikita Abraham… Lois: And Lois Houston signing off! 24:09 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Today's guest brings a wealth of experience from both his time leading large sales organizations and building his own companies.  Sean Harmon is the Chief Executive Officer of Rapid4Cloud, which makes it easier to implement and run Oracle Cloud Applications​. Sean joins Host Matt Benelli for a discussion of nurturing robust work cultures, hiring great sales teams, and building successful organizations.Takeaways:Smart sales managers who are planning for long-term success will hire based on four characteristics: 1. Work Ethic, 2. Integrity, 3. Loyalty, and 4. Intelligence, which is really a person's aptitude and willingness to learn new things.A healthy work ethic can make up for talent gaps and drive success. Sales leaders should therefore encourage a work-smart culture, where the focus is on achieving results rather than just boosting activity.While there is not a universal work-life balance that works for everyone, it's important that you and your team keep up with their lives outside of work. Without doing so, you won't be able to sustain your best production at work. A well-structured hundred-day plan can set the stage for long-term success. This plan should emphasize active listening and understanding team dynamics first, followed by identification of gaps and setting suitable strategies.Having a genuine understanding of your target audience is crucial. Principled decision-making and product belief are critical, allowing you to spot the best opportunities and prioritize accordingly. Every client or prospect may not be qualified or a good fit; discernment is key.Sales leaders need to be selective about who they invest their time in. Leaders need to prioritize their interactions and invest in relationships that add value to their career growth and organizational objectives.Quote of the Show:“Most of what we do, it's not about what people know, but their willingness and curiosity to learn.” - Sean HarmonLinks:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-harmon-344204/ Website: https://www.rapid4cloud.com/ Ways to Tune In:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Yb1wPzUxyrfR0Dx35ym1A Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coach2scale-how-modern-leaders-build-a-coaching-culture/id1699901434 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/fd188af6-7c17-4b2e-a0b2-196ecd6fdf77 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/coach2scale-how-modern-leaders-5419703 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Coach2Scale CoachEm™ is the first Coaching Execution Platform that integrates deep learning technology to proactively analyze patterns, highlight the "why" behind the data with root causes, and identify the actions that will ultimately improve business results going forward.  These practical coaching recommendations for managers will help their teams drive more deals, bigger deals, faster deals and loyal customers. Built with decades of go-to-market experience, world-renowned data scientists and advanced causal AI/ML technology, CoachEm™ leverages your existing tech stack to increase rep productivity, increase retention, and replicate best practices across your team.Learn more at coachem.io

