A quick look at Process Cloud Service by Laurens van der Starre

November 14, 2015 Leave a comment

 

clip_image002Oracle Process Cloud Service is Oracle’s rapid process automation in the Cloud. It is more or less BPM in the cloud. This service allows you to quickly and easily create business processes like you are used to with Oracle BPM, only now in the cloud. In this post I’ll give a quick tour of this service.

So let’s start with the Process Cloud Service. The landing page already gives you loads of features.

The landing page of the Process Cloud

Here you have your spaces in which your processes will be saved, and where you start building new applications. So let’s create a new one. Read the complete article here.

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Process Cloud – first impressions by Luc Gorissen

November 13, 2015 Leave a comment

 

clip_image002As of this week, Oracle has released the Oracle Process Cloud Service (PCS): https://cloud.oracle.com/process. This PaaS cloud service offers a development platform for implementing business processes. Underpinning technology for this cloud service is the Oracle Fusion Middleware BPM stack. As a result, using the Process Cloud Service should be easy for people that are already familiar with Oracle Fusion Middleware BPM. For example, familiar platform components like BPM Composer and BPM WorkSpace are also present in PCS. With that in mind, we decided to give it a go!

This article outlines the steps for implementing a simple process in the Oracle Process Cloud Service. We were inspired during a discussion with a customer on SOA Governance, more specifically: how to handle/grant access to specific services. The customer mentioned that ‘he had people were complaining that it was unpredictable how long it took before access to a specific service in a specific environment was granted’. These types of processes can be handled very well within the Oracle Process Cloud. So, the ‘ServiceAccessApproval’ process will be shown in this example.

Sample process ServiceAccessApproval

The process ServiceAccessApproval in short consists of the following steps: Read the complete article here.

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IoT Cloud Service – Driving value in the connected world–Webcast Wednesday, November 18th

November 12, 2015 Leave a comment

imageWednesday, November 18th @ 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT

Speakers:

Harish Gaur, Senior Director Product Management for Internet of Things Product Group

Simon Nicholson, Senior Director, Product Management for the Internet of Things Product Group

IoT presents a huge opportunity to transform and differentiate your business—whether you are in manufacturing, logistics, infrastructure, or other verticals. Companies are looking to deliver business benefits from the Internet of Things (IoT) around reduced operational costs and enhanced customer experience, and by improving products. If this is done right, returns can be significant and rapid. By leveraging large volumes of sensor data, analyzing this data, and connecting this data with back-end applications, customers and partners are realizing the full potential of IoT for digital transformation.

Join this session to understand Oracle IoT Strategy and a phased approach to ROI with the Oracle Internet of Things Cloud Service, making IoT implementation straightforward, simple and effective. In this session, you will learn how the feature set will help you to quickly build IoT applications, connect and manage devices, configure and monitor security policies, manage and analyze massive amounts of data and integrate with your business processes and applications. You will also see examples of out-of-the-box integration with other Oracle Cloud services and applications, showing the unique value through end-to-end integration that Oracle provides.

This is the link to the registration page that displays all webcast details!

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Fusion Middleware 12c – Selective tracing by Michel Schildmeijer

November 12, 2015 Leave a comment

 

clip_image002For doing a good diagnosis in case of a problem in your Oracle Fusion Middleware Product, the platform offers you many methods and techniques to do your investigation. The disadvantage from some of these methods is that they have some impact on your system, such as if you would raise the log or debuglevel or use diagnostic snapshots.

Selective Tracing is a facility available through Enterprise Manager to limit the scope of trace logging.This allows for debugging of a production system without overloading the system with logging activity. To use Selective Tracing, perform the following method:

1. On the left expand ‘WebLogic Domain’
2. Open Enterprise Manager: http://<your host>:7001/em

3. Right click your domain name -> Logs -> Selective Tracing. This will bring you to the following screen where you can configure your Selective Tracing session. Click on add fields and select as below: Read the complete article here.

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OSB – Comparing Transformation Performance by Over de Auteur

November 11, 2015 Leave a comment

 

clip_image001Introduction

In this post, I am looking into the relative performance of the transformation technologies in Service Bus 12c. Having searched the internet, I could not find a lot of specific information regarding the performance in Oracle Service Bus, but only qualitative opinions like “XSLT performs better for large documents”, or “Service Bus is optimized for XQuery”, without any supporting data [ORAFORUM].

Background

In an attempt to offload some of the production load from the SOA clusters, a migration project has been initiated to migrate services implemented in SOA Suite 11g (as BPEL processes) to the Oracle Service Bus cluster.

