Optimizing Oracle Applications: Custom Apps

Despite the many Oracle software offerings (and the many advantages of using them), they aren’t the only applications that will be running in your IT environment. So how can you get your custom applications to play nicely with Oracle while making sure that you’re using them to the fullest?

Common Issues with Custom Apps

Custom applications can run into the same problems that you encounter with your Oracle applications: slowness, crashes, errors, concurrency issues, missing data, and more. In addition, getting these applications to integrate with Oracle software is often easier said than done.

Benefits of Custom Apps

Despite the challenges of using custom applications, most businesses find that they’re well worth the effort. Custom applications can be tailor-made to meet your unique business needs and problems. If you have ownership of the code base, you can also maintain and scale the application as you see fit.

Optimizing Custom Apps: Case Studies

Datavail has helped two of its clients get better performance from their custom applications, integrating them more closely with their choice of Oracle software.

Batch Job Volume

The Problem

The first client used UC4 workload automation software to schedule thousands of batch jobs on a daily basis. However, hundreds of these jobs were being aborted prematurely due to issues with incompatibility and concurrency. These IT problems were spilling over into the business workflow, preventing the client from getting the right products to the right places.

The Solution

Datavail implemented its own software solution, Oculus, a web-based application that manages and monitors job scheduling software to ensure peak performance. Oculus provides users with a system-wide view of automated business and IT mission-critical Oracle jobs.

The Oculus software includes features for monitoring job run volumes, run times, and long-run and abort events. In doing so, users can locate critical performance bottlenecks and better understand the technical requirements of their systems and applications.

The Results

Upon installing Oculus, the client noticed a drastic improvement in the number of abort events: from over 5,000 in January 2018 to only double digits three months later.

The second client, a Fortune 500 restaurant chain, had custom applications running along with Oracle EBS.

Restaurant Menu Updates

The Problem

They had menus that needed to be updated on a daily basis in locations around the world, especially when introducing new products. However, this was only possible when working in batches, which meant that it could take up to a week to bring every menu up-to-date.

The Solution

After two failed consulting partnerships, the client approached Datavail’s team of EBS experts to diagnose their performance issues and apply their seasoned 5S approach. Datavail’s consultants applied a variety of strategies based on their years of experience: optimizing communications between the database, applications, and infrastructure; rearchitecting file systems; updating old software; rewriting SQL code; and more.

The Results

Thanks to the partnership with Datavail, the client can now update their menus worldwide in a matter of hours rather than days.

Final Thoughts

Datavail’s in-depth familiarity with both Oracle and custom applications makes us the perfect choice for organizations that want to deploy both within a single IT environment.