A note on Setup Manager - Application Change Management Pack

Question

Hi All,
This is Mugunthan, Development manager for iSetup and Setup Manager. I am happy to begin my note with the launch of Application Change Management Pack 3.1. For those who are not aware of Application Change Management Pack, it is a new product built on top of Oracle Enterprise Manager and comprises of three major modules namely Setup Manager, Customization Manager and Patch Manager. You can find more information about this pack here (LCM: Oracle Application Change Management Pack Setup Manager is enhanced and advanced version of iSetup on Oracle Enterprise Manager. There were good amount of reasons to re-architect iSetup on Oracle Enterprise Manager as Setup Manager.
Why Setup Manager?
Ability to migrate to data over point releases of EBS – EBS comes up with rollup patches on top of major releases periodically. It means that you have to certify the patch before it get deployed on to production which means that setup data are to be certified again. iSetup cannot connect between 12.0.4 to 12.0.6 or 12.0.6 to 12.1.1. We have achieved the data migration for above scenarios in Setup Manager (11i to R12 is not supported in Setup Manager)
Projects – Setup Manager supports grouping of Extracts, Transforms, Loads and Reports as a single entity and can be deployed multiple times to multiple targets. The project consists of one or more tasks (of type Extract/Load/Transform/Report) and can be orchestrated according to your ends. Project execution supports scheduling which means that you can use this feature to sync up setup data between two instances at periodic internal. Projects can be shared with other users which is remarkable difference between iSetup and Setup Manager. You can share your projects with others in a combined development environment. The functional configuration data (Extracts) are stored in Oracle Enterprise Manager. This means that you can refresh EBS without losing Extracts.
Integration with Change Approval mechanism – Execution of projects is integrated with change approval mechanism which means that you can control who executes what. Also, you have fine grain access control where you can control EBS targets assigned to a user.
Offline Transformation – I would say this is the most unique feature of Setup Manager and as an implementer you would welcome this feature very much. iSetup has got very limited capability on Transformation. Here we have gone way ahead and support Transformation on almost all Setup Objects. We present you the extracted data in excel sheets. You can download the excel template and work offline. All the attribute value fields in the excel sheet are editable which means that you supply your own value. For example, you can download Operating Unit data in xls file and change operating unit “OU100” to “OU200” and upload it back to system and load to target instance. Please note that any attribute of Operating Unit setup data can be edited. Also, system has got intelligence and once you upload the excel sheet, it automatically changes all the inventory organization which belongs to “OU100” to “OU200”. This behavior can be controlled using attribute mapping which you can create in Setup Manager. Hold on, this is not the end, also you can add more operating unit in excel, say OU300 and OU400 and load it to target instance. You can delete few Operating Units from extracted data in excel sheet and load the remaining to target instance. This gives you complete flexibility to manage (add/edit/delete) functional configuration data offline. This is fantastic feature and please have a look at how it works.
Advanced Filtering – Filter support in iSetup is not flexible where you cannot use comma separated values and complex sql join conditions. Also you do not know what query is executed behind the scenes to the data. All this problems are addressed in Setup Manager 3.1. We show you the “select clause” (SQL) associated with interface and provide you a text field where you can refer the select clause and provide your own custom where criteria (SQL). This means that filter support is unlimited and you can set filter any database columns. For example, you can extract “Responsibilities/Menu” which are active or created as on yesterday. You can extract all Operating Units excluding “OU100 and OU200”. We support all filter criteria that are supported by SQL.

Answer 1

Hi,
your note very interesting. Is there any other way to extract the configuration using SQL? not using Enterprise Manager? hope this will be fastest way then using GUI base.
Thanks,
Fahmi Fahlevi