Although these services are not directly exposed to consumers, the intention is to reuse – without modification- as much artefacts as possible, including WSDL, JCA adapter definitons and the transformation logic – currently implemented in XSLT. Fortunately, the XSLT is version 1.0 since our Service Bus 11.1.1.6 does not yet support version 2.0.

Environment Setup

Although the environment where the question originates currently runs SOA/OSB 11g, migration to 12c is being planned. Liking life on the bleeding edge of technology, I decided to setup a test for 12c.

To quickly create a (reproducible) SOA 12c installation, I have used the scripts [BIEMOND] provided by Edwin Biemond to leverage Vagrant for the creation of two virtual machines (one for the DB and one for the middleware) (). Since my laptop has enough memory available, I have assigned 8 GB to the middleware virtual machine. Furthermore, the memory settings for the OSB-server have been increased to 1536 MB (initial = maximum memory).

On my laptop, I have also installed SoapUI [SOAPUI] (for functional testing – verifying that the testcase using different technologies yields the same result) and Apache Jmeter 2.13[JMeter] (for the actual performance testing).

Scenario Setup

For the time being I want to primarily focus on the relative performance of XQuery when compared to XSLT, over multiple transformations with varying payloads. So, the only metric I am interested in is the response time of the service, assuming that -with all other things being equal- equal actions will add equal overhead: the total response time of the service will be taken as the main indicator.

To support different transformations for testing, there should both be XQuery and XSLT versions of the transformation. Ideally, we should have different proxies per scenario and transformation technology, but actually I am too lazy to set up this scenario. Initially, I was thinking about setting up different testcases in the same proxy and switching between these testcases based on a value in the payload or operation, this has the suspicion that it works like a case statement (or nested if-then-else): evaluating the conditions for the fourth case might take more time than for the first case.

Fortunately, Service Bus also supports “Dynamic Transformations”[OSBDYNTRANS] for both XQuery and XSLT: this lets you dynamically assign the name of a transformation resource to apply, and also dynamically assign the payload to this transformation (see the Dynamic XQuery example below):

OSB Dynamic Assign Operation

The project I have come up with consists of a single proxy exposing a single operation and five pipelines: Read the whole article here.

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SOA 12c–Creating ESS Job metadata by Siva

November 11, 2015 Leave a comment

 

clip_image002In this post, We will use the EM Console to create ESS Job metadata  to call the Service Bus proxy services however the steps remain same for calling BPEL service too.

Configuration

During domain creation, we should select the following options to create ESS Managed Server and EM Plugin for ESS. EM Plugin for ESS enable us to monitor and manage submitted ESS jobs.

You should see the EM Console as shown below on successful domain creation and starting the Admin and ESS servers. Observe that Scheduling Services is shown having ESSAPP. Read the complete article here.

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Fusion Middleware 12C: Deploy the MDS using Maven by Hugo Hendriks

November 10, 2015 Leave a comment

 

clip_image002In two previous posts here and here, I demonstrated how you can setup CI for OFM 12C projects. One of the things I hadn’t figured out yet was how I could deploy the MDS using Maven. After a vague hint on the internet, Oracle’s response that this feature wasn’t officially supported yet and some trial and error I came across the solution. It is actually quite simple.

Basically it comes down to this:

  • Create a zip file of the files you want to stick into the MDS
  • Use the com.oracle.soa.plugin:oracle-soa-plugin:deploy maven goal to deploy it

That wasn’t that hard as you can see clip_image003Let’s go into a bit more detail. You can use a command line to create the zip or use the maven-assembly-plugin to give you a bit more flexibility. I used the last option because I wanted to filter certain files. Within my Jenkins job, I checked out my MDS files and zipped them using the package goal into a file called sca-MDS_rev1.0.jar. Look in the plugin section in the pom file down below to see about the configuration of the assembly plugin. The pom file is just a copy of a normal soa composite project. Read the whole article here.

