Introducing the Oracle HCM Fast Formula Agent – Built with AI to Help You Work Smarter

🚀 Introducing the Oracle HCM Fast Formula Agent – Built with AI to Help You Work Smarter

After months of juggling fast formulas, fielding questions from HR teams, and trying to decode cryptic payroll logic at 2AM, I decided it was time to build something better.

Today, I'm happy to share an open-source project that came from that journey:

👉 Oracle HCM Fast Formula Agent – A smart, simple tool that uses Generative AI to help you generate, validate, explain, and modify Oracle HCM Fast Formulas, and more!

🎥 Check out a quick demo - Watch on Loom

💡 Why I Built It

Working in the Oracle Cloud HCM space, I saw firsthand how challenging it can be to:

• Interpret legacy Fast Formulas written years ago
• Validate logic across hundreds of conditional paths
• Explain formula outcomes to business users
• Generate new formulas based on complex rules — under tight deadlines

And with the rise of AI, I thought: Why not build an assistant that understands Oracle HCM and speaks "formula"?

⚙️ What It Does

With this Flask-based app, you can:

✅ Generate new Fast Formulas from plain-English descriptions
✅ Explain existing formulas in readable, line-by-line language
✅ Validate and suggest corrections for logic/syntax errors
✅ Modify formulas based on user input
✅ Extend the tool with new advanced actions using a plugin system, like the included Summarize advanced action!

It even has a clean admin panel and a dark mode toggle because... well, late-night debugging deserves a good theme.

📦 Plugin Architecture

Want to add your own action like summarize_formula or compare_logic_blocks? Just drop it in the plugins/ folder. No changes to the main app required. It's built for extensibility.

🐳 Docker Ready

Whether you’re developing locally or deploying in the cloud, the app comes with a Dockerfile that runs the app via Gunicorn for production-grade performance.

🔗 Get Started

Clone it, run it, or fork it for your own use:

👉 GitHub: https://github.com/TheOwner-glitch/hcm-fast-formula-agent
📹 Demo: Watch the video

🙌 A Call to the Oracle Community

I built this for consultants, analysts, and developers who need to move fast and support critical Oracle HCM needs in the Fast Formula space, but more importantly to share an example of how AI Powered application development can be compelling and reduce the need for conditional and hardcoded business logic by instead leveraging the power of generative AI  to interpret natural language. If you try it out and find it helpful — or have ideas for improving it — I’d love to collaborate.

Thanks for reading. Now go automate your fast formula headaches away.

— Julio

The Oracle EBS Invalid Object Utility

If you are familiar with Oracle databases then you are familiar with invalid objects. Specially in the realm of EBS, where making a code change to a package, changing a table or applying a patch can cause many objects to become invalid within the various schemas in your database. There are of course tables you can query to see which objects are invalid, like dba_objects, where you can see whether a particular object is in an invalid state. However, the reason as to why that is, is not as easy to discern.

Here is where the EBS Invalid Object Utility (Doc ID 2214169.1) comes in. According to Oracle, "this utility is provided by Oracle Support to proactively assist you with maintaining Oracle Application environments and can also be used for data collection by Support engineers".

So, what does it do? It generates an HTML output with good details around invalid objects in the target instance and insights as to why they are invalid. If you have ongoing research efforts to reduce the invalid objects within your EBS Oracle database then this is a must, also it is a great a tool going forward whenever you need to research any invalid objects. A good use case would be to run the utility after releases or maintenance activities where patches are applied in order to get information regarding any objects that may have become invalid and why that happened.

Unlike your basic SQL against the tables provided by Oracle, the UI within the report looks great, and aside from aiding the research of invalid objects it has a couple of additional features. First is the "droppable" objects feature, which lists obsolete objects that can be dropped, since many objects don’t get dropped automatically after patches or upgrades, even if they get deprecated, thus creating noise within your instance and making subsequent upgrades harder and true invalid objects difficult to mine. The second additional feature is the patches applied feature, this one is really useful since it helps show which patch caused which object to become invalid, which really narrows down the root cause analysis as to why an object became invalid after a patch was applied.

There is no configuration required, all that is required is for the utility to be unzipped and executed. There are some basic requirements such as having Perl installed and the APPS environment set, all of which can be seen in the note I included above.

Oracle has a dedicated thread to share feedback regarding the utility and ask any questions, the thread can be found at: https://community.oracle.com/docs/DOC-1011252

Happy invalid objects hunting!