Wouldn't it be great if you could practice your Oracle Cloud Apps implementation in a safe, controlled lab environment? Well, now you can!   Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Bill Lawson, as they discuss the new Applied Learning for Fusion Cloud Applications Implementation projects, which provide practical use cases and business scenarios that you can work through to apply the concepts you've learned and expand your skills.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, Sujatha Kalahasthi Raju, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started. 00:26 Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hello everyone! In our last episode, we spoke about HCM business processes and learned about the Talent Life Cycle. Today, we're going to take a look at some related training that's just launched in our Cloud Learning Subscriptions. This new training was developed based on requests from our customers and partners. You asked, and we listened. 00:58 Nikita: We're joined by Senior Director of Cloud Applications Product Management, Bill Lawson, who you've heard from before, and he will be telling us all about this exciting new program. Lois: Bill, we're so happy you're back with us today. So, as I mentioned, this new program was a direct result of customer and partner feedback. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that happened and what this new training is all about? 01:20 Bill: I'm happy to be back as well, Lois. And very excited to share details about the Applied Learning for Fusion Cloud Application Implementation projects that are now available. And you're correct. This was in direct response to requests we received from our customers and partners. As you're aware, we hold quarterly feedback sessions with some of our strategic partners and customers, and one thing we heard was the need to have some practical applications of concepts learned in our implementation courses. 01:46 Bill: So, we got our subject matter experts on the task and challenged them with creating some real-world scenarios that students can work through in our hands-on lab practice environments. In these scenarios, students will work their way through examples of some of the decisions and configurations that they and customers might need to go through in an implementation of Oracle Cloud Applications. It's a great way to expand your skills and apply the concepts you've learned in implementation classes in a safe, controlled lab environment. Then, you can take that back to your workplace and apply that knowledge in your own implementation projects. 02:19 Nikita: Wow, that's really cool, Bill. And how exciting that we're taking feedback directly from our customers and developing the training that they are asking for.   Bill: Yes, Niki, it is. And we're planning to continue that listening program in our Oracle University Learning Community. We've launched an Idea Incubator and we're looking forward to hearing from our members about their content ideas and suggestions. Who knows what new types of courses will come out of that?   02:43   Lois: It's another great reason to join the Community for sure.   Bill: Indeed, it is.   Nikita: Ok, Bill, back to the Applied Learning for Fusion Cloud Application Implementations program. Who is this training best suited for?   Bill: Well, Niki, it's really aimed at those people who are going to be actively involved in an Oracle Cloud Apps implementation. So, your solution consultants, implementers, administrators, project teams, etc. etc.   03:07   Nikita: And can you give us an example of what one of these projects looks like?   Bill: I sure can, Niki.    One of the new Applied Learning Implementation projects is centered around Fusion Enterprise Structures & General Ledger in the ERP space.   In the project scenario, we follow a fictional company, which is a startup that has decided to implement Oracle Fusion Cloud Financials to streamline their business processes while taking advantage of the latest functionality Oracle Cloud Applications has to offer.   The case study outlines the business requirements of the company and then provides a challenge to the learner. The student must determine how these requirements would be met within the application, complete the setup and configuration, and validate that they've done it correctly. 03:48   Lois: That's really neat. So essentially, it's mimicking a business scenario that you may come upon in a conference room pilot during an implementation and would have to configure using Fusion Applications.   Bill: Right, Lois. Providing a practical business scenario based on the customers' requirements for the student to configure a solution in a safe practice environment. The student will be prepared to tackle the scenario based on the foundation of knowledge they've gained when they completed the implementation learning path training in the learning subscription or during their previous implementation experience.   04:22   Have an idea for a new course or learning opportunity? We'd love to hear it! Visit the Oracle University Learning Community and share your thoughts with us. Your suggestion could find a place in future development projects. If you're already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the community. You will need to log in first. If you've not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started.    04:51 Nikita: Welcome back. Ok, Bill, so the students do this setup. How do they know it was done correctly? What if they get stumped and don't know what to do?   Bill: If they're completely stumped, then it's probably a good indication that they need to revisit the training and check that they understand the core concepts. But once they've completed the challenge, there will be a solution video in which our SME will walk through one of the possible solutions. Bear in mind, there may be more than one solution that is possible. We will show one possibility, but learners may opt for a different route when they approach the challenge. And that's ok. We want people to be able to explore the options and learn while they're doing so.   05:28 Lois: And all of this is done within MyLearn and the lab environments provided to our learning subscribers, right?   Bill: That's correct, Lois. This content is available to our MyLearn subscribers. The projects are included as part of the Cloud Applications Implementation training. So, if you go to mylearn.oracle.com and search by the phrase “Applied Learning,” you will find all the applicable learning. You can also search by “Implementer” to see the Implementation training that is available. Applied learning projects will be part of this implementation training. The content is available on a paid subscription basis only, but very well worth the investment if you're in the middle of an Oracle Cloud Apps implementation. If you already have a subscription, you can dive right in and give one of our projects a try. 06:12   Nikita: Bill, where are these Applied Learning scenarios found? Is it only for General Ledger?   Bill: No, Niki, it's not. We've got Applied Learning projects available for 10 of our most popular product areas, such as General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Project Management, Accounting Hub, Global Human Resources, Talent Management, Recruiting, Inventory, and Procurement.   Lois: So, we're covering all the bases here – ERP, SCM, HCM…   Bill: Exactly.   06:42 Lois: Is there anything else we should know about the Applied Learning program? Bill: Well funny you should ask, Lois, because one of the unique things we're doing with this new program is we're offering the opportunity to engage with other people who are completing the project via a discussion in the Oracle University Learning Community.   Lois: You knew that was a loaded question, right?   Bill: Haha, I sure did. You're the champion of our Community.   So, in the Community, people can ask questions, share their solutions, and more. It's a great way to expand the learning experience and see how other people approached those same scenarios based on their knowledge and experience.   07:13 Nikita: And if people have ideas for other Applied Learning scenarios, what should they do?   Bill: They can always suggest those in the Idea Incubator in the Community, Niki.   Lois: Yep. The Community has a lot of great things to offer. If you're not a member, you should join today by accessing it via mylearn.oracle.com.   07:29 Nikita: Thank you so much, Bill, for coming back to talk to us about the Applied Learning program. I really think it's such a great new resource for our learners. Bill: I'm always happy to be here with you ladies. Thank you for having me. Lois: Thanks Bill. Ok, next week we've got another great topic lined up. If you followed along with some of the announcements at Oracle Cloud World, you'll know that we launched a new certification and training path centered around Artificial Intelligence. Next week, we'll be talking with Rohit Rahi to learn more about this free training that is available, in an episode we're calling AI for Everyone. You won't want to miss that. 08:03 Nikita: And if you want to learn more about these Applied Learning projects, visit mylearn.oracle.com. Lois: Right, Niki. So that's all for today. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 08:15 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

