Blog Topic: WLShell for Quick Access to Data
By Mark Vaughn
(http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/mvaughn25/archive/2005/04/)
Sure, both WLShell and WLST have a good bit of functionality. WLST may even have more, in some aspects. However, WLST is still lacking the GUI ability to graph resource usage in real time. I initially looked at WLShell as a tool to script and automate changes to WebLogic configurations. That would make migrations between environments and across clusters both more accurate and less time consuming. However, in the process of evaluating WLShell, I found the all-important "-g" option.

Sure, "get /JVMRuntime/$SERVER/HeapFreeCurrent" will get you instant access to information on your JVM Heap, and "get -r 5 /JVMRuntime/$SERVER/HeapFreeCurrent" will get the same information and update it every five seconds. But if it is hitting the fan and you need to know why, "get -g /JVMRuntime/$SERVER/HeapFreeCurrent" is the command you are looking for. This gives you a graphical representation of your JVM Heap, and updates it in real time.

Now that you have the ability to pop off a graphical window on MBean attributes, why not check on your JDBC Pools, your execute thread pools, your EJB stats, and your cluster stats? WLShell has a decent selection of commands that will allow you to read from shell prompts, throw in a few "if/then" statements, and drop it all into a quick "for" loop to get quick access to a wide array of data from multiple managed servers in a cluster.

This script (http://dev2dev.bea.com/blog/mvaughn25/archive/EXAMPLE.wlsh) is an example of a script I use to pull the data that I consider critical to troubleshooting application issues. If an application is misbehaving, I use this script to get all of the data in front of me. That lets me quickly determine where to focus my troubleshooting effort and lets me monitor the health of the application as we address the issues.

Blog Topic: WebLogic 8.1 SP3 Long Value Bind Problem
By Franz Garsombke
(www.jroller.com/page/fgarsombke/20050209)
After wasting about 5 hours on this problem, we have finally figured out the solution. The problem was that we had a database column of VARCHAR2 (4000) size.

Any time we would insert larger than 1333 characters we would get the following error:

(Hibernate operation): encountered SQLException [ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only for
insert into a LONG column
]; nested exception is java.sql.BatchUpdateException: ORA-01461: can bind a LONG value only
for insert into a LONG column

which, needless to say, is very misleading. The answer is that WL 8.1 SP3 comes with Oracle 10g drivers, and we are on an Oracle 9.x database. This link is how to fix this problem: http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs81/jdbc/thirdparty.html#1050527.