PeopleSoft Upgrades Underway

Upgrades for PeopleSoft are in progress at IT. When complete, they are expected to improve how the application operates as students, staff and faculty access it.

The databases used for PeopleSoft Human Resources and Student Academic and Administration system were recently upgraded to give UH access to a newer version of databases with new features and better information processing. They were upgraded from Oracle database version 9i to 10g. In the next few months, there are plans to upgrade the PeopleSoft Financial system databases.

IT experts from Enterprise Systems (ES) intend to do more. Among other things, they plan to modify the PeopleSoft system architecture to accommodate the changing needs of the University and of technology. Expanded use of PeopleSoft is among factors driving innovation. Three other important changes are planned for PeopleSoft: additional database upgrades from Oracle database version 9i to 10g, implementation of Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology, and the purchase and installation of new hardware to support these two changes.

Most of PeopleSoft's environment have already been upgraded to Oracle database version 10g. That means many, but not all databases are running on 10g. Eventually they all will, but it will take work to achieve that goal. Database administrators are responsible for the effort.

PeopleSoft databases used to deliver information to campus users now run in an environment that assigns one server to one database. Implementation of Oracle RAC technology makes it possible to run a single database over multiple servers in computing clusters intended for PeopleSoft. The database environment that results provides more stability and higher availability. Here’s what that means in layman’s terms. If any server malfunctions, other servers will take over for the faulty equipment without any changes in the operation of the application. Moreover, during peak loads, additional servers providing more performance can be added to the RAC without shutting down the application.

In computer lingo, database experts say that RAC technology provides high availability, better performance, and lower server costs. Moreover, this additional performance can be achieved using lower cost commodity servers rather than just one expensive, high end server.

Those working on the upgrades at ES include Eric Block, director, Architecture and Technical Services; Jitender Kumar, ES database manager; Zeandra Mathura, database analyst 2; and Ming Lii Twu, lead database administrator. Before taking a post at UH Downtown, former ES Database Team leader Grace Davila also worked on this project. Others working on the project were Mike Alleman, operating systems manager at Enterprise Computing Systems (ECS) and Reggie Beavers and Danny Reid, both systems administrator 3 at ECS.