In today's competitive landscape, a comprehensive understanding of business processes is critical to successfully deploying and using Oracle Cloud Applications. Having solid foundational knowledge of business processes can help you understand “how things are done” and apply your learning to the right processes, in the right way, at the right time.   Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Bill Lawson, as they talk about how Oracle's business process training can help everyone involved in an implementation project, from project teams and technical teams to end users.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started. 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! We're starting the third season of the Oracle University Podcast today, and this time around, our focus is going to be on Cloud Apps Business Processes. And we're very excited about this episode, which will be an overview of the Business Process training and certification offered by Oracle University. We'll discuss this training at length, learn how it can help you prepare for projects, and find out how everyone involved in an implementation—from project teams to technical teams and end users —can benefit from taking this training. 01:12 Lois: And we're so excited to welcome Bill Lawson back to the podcast today. If you've been following our podcast, you already know Bill from last season. Bill is the Senior Director of Cloud Applications Product Management at Oracle University. His team is in charge of developing new content for Oracle Cloud Applications. So, all the amazing training that helps you successfully implement and operate our cloud apps is created by his team. Thanks so much, Bill, for being with us today. We're really excited to talk with you. 01:41 Bill: I'm happy to be here to kick off this new season, Lois and Niki. Nikita: So, to start Bill, can you tell us a little about the Cloud Apps Business Process training in general?  Bill: Think of our Business Process training as Oracle's official collection of courses designed to provide you with a foundational understanding of how end-to-end business process flows are defined. These are based off Oracle Modern Best Practices. So, we have a series of courses that enable learners to have a common foundational reference when implementing Oracle Cloud Applications. Ultimately, the goal of our Oracle Business Process training is to ensure that everybody in the organization, across all the various roles, are all on the same page when, you know, they are discovering and learning more about Oracle Cloud.  02:22 Lois: We already have extensive Cloud Apps training, right? So, why did we decide to create this particular training? What's different about these courses, Bill? Bill: While we do have a very comprehensive modern digital Oracle Cloud Applications training existing today, we felt there was an opportunity to educate our customers on foundational business processes, which are required knowledge to have even before anyone starts their application implementation journey.  To meet this important need, we developed Business Process training, which, once again, is defined by Oracle Modern Best Practices and driven by Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. This training will help students by providing them with the skills that are required to maximize the use and impact of those applications in their business. 03:03 Bill: And also providing a common framework for teams to use and to refer to throughout their cloud implementation projects, aligning from the start to accelerate and improve project planning and improving decision-making throughout the cloud implementation cycle. The training also defines end-to-end business process flows and illustrates how organizations and business users across all job roles can best manage day-to-day business activities and tasks, in a format within MyLearn and Cloud Learning Subscriptions that's engaging, easy to digest, and easy to learn. In fact, knowledge of basic business processes will enable students to understand “how things are done” and then apply those right processes, in the right way, at the right time. 03:44 Nikita: And what areas are covered, Bill?  Bill: We have training on Oracle Human Capital Management or HCM, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Experience (CX) Sales, Supply Chain Management, which is SCM, and Procurement.  In HCM, we show examples of the full suite of HR processes that encompasses all stages of an employee's experience—from the time they apply for a job, to when they're onboarded, ultimately to the last day they're at the company.   In our ERP training, learners use how to process, record, and report on finances reports. ERP training is really focused within the financial management area within ERP.   Our Sales training teaches how to make the organization sales cycle more effective by gathering all the customer information in one place, increasing productivity, empowering sales reps to sell more, and obtaining accurate information for boosting revenue. 04:36 Bill: Under Supply Chain Management, we have a comprehensive Cloud Applications suite that includes many products such as Inventory Management, Order Management, Manufacturing, and many more. In our business process training, as an example, we cover the processes of forecasting anticipated demand of products and services and planning the supply of materials and components, production, distribution, marketing, and sales in order to meet that demand. And finally, in Procurement, students will learn the business processes encompassing every stage of the procurement life cycle–from the initial stage of onboarding suppliers, to identifying sourcing opportunities and initiating sourcing events, to authoring contracts, to ultimately receiving the product or service and closing out the financials.    05:23 Lois: Wow, that's a lot, Bill! So, let's just say I'm getting started in my career with Cloud Applications. Would you recommend that I take this training or would I need to be more experienced to take it?  Bill: Anyone can take this training, Lois. We have learning paths from the beginner to the advanced level within our Cloud Learning Subscriptions today. The business process courses in particular are for any experience level, from the recent college grad to the seasoned professional who just wants to learn more about Oracle Cloud Applications. 