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Of ECIDs and Histograms; Oracle SOA Suite Metadata Repository Performance Management by Paul Wever

November 9, 2015 Leave a comment

 

clip_image002In my job as system administrator/DBA, projects related to Oracle’s SOA Suite I put a lot of emphasis on configuration of the environment, like the OS, the Oracle database, WebLogic, OSB, and other products. Part of the Oracle SOA Suite is the Oracle Metadata Repository, where all metadata and run-time data of applications is stored. This repository is often forgotten in performance management , but deserves special attention when dealing with performance improvements.
This blog is part of a series of blogs around Oracle SOA Suite Metadata Repository Performance Management. In this blog we will show how a performance gain of factor 15 was achieved while querying the Metadata Repository.
Terminology
Oracle Metadata Repository
Oracle Metadata Repository is an Oracle database that contains additional schemas to support Oracle Fusion Middleware and its components, for design and run-time management of the applications. Oracle SOA Suite mainly uses two components:

  • The Metadata Store (MDS) to store all SCA artifacts
  • The Dehydration Store (SOAINFRA) to persist composite instances and to audit composite instances

ECIDs
ECID, or Execution Context ID, is a unique identifier to correlate events or requests associated with the same transaction across several components. As a message is passed from composite to composite, the ECID is passed within each message. In other words, ECIDs are used to track a message flow that crosses instances of different composite applications.
Histograms & buckets
Histograms are a special type of column statistics that provide more detailed information about the data distribution in a table column. Histograms help the Oracle Optimizer in deciding whether to use an index or a fulltable scan. These are most useful for a column that is included in a WHERE clause and the data distribution is skewed. A histogram sorts values into buckets to help estimate the cardinality. Oracle uses a maximum of 254 buckets.
Case
Investigating performance issues around purging the Oracle Metadata Repository, I stumbled over the following simple query that was executed by the SOA Suite while running an application:
SELECT ID, CONVERSATION_ID, …
  FROM COMPOSITE_INSTANCE
WHERE (ECID = :1)
ORDER BY CREATED_TIME DESC;
This is a simple query with a simple WHERE clause returning 22 records. Nothing special. And as an index on column ECID with lots of distinct values exists, I expected the Oracle Optimizer to execute the query using an Index Range Scan.
To my surprise the Oracle Optimizer chose to use a Full Table Scan (see Explain Plan 1 below). The query took 2.79 seconds. Read the whole article here.

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Accessing Oracle B2B metadata from your application by Tiago Teixeira

November 8, 2015 Leave a comment

 

For some time now, Oracle B2B has exposed several methods of accessing it’s partner and message metadata from a custom application. This has been improved even further with B2B 12c.
In this post I’ll guide you through the 2 most common ways of accessing B2B’s metadata programmatically and some news of the 12c version.
The 2 main ways of accessing the metadata stored in B2B are:

  • Web Services exposed by B2B
  • Java API

Web Services exposed by B2B

You can access the WSDL’s for the available web services at the following URL:

http://host_name:port_number/b2b/services/

The most common services are:

  • Outbound Web Service – Works as an internal Listening Channel. Based on the details and headers in the soap:body, the agreement identification is done and the message is routed to the partner.
  • Translation Web Service – Allows to translate documents such as EDI and HL7 from Native to XML format (NativeToXMLService) and from XML to Native format (XMLToNativeService)
  • Query API (GetTPAConfigService) – Allows for retrieval of different metadata such as active agreements for a Trading Partner or checking if a Trading Partner has an agreement for a specific Document.

Read the complete article here.

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Yes, Oracle API Gateway Can Protect Your Web Application, Too by Marcelo Parisi

November 7, 2015 Leave a comment

 

clip_image001This article by Marcelo Parisi examines basic concepts of web application security using Oracle API Gateway, using an XSS Injection issue and an SQL Injection issue to demonstrate how Oracle API Gateway can bring value to these scenarios.

The topic of Web application security never gets old. Some of the main associated challenges are related to detection and prevention of XSS Injection and SQL Injection. Such vulnerabilities are usually exploited through web application url parameters or user input fields in HTML forms.

While Oracle API Gateway has been used mainly to protect Web Services, RESTFul APIs and other kinds of services, its filtering and hardening mechanisms make it a powerful tool in a web application protection scenario.

In this article we’ll examine some basic concepts of web application security using Oracle API Gateway. We’ll work on an XSS Injection issue and on a SQL Injection issue to demonstrate how Oracle API Gateway can bring value to these scenarios.

The applications used here to demonstrate the issues were custom made for this article and are deployed in an Oracle WebLogic Server 12c environment with no clustering. The SQL Injection demonstration application uses a datasource connected to an Oracle Database 11gR2. The application reads data from the database’s simple three-column table and prints in the screen. The XSS Injection application prints only the user form input field value in the screen. These applications have no real-life use and are only some code samples for demonstration purposes.

We’ll not be covering infrastructure installation in this article. We’ll be using two servers, one with Oracle API Gateway installed on it, and the other one with the application running on Oracle WebLogic Server 12c.

Infrastructure

As mentioned before, building the infrastructure is out of this document’s scope. In this section we’ll just see what the infrastructure used to demonstrate the concepts looks like. Read the complete article here.

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