The Triora Group

By now I’m sure that all of you have at least seen the new MetaLink V3 (now dubbed “My Oracle Support”). The Adobe Flash driven site has several nifty features, including the ability to easily switch between accounts through a pull-down near the top right corner.

Many of you may not see the icon, and, for that matter, may not have a use for it. However, for those of us that need multiple CSIs, there have been two common practices for managing them.

1) Create a separate MetaLink account for each CSI (or for each Client if you’re a consultant).

2) Go into your current MetaLink account and add a CSI to your profile (through the “License” screen).

Option 1 is nice in that it allows you to keep things separate. However, it also requires that you have multiple email addresses and that you maintain multiple passwords.

Option 2 works as well. However, should any one of the administrators for any CSI in your profile deactivate your account, it will completely lock you out of MetaLink (until another Administrator reactivates you).

While both of those options do work, there is yet a third option that came along (rather quietly) when MetaLink V2 appeared. If you need to add a CSI, simply proceed as though you were following Option 1 above. Log out of Metalink and go through the “I don’t have a MetaLink account and need to set one up” process. The one difference, however, is that you should provide the email address associated with an existing MetaLink account.

Once that’s done, if you’re still using MetaLink V2, you should see “radio buttons” after you login that will allow you to choose which account to use. On the MetaLink V3 (”My Oracle Support”), the icon will appear in the top right corner of your screen that will allow you to switch. The biggest benefit here? Should one of your CSIs be deactivated, it will only deactivate that CSI and will not lock your entire account.

Another “new” feature (that is also somewhat available in the “old” MetaLink) is the Oracle Configuration Manager. This is a process that runs on each ${ORACLE_HOME} that uploads limited information to support. The benefit of this feature is that, when you’re logging a SR, you can indicate which system is involved and eliminate some of the back-and-forth required to provide support with rather basic information (version, platform, etc.).

One of my biggest concerns (that appears to have been addressed recently) is the impact of the Flash interface on the way I work. In particular, its relation to the “Tabbed Browsing” feature in my favorite browser, Firefox. When researching a problem, I’ll generally run down the list of “hits” in my search results and, rather than opening them one at a time, I’ll right click and use the “Open Link in New Tab” feature. Also, I tend to search for multiple patches at once and will use the “Open Link in New Tab” functionality when doing patch research. In my first exposure to the new MetaLink, I was unable to do these things. Fortunately, they appear to have corrected those issues.

The one thing that continues to worry me is this message at the bottom of the screen when you query up any patch:

It’s quite obvious that the old MetaLink (MetaLink V2) is not long for this world. And the message above may simply be transitory. But, when they do finally turn off MetaLink V2, will the FTP functionality go away? I, for one, certainly hope not. Downloading multiple (particularly large) patches through a web browser to a PC and then uploading them to the unix box requires much more time and interaction than simply pulling them down to the unix box directly.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!