05:52 Lois: OK, so let's talk a little more about who this training is best for. Can you expand a little bit on who would benefit the most from the courses? Bill: The training is for anyone who wants to build a strong foundational knowledge of Oracle Cloud   Business Processes in order to successfully plan, implement, test, and use Oracle Cloud Applications. You can be a Business Process Owner, a Functional User, an Implementation Project Team Member, an Implementer, a User Acceptance Testing Team Member, or even a University Student. We feel that this knowledge is foundational for success in the cloud. 06:26 Bill: So, for example, a partner implementation team will benefit by gaining an understanding of the modern business process flows supported by Oracle Cloud Applications to gain a solid understanding in order to configure based on the flow. Or say, customer project teams who work with implementation teams and will benefit from defining common approaches and business rules for their organization at the onset of their application implementation to help avoid any delays in the project. In short, having the same fundamental knowledge throughout this training helps ensure everyone is on the same page when discovering, planning, configuring, and executing these business processes in the cloud.  07:09 Want to learn about modern best practices for cloud applications?  Oracle University is offering (for a limited time) free Business Process training and certification in the areas of Human Capital Management, Financials, Customer Experience, Supply Chain Management, and Procurement.  Oracle Cloud training and certifications empower you to explore limitless possibilities in the cloud landscape. Gain the knowledge and skills needed to design, deploy, secure, and operate modern cloud infrastructure and applications with confidence. Go to education.oracle.com for more details. What are you waiting for? Get certified today! 07:49 Nikita: Welcome back! Bill, could you give us some examples of what I'll learn if I take this Business Process training? Bill: Great question, Niki. Project teams, both business process owners and those involved in executing specific steps in the process, will gain a high-level understanding of how their teams' processes and related tasks will change, and continue to evolve, when moving to the cloud. But it doesn't end there. Project teams will also learn the basics around how organizations manage day-to-day business activities and tasks in such areas as I mentioned earlier… Finance, Human Capital Management, Sales, Supply Chain, and Procurement. They will learn about how Oracle Cloud Applications leverage emerging technologies, such as AI and machine learning, blockchain, and business intelligence, which help drive mission-critical organizational business processes.  08:39 Bill: So, for example, let's take the use case of a recruitment team lead. This training will provide an overview of the best practice steps in an applicant screening process that are enabled in Oracle HCM and how it relates to onboarding and other employee lifecycle processes.  This way, users can consider how their team's current screening process steps and related tasks will be impacted as they move to the cloud, as well as how that process can evolve over time when enabled by new technologies. In addition, this training will show how to use machine learning to help screen and prioritize candidate résumés.   And with this base understanding, the recruitment team lead can contribute to improving the screening process when using Oracle HCM Recruiting and better the overall collaboration and project planning with their system integrator and other HR project teams. 09:29 Lois: So, you said we have a full suite of Business Process training courses. What's the value in taking training outside of my area of responsibility? Bill: That's such a great question, Lois. You'll see, often in implementation projects, decision-making can be siloed. Business process owners consider the needs of their own team, especially as detailed requirements are documented and considered for each process. As leaders, they want to ensure their teams' needs are thoroughly considered to ensure they can accomplish all that is expected of them. When planning a cloud implementation project, teams need not only consider how their own processes will change but also how the decisions they make in planning, configuring, and implementing Oracle Cloud Applications to suit their own needs will impact other teams and their processes. 10:17 Bill: That's why getting the end-to-end view is so important, we believe. We created this training to ensure that business process owners across the organization, as well as the implementation teams supporting their projects, understand not only their own area of responsibility but are also considerate of the changes, the subsequent impact, on other teams as well. We really want to encourage collaboration from the beginning of the project to improve decision-making at all phases by developing this early-stage awareness and understanding. 10:47 Nikita: I've heard this training is a little different from the video-based training that we have for most of our other Cloud Apps courses. So, what's different about it, Bill? Bill: Yeah, you're right, Niki. So, this training combines a variety of elements, not just videos. We still do have some videos within our business process training. But it also includes rich text articles, descriptive imagery, concepts explained by experts, product demonstrations, and knowledge checks, to bring users the best possible learning experience. 11:16 Nikita: And along with this training, we also offer certifications, right?  Bill: Yeah, you're absolutely right, Niki. For Business Process training, we have five associate-level exams included—one for each of the areas I mentioned. One for HCM, one for ERP Financials, Sales, Procurement, and Supply Chain Management. So, earning a Business Process Foundation Associate certification provides the candidate with an industry credential which recognizes a foundational understanding of the business process flows enabled by Oracle Cloud Applications. Our content prepares the candidate to earn that certification. 11:50 Lois: Well, this has been very enlightening, Bill. Thank you so much for joining us today and telling us all about the Business Process training and certifications that are available. Bill: Yeah, you're welcome, Lois. And thanks for having me, Niki. Nikita: To get started on Oracle Business Process training, head over to mylearn.oracle.com.  Lois: Well, that's all the time we have for today. Join us next week as we set off on our journey through the HCM business processes with Senior Principal Instructor Nigel Wiltshire. Until next week, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off. 12:22 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

