fun with the Siebel data model
The Siebel 7.8 data model supports different industry applications (finance and banking, pharmaceutical, sales, telecommunications, energy, media, motor, public sector, retail) and contains 3,920 tables and even more indexes.
The results are just in from a Friday afternoon poll to find the most popular Siebel table:
- S_ACCELERATOR - invaluable in performance tuning. 'Oh well - there's nothing for it. Now we are simply going to have to load S_ACCELERATOR'.
- S_CLUSTER_TNT - images of cluster bombs and high explosives but supposedly related to 'Hospitality'.
- S_AUDIT_ITEM - typically will contain 155 million records of historic audit data dating back to 2003. No-one knows why this data is being collected let alone using it.
- S_DOCK_INITM_43 - Crazy name, crazy table. Docking table for Remote.
- S_CL_PTCL_LSXM - A real tongue twister related to clinical protocols.
And finally...
- S_DISEASE - the clear winner.
the most important decision of my life
...lies in your hands, dear reader.
Another baby when my wife is 57 years old ? - discuss.
My job title when I joined Siebel in April 2003 was 'Junior Architecture Specialist'. Four years later, it transpires that I am now officially entitled to call myself 'Principal Architecture Specialist'.
However, I have elected not to change my business cards and .signature as I am simply not worthy. Please remember that I have worked with some very talented individuals (past and present).
In any case, who needs more boxes of business cards gathering dust ? I rarely dispense my business card to any client as I much prefer email as the sole communication channel. This also avoids the possibility of a customer calling me on Sunday evening to assist with a Service Request escalation or go-live support. After all, 'Antiques Roadshow' is absolutely sacrosanct in our household.
Secondly, such a deluxe, overblown, Rolls-Royce description may set the client expectations unreasonably high and this may lead to dashed hopes and bitter disappointment (especially when dealing with me).
So when I cross the threshold of the modern glass-fronted offices, extracting my contact details and preparing my firm handshake, I normally introduce myself with 'Hi, I'm Norman Brightside from Expert Services. I know a little about lots.'
To be fair, this statement is unerringly accurate and leaves me with the perennial 'Get Out of Jail Free' card: 'Oh I'm sorry - but that's an area of Siebel I am not intimate with' (which I tend to use a lot).
Last March, following the Oracle takeover, our group was going to be re-branded as 'Service Delivery Engineers'. All Siebel employees were also eligible for higher rate tax relief on any dental surgery and liposuction, if required.
I was abroad in Sweden and didn't really care - after all, what's in a name ? - Expert Services actually do 'deliver services' to customers although we are not (software) engineers in the traditional sense.
However, some of my colleagues fiercely resisted this change with a vengeance (think 1990 Poll Tax riots) which left me rather bemused. The standing joke was that we would tell customers; 'Sorry I haven't got that part on the van' and suck through our teeth 'Hmm - this isn't gonna be cheap' when faced with a thorny performance problem.
I honestly wouldn't care if Oracle called me 'Overpaid, ugly code monkey' as long as my salary and benefits were preserved. In fact, when I was a mercenary contractor, I toyed with using this job title as my official occupation on my passport.
Surprisingly, the revolutionaries prevailed and the corporation ruled that we could preserve our job titles or upgrade, at no extra cost, to 'Electrolux repair man', if we so desired.
Twelve months on, my contrarian instincts are twitching so what do you think ?
- Service Delivery Engineer
- Architecture Specialist
- Technical 'Consultant'
- Amusing alternative
don't believe the truth
I am currently trying to assist with a couple of long standing Service Requests. This type of work is interesting because the issue is normally pretty deep rooted and complicated. These escalations are also very challenging because lots of very intelligent people have already spent a lot of man-hours investigating the problem. Anyway, one of the first steps is to review associated Service Requests and try to determine whether they are indeed related to the issue under investigation. The opening paragraph of one such SR contained this bold assertion from the customer: 'As you can see, we have populated the interface tables correctly and EIM still doesn't work.' This was a interesting statement and was directly related to the problem I was looking at. This statement went unchallenged by Technical Support so I took it at face value and continued my analysis. There was further empirical evidence that this data load would fail as changes to the corresponding meta-data in the Siebel Repository had been made in version 7.8. A user key definition on this table had been inactivated which was previously present in 7.5. Interesting. A few hours later, I returned to this SR as I was about to actually try loading data into the same Siebel tables. This seemed rather pointless if it wasn't going to work. However, I started from scratch, read the documentation and created my own simple test case for a single record. Sure enough, the customer was correct. Even though, I had populated the correct columns in the correct interface table with the correct data, Siebel failed to populate the target tables. However, when I reviewed the EIM log files more carefully, the errors were the conventional (foreign key lookup failed) type. I fixed the test data, re-ran the load script and sure enough data appeared in the target tables and was visible in the Siebel application. So, the customer was actually mistaken and I suspect his bold assertion including the four little words 'As you can see' also misled the technical support engineer. Last night, my son told me that playing World of Warcraft was much, much quicker since the recent broadband upgrade from 4Mb to 10Mb. This made sense as online gaming presumably needs lots of bandwidth and Virgin customer services told me the upgrade would be effective from last Friday. Out of curiosity, I downloaded a 100MB file (twice) and looked at the download speeds which were in the range 360-390 KB/sec. Quick but less than you would expect for a 10Mb connection. I called my friends at Virgin Media to check the status of my broadband upgrade. Sure enough, contrary to what I was told, the 10Mb upgrade will only be activated on 23 March when the engineer installs the V+ box. So, unless you see it with your own eyes, it didn't happen.questions and answers
Over the past couple of days, much to my surprise, I have actually managed to answer some questions.
- The parameter 'ExtractStartDate' was set to '11/01/2007'. This means that Siebel will ignore all appointments and tasks prior to this date. The default value of 'ExtractStartDateFormat' is 'MM/DD/YYYY' which equates to '01 November 2007'.
- Install Cygwin, sed -n -e 'x,yp' < bigfile.log
- If the Exchange Connector and SSSE Engine component are run by accounts in different domains, trust must be established in order for RPC calls to work correctly. Alternatively, use two separate accounts (least privilege) in the same domain.
- In the heart of London, surprisingly.
- Install OHS from the OAS Companion CD
- F11
And now for the questions...
- Why, oh why, does Siebel stubbornly refuse to synchronise any of my appointments and ToDo's to Outlook ?
- How do you print lines x to y of a file too large for notepad ?
- Why, oh why, don't multiple SSSE engines on different servers work ?
- Where is London City Airport exactly ?
- Where do you get the version of OHS (with Apache 2.x) needed for Siebel 8.0 ?
- How do you switch from full screen mode back to console in VMware ?
I am probably most proud of number 6. If only all my answers were as succinct and technically correct.
what's new in Siebel 8.0
Siebel 8.0 is the first major release since the Oracle takeover and is now imminent. Oracle are planning a simultaneous launch of five different products (JD Edwards, E-Business, PeopleSoft and Siebel 8.0) on 31 January 2007. Ed Abbo (VP CRM products) will be chairing the Siebel session and SearchCRM has an interesting (albeit low quality)Oracle Application Management Pack for Siebel is a comprehensive solution for managing the configuration, performance, availability, and service level of Siebel CRM applications. It can be used to monitor the health of the servers and components, measure application response time, track configuration changes, and diagnose performance and execution problems.This will be an invaluable tool for Oracle DBA's (who may be unfamiliar with the Siebel application) to easily monitor a Siebel OLTP instance and identify performance problems more promptly.