In this special episode of the podcast, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by Rohit Rahi and Bill Lawson to talk about the free OCI training and certification being offered by Oracle University for a limited time.   Find out how you can choose from over 25 different Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Cloud Applications Business Process certifications and gain the knowledge and skills needed to boost your career.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community Free Certification: https://education.oracle.com/oracle-oci-certification LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ---------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00;00;00;00 - 00;00;39;02 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I'm Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor.   00;00;39;05 - 00;01;06;02 Hey there! We're very excited about today's episode, which will be all about the free training and certification being offered for a limited time by Oracle University. And we're so excited to welcome two of our OU product development leaders to talk with us about the free training and certificate that's available. Rohit Rahi and Bill Lawson are joining us today. If you've been listening to the podcast, you already know Rohit because he was our special guest last season.   00;01;06;04 - 00;01;29;22 Rohit is Vice President, OCI Global Delivery, and has extensive experience in the cloud space. Bill is the Senior Director of Cloud Applications Product Management. His team looks after the new content development for Oracle Cloud Applications. All the great training that helps you successfully implement and use our cloud apps—his team creates it. Thank you so much, Bill and Rohit, for being with us today.   00;01;29;24 - 00;01;59;14 We're really excited to talk with you both. So, to start, Rohit, can you tell us a little about the free certification promotion in general? So, we have had free OCI training for a while now and have just launched a free certification exam promotion worldwide beginning June 1st and continuing through August 31st. Each participant in the promotion will get free access to OCI and Cloud Applications Business Process training.   00;01;59;16 - 00;02;25;00 They will also get two free exam attempts that they can apply towards any exam in the promotion. And what's the benefit of getting this training and certification from Oracle? This free promotion will help you acquire in-demand critical skills in Oracle Cloud computing, database, security, AI/ML, and application business processes to boost your career and deepen your core expertise. All of this while eliminating the cost barrier for getting certified.   00;02;25;01 - 00;02;53;16 When we're talking about gaining access to training, is it strictly training content or are there any other resources that will be made available? Well, we have packed a lot into this promotion. You will get access to Oracle MyLearn, where you can book your exams and access a library of learning and exam preparation materials. MyLearn is our one-stop platform where you get access to the content, training content, skill checks, exam prep material, all of it.   00;02;53;22 - 00;03;24;05 You will also have access to brand-new hands-on performance exams for select OCI and Cloud Applications certifications that will really help showcase your hands-on knowledge in real-life scenarios. And then there's the Race to Certification challenge, where you can complete race criteria and win prizes during your certification journey. You can also access Oracle University Learning Community for collaboration and idea sharing to help you better prepare for your free certification exam.   00;03;24;07 - 00;03;50;01 Wow. There really is a lot to offer. Now, who is this training for? Can an absolute beginner take this training or do you need to be more experienced to take it. Also, are there any prerequisites to participate in the promotion? Anyone can take this training. We have learning paths from the beginner to advanced levels. You can start with the free foundations classes and certifications for OCI and Data Management.   00;03;50;08 - 00;04;22;12 If you already have some knowledge, familiarity, and experience with OCI, you might want to look at the learning paths and certifications for architects, cloud developers, DevOps engineers, security engineers, cloud operations, machine learning engineers, data analysts, and database admins. There is really a lot to choose from. 21 tech exams in total. And if you're interested in learning more about Oracle Cloud Applications, you could take advantage of the free business process training and certifications for HCM, Financials, Sales, Procurement, and Supply Chain.   00;04;22;19 - 00;04;45;23 These provide a great opportunity to learn more about business processes as defined by Oracle's modern best practices and how our cloud applications modernize these processes to make running businesses even better. These classes and certifications are for any experience level from the recent college grad to the seasoned professional who wants to learn more about Oracle Cloud Applications.   00;04;46;00 - 00;05;03;15 That's awesome. Let's say I want to get started and enroll for this promotion. How would I go about doing that? Well. Well, you could start by going to education.oracle.com. All the information you need to know is on this page, including the details about the free training, which exams are included, and the Race to Certification challenge.   00;05;03;18 - 00;05;28;15 Yeah, that's right, Bill. This is a really exciting challenge we are running as part of the promotion in which you can earn prizes as you complete your learning. Like you said, all the information is on education.oracle.com and we are really happy to offer this opportunity for you to not only learn and certify for free, but also win additional prizes along the way.   00;05;28;17 - 00;05;52;09 Wow, that's really cool. Prizes—an added bonus! I thought Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was already free, Rohit. So what's really new here? You're absolutely right, Niki. The training for OCI is free and has been free for a while now. What is new in this promotion is the opportunity to get certified for free.   00;05;52;11 - 00;06;14;06 Want to get the inside scoop on Oracle University? Head on over to the all-new Oracle University Learning Community. Attend exclusive events. Read up on the latest news. Get firsthand access to new products and stay up-to-date with upcoming certification opportunities. If you're already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the community. You will need to log in first.   00;06;14;08 - 00;06;26;21 If you've not yet accessed Oracle My Learn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started. Join the community today.   00;06;26;24 - 00;06;52;29 Welcome back. Bill, I want to ask you about Oracle Cloud Apps Business Process training. For anyone who doesn't already know, what are these business processes and what sort of training do we offer on this? As I mentioned earlier, MyLearn has business process training related to HCM, ERP Financials, Procurement, Supply Chain Management, and Sales. For example, for HCM, there are processes such as Recruit to Onboard, which is in the Applicant life cycle.   00;06;53;01 - 00;07;22;15 Think about it. You as an employee, you have maybe once been contacted by a company through recruiting activities. Companies require processes to reach out to and identify potential candidates and set up interviews. You receive a job offer, you accept it. And on day one, you begin your onboarding process into the new company as a new hire. In a modern business, this is driven by technology and managed by various job roles within an organization, including you as the applicant, to move through the process quickly and efficiently on your career journey with the new company.   00;07;22;17 - 00;07;43;20 Other business processes for HCM include Hire to Retire, Payroll to Payment. You know we all like to get compensated for the hard work we do, right? And Career Planning to Development. For Financials processes such as Invoice to Cash, Procure to Pay, and Budget to Report. Within Sales, we have processes that we cover Lead to Opportunity, Opportunity to Quote, Quota to Order, and Order to Close, only to mention a few.   00;07;43;25 - 00;08;09;26 The Business Process training focuses on how these processes are managed within Oracle Cloud Applications, how data and control flows between the processes, the various job roles responsible for the activities and tasks for these processes, and the inputs and outcomes for each of them. Our content is rich text based, has captivating imagery, concepts explained by experts, product demonstrations, and quizzes to reinforce what you have learned.   00;08;10;01 - 00;08;35;00 Who would benefit most from this training, Bill? This training and certifications are for anyone who wants to build strong foundational knowledge of Oracle Cloud Business Processes to use, implement, and test Oracle Cloud Applications. You can be a business process owner, a functional user, an implementation project team member, an implementer, or on the user acceptance testing teams within your company or even university students.   00;08;35;05 - 00;09;03;12 It's so great that we have this free training for OCI and Cloud Apps. So, Rohit, what certifications are available for OCI? There are the two always free certifications, Foundations Associate certifications, one for OCI and one for Database Management. So, these are always free. And then we have 19 other certifications. For these, you would use the two free exam attempts that are included in the promotion.   00;09;03;12 - 00;09;26;08 You can find a list of all the exams on education.oracle.com. And Bill, what certifications are included for the business process training? For the business process training, there are five associate-level exams included for HCM, Financials, Sales, Procurement, and Supply Chain Management. This free promotion sounds like a great opportunity to learn some new things and get certified.   00;09;26;11 - 00;09;44;00 Bill, how many free exams can I take as part of the promotion? Can I choose any certification exam to take for free? The promotion includes two exam credits. Once you register through the promo page, these will be added to your MyLearn account. You can take any of the 26 exams that are part of the promotion.   00;09;44;02 - 00;10;03;22 You do have to register on education.oracle.com to get these exam credits though. And of course, you can always take the two OCI foundations exam which are free anytime and you don't have to pay for these exams. Yes, you're right. Good point, Rohit. And what happens if I don't pass the exam? You can retake any exam.   00;10;03;25 - 00;10;22;26 You can use the two credits on any of the exams included in the promotion. You can take two different exams or use both on one exam if you need to take a retake. And if I need more attempts or want to take more exams? You can buy additional exam credits through MyLearn for any exam, including the ones not part of this promotion.   00;10;22;27 - 00;10;44;15 So, let's think positive here. I've taken the exam and passed. Will I receive a digital badge or certification? How can I share this accomplishment with others? Absolutely, Niki, you can. You will have access to a digital badge when you pass the exam. These are available to you on MyLearn and you can share on social media, etc. Where can I go if I have more questions about this?   00;10;44;17 - 00;11;03;13 The best place to go is education.oracle.com. You'll find all the answers, including an FAQ section there. I want to know more about the contest you spoke about earlier. What do I have to do to win prizes and what kind of prizes are there? The contest combines the challenge of learning new skills and the opportunity to win prizes.   00;11;03;16 - 00;11;25;00 There are three sectors like there are in a racetrack, and as you complete each sector, you'll win prizes. Right, and at the end of the first sector, you will earn a free exam attempt and a special badge in the Oracle University Learning Community. When you complete the second sector, you earn a second free exam attempt and another badge in the community.   00;11;25;00 - 00;11;47;03 And when you complete the third and the final sector, you get yet another free exam attempt, if you're counting, that's three in total, and another community badge. But you will also get some additional prizes for this top tier, such as you will get access to our premium OCI labs for three months. Hmm, that's a pretty sweet deal if you ask me.   00;11;47;03 - 00;12;06;23 Free certifications and training, and you can win prizes on top of that! You're so right, Bill. Well, gentlemen, this has been very enlightening. There are lots of opportunities to learn new things and get certified as well. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing about the free training and certifications that are available. Yeah, we're really excited to share this with our listeners.   00;12;06;24 - 00;12;27;05 Yeah. Thank you both for having us. Yes, it's been great to be back on the podcast with you both. Thank you. Don't forget this is only for a limited time from June 1st to August 31st. So, if you're wanting to take advantage, visit education.oracle.com, that's education.oracle.com, today and register for the promotion.   00;12;27;05 - 00;12;49;07 Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for joining us. Until next week, this is Nikita Abraham and Lois Houston signing off. That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app.   00;12;49;10 - 00;15;17;10 See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

An overview of Oracle's different Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and data science solutions available on Oracle Cloud. If you are new to this website, it is a learning and sharing platform where we will learn publicly. Before I cover today's show schedule, let me admit that procrastination is sometimes very dangerous, as I could not record/host the podcast for the last 4 months. It wasn't easy to have a work-life balance due to the two factors. First, as I am doing MSc in AI and the previous 4-5 months were crucial to complete the key subjects, now I am on the last topic of robotics, which will be completed very soon. And 2nd factor was that I was dedicating a lot of my time to office work, where I worked with several EMEA-based customers and helped them migrate on-premise workloads to the Oracle cloud. On the procrastination, James clear's book ‘Atomic habit' and specifically the article “Procrastination: A Scientific Guide on How to Stop Procrastinating” has helped me to come out of the phase and be back with the podcast

This week, join us for a conversation with Josh Scheumann and Walter Reinoehl, Managing Directors for Oracle Advisory Solutions at KPMG, to discover how they helped one of the top global-branded food companies in the world, Hormel Foods, through one of the largest Oracle Cloud back-office transformations in a Fortune 500 organization. Discover how they were able redesign their finance and supply functions to generate more automated close, intelligent forecasting and integrated supply chain planning, resulting in a single source of truth for decision making. KPMG: https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home.html Hormel Foods: https://www.hormelfoods.com   Learn More: Hormel unifies finance and HR with Oracle Cloud Applications: https://www.oracle.com/customers/hormel-foods/ Oracle Cloud HCM: https://www.oracle.com/human-capital-management/ Oracle Cloud ERP: https://www.oracle.com/erp/ Oracle Cloud SCM: https://www.oracle.com/scm/

In this conversation, I will be joined by Steve Miranda, Executive Vice President, Oracle Cloud Applications, to look at the lessons learned from the pandemic; we will discuss what has worked in different businesses across industries and geographies.

Would you like to hear how Oracle is adding Adaptive Intellegence to its Oracle Cloud Applications Suite? Tune in to HCM Cloud Talk Radio and listen as Clive Swan, Oracle Senior Vice President, Applications Development, talks about changing the future of HCM Cloud with Adaptive Intelligent Apps.

Would you like to hear how to build a Learning Organization? Then listen in to HCM Cloud Talk Radio to hear Tom Stewart, Oracle Principal Solutions Consultant, explain how Oracle Cloud Applications can be used to deliver an innovative and highly competitive Corporate Strategy in which knowledge is captured and disseminated smoothly through the organization.

Would you like to hear how to build a Learning Organization? Then listen in to HCM Cloud Talk Radio to hear Tom Stewart, Oracle Principal Solutions Consultant, explain how Oracle Cloud Applications can be used to deliver an innovative and highly competitive Corporate Strategy in which knowledge is captured and disseminated smoothly through the organization.

Listen to the full story on how BIAS chose and implemented Oracle Cloud Applications internally.

Today’s session is focusing on what are the Career choices available for Oracle Application Technical consultant in the era of Oracle Cloud Applications. Organizations are adopting to move to Cloud Model like Oracle HCM Cloud, ERP Cloud, CX Cloud. 2nd post on this topic is Oracle Technical Professionals Journey from EBS to Cloud Applications I […] The post Career Choices for oracle technical consultant in cloud applications era appeared first on Open Tech Talks - Technology worth Talking.

Are you aware of Oracle's new subscription, usage and operational metrics now available for Oracle Cloud Applications? Tune into HCM Talk Radio to hear Oracle's Bill Swenson discuss how these new metrics help you understand your Oracle Cloud usage.

Oracle PaaS4SaaS is a term reflected use of Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Software as a Service (SaaS), what does it mean is to use PaaS products for your SaaS products/services. Uses of PaaS can be categories into a. to build extension/features to your Oracle SaaS application like any feature/extension to HCM/ERP Cloud applications, […] The post 21: PaaS4SaaS – Extend Oracle Cloud Applications appeared first on Open Tech Talks - Technology worth Talking.

Did you know that Oracle's Cloud Applications User Experience Rapid Development Kit can seamlessly extend Oracle Cloud Applications and build Simplified UI solutions, both of which are powerful differentiators? Lancy Silveira, Oracle Senior Architect, Cloud Applications User Experience, joins us on HCM Talk Radio and provides information on the tools available to customers and partners that can enable them to tap into the Cloud Applications User Experience.

Did you know that Oracle’s Cloud Applications User Experience Rapid Development Kit can seamlessly extend Oracle Cloud Applications and build Simplified UI solutions, both of which are powerful differentiators? Lancy Silveira, Oracle Senior Architect, Cloud Applications User Experience, joins us on HCM Talk Radio and provides information on the tools available to customers and partners that can enable them to tap into the Cloud Applications User Experience.

In this session we will review Integrations of Oracle Cloud (SaaS) Applications with on-premise applications like Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12. A case study of Oracle HCM Cloud integration with on-premise Oracle e-Business Suite HCM will be covered. IN THIS SESSION, WE WILL LEARN Oracle Cloud Applications Integration overview How do I Integrate? Integration Flow […] The post 15: Integrations of Oracle Cloud Applications with on-premise Applications appeared first on Open Tech Talks - Technology worth Talking.

In this session, we will review the Integrations of Oracle Cloud (SaaS) Applications with on-premise applications like Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12. A case study of Oracle HCM Cloud integration with on-premise Oracle e-Business Suite HCM will be covered. IN THIS SESSION, WE WILL LEARN Oracle Cloud Applications Integration overview How do I Integrate? Integration Flow Integration Framework Oracle HCM Integration Co-Existence Oracle HCM Integration Tool Oracle HCM Integration Encryption   https://www.otechtalks.tv/integrations-with-oracle-cloud-applications-with-on-premise-applications/