Oracle SOA | PaaS Community Blog

I don’t like the Mediator by Luc Gorissen

September 21, 2016 1 Comment

Ok, so there you have it: I just don’t like the Mediator. I don’t really know why. But now that it’s in the open, let’s discuss it.

I often see a pattern where a composite with a synchronous operation is implemented with a Mediator and BPEL component:

I think that in most of these cases, it would be better to either leave out the Mediator component completely. Or replace it with a BPEL component that is run transient, i.e. in-memory.

This article discusses some of the aspects around using a Mediator.

We need to discuss…

Some of the reasons to avoid a Mediator:

It adds another ‘technology’ to your developer’s skillset
It adds more tasks for system administration
It’s bad for performance

Arguments in favor of using the Mediator:

One end-point for a composite with multiple operations
One external interface hides composite-internal changes

Let’s go.

Yet another developer skill

As developer has to learn a lot when trying to master the SOA Suite completely. Learning all the aspects of BPEL is already a big task. And the Mediator is yet another skill. Arguably, not a big skill. Even more, developers are often inclined to say ‘ah … not hard at all’. But … are you as a developer familiar with all the features of Mediators? Like the resequencing rules? The routing rules priorities? When to specify sequential and parallel execution?

I like simple things.

More tasks for system administration

Like for the developer, the Mediator also introduces new topics for the system administrator: purging and tuning.

Both should not be a big issue, as enough information is available on how to handle them . But … does your system administrator know that there is a Mediator engine that needs to be tuned? Just challenge your system administrators to have a look at Mediator tuning and ask them how they handled it.

Performance

At the beginning of the article, it was argued that a Mediator with synchronous operation(s) can be replaced with a BPEL component. That BPEL component can then be made transient, i.e. it will run in memory. That would save the DB access by the Mediator engine. Read the complete article here.

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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Thomas Kurian PaaS Oracle OpenWorld 2016 keynote summery

September 20, 2016 Leave a comment

During Oracle OpenWorld 2016 keynote Thomas Kurian showcased the Oracle IaaS, PaaS and SaaS portfolio in many live demos. Some of the highlights include key PaaS solutions:

Slides and demos will become available for partners via the communities in the next weeks. Please see partner community details. below.

Want to try the Oracle PaaS Service?

Want to know how you can position your services around Oracle PaaS?

Watch the on-demand PaaS Partner Webcast www.tinyurl.com/salesPaaS

Make us of the sales Oracle kits and learn how to position your services:

Want to learn more about Oracle PaaS Services?

Join the Partner Communities free of charge:

SOA & BPM Partner Community

For regular information about Oracle’s PaaS and Middleware solutions become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

WebLogic Partner Community

For regular information about Oracle’s PaaS and Middleware solutions become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

Enjoy Oracle OpenWorld 2016!

Jürgen Kress

SOA & BPM Partner Community

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SOA & BPM Partner Community Webcast – September 27th 2016 Oracle Open World PaaS update

September 20, 2016 Leave a comment

Attend our September edition of the SOA & BPM Partner Community Webcast live on September 27^th 2016 at 16:00 CET.

Get the latest news from Oracle Open World 2016. A detailed update on new features of Oracle Platform as a Service and how to position them at your customers. As part of the Webcast we will introduce the Oracle Open World kit, an opportunity to you to run a mini conference for your customers!

Ed Zou

Vice President Product Management, Oracle Cooperation

Visit the registration page here.

Call ID: 5566478 Call Passcode: 333111

Austria: +43 (0) 192 865 12
Belgium: +32 (0) 240 105 28
Denmark: +45 327 292 22
Finland: +358 (0) 923 193 923
France: +33 (0) 15760 2222
Germany: +49 (0) 692 222 161 06
Ireland: +353 (0) 124 756 50
Italy: +39 (0) 236 008 198

Netherlands: +31 (0) 207 143 543
Spain: +34 914 143 755
Sweden: +46 (0) 856 619 465
Switzerland: +41 (0) 445 804 003
UK: +44 (0) 208 118 1001
United States: 140 877 440 73
More Local Numbers

Schedule:

August 30^th 2016 at 16:00-17:00 CET

Visit the registration page here.

Missed our SOA & BPM Partner Community Webcast? – watch the on-demand versions:

· BPM Suite & PCS Update July 26th 2016

· Integration Cloud Service June 28th 2016

· Sales Plays Webcast June 9th 2016

· Real-Time Integration Business Insight May 31st 2016

· Integration Strategy sales and marketing campaign update

· Microservices

· Stream Explorer

· Process Cloud Service V2

· SOA Suite 12.2.1

· Oracle OpenWorld 2015 update

· SOA & API Cloud Service

· Solutions Catalog & Cloud Marketplace

· GSE demo systems

· Hybrid sales plays

For the latest information please visit Community Updates Wiki page (SOA Community membership required).

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My private Corner – Bandit cloud expert

September 18, 2016 Leave a comment

Thanks for the excellent time at the Summer Camps 2016 in Lisbon. Was great to get pet & lab during the whole week! In my class I learned – paw-on the Oracle PaaS portfolio including PCS, ICS, API CS, IaaS… now I’m an Oracle cloud expert. As a follow-up I will take the online assessment to become certified. The summer in Europe is great, decided to go on holiday and enjoy the beach! Bandit – the cloud expert. #jkwc

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How to find purgeable instances in SOA/BPM 12c by Derek Kam

September 18, 2016 Leave a comment

If you are familiar with SOA/BPM 11g purging, after you have upgraded/implemented SOA/BPM 12c, you will not be able to use most of the SQL for 11g to determine the purgeable instances. This is because SOA/BPM 12c is no longer using composite_instance table for composite instance tracking.

In SOA/BPM 12c, a common component is used to track the state associated with a business flow and report audit information. This design will reduce the instance tracking data generated and stored in the database, and improve purge performance by minimizing the number of tables that need to be accessed. Component instance state will no longer be stored in individual table for instance tracking purpose, the overall flow state will be stored in SCA_FLOW_INSTANCE table.

In SCA_FLOW_INSTANCE table, the “active_component_instances” column keeps track of how many component instances are still in a running/active state. These are the instances in one of the following states:

RUNNING
SUSPENDED
MIGRATING
WAITING_ON_HUMAN_INTERVENTION

When the “active_component_instances” value reaches 0, this indicates that the Flow is no longer executing. There is another column called “recoverable_faults”, this column keeps track of how many faults can be recovered. This information together with the “active_component_instances” is used to determine whether the Flow can be purged or not.

The SCA_FLOW_ASSOC table is used to record the association between the original Flow that creates the BPEL component instance and the correlated Flow. The SCA_FLOW_ASSOC table is used by the purge logic to ensure that all correlated Flows are purged together when none of the flow is in an active state.

Another important thing to take note: if you create a SOAINFRA schema with LARGE database profile, all transactional tables will be created with range-partition. If you decide to run the SOA purging with the purge script either manually by running the stored procedure or by using auto purge function which can be configured in Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control, you will need to set the purge_partitioned_component => true (default is false), otherwise the purge logic will skip all partitioned tables when the purge script run and no flow instance will be purged. You will be able to find all the partition tables in your SOAINFRA schema by using the following SQL: ?select table_name from user_tables where partitioned = ‘YES’;

You can use the following sample PL/SQL to determine whether the SCA_FLOW_INSTANCE has been partitioned and the number of purgeable flow instances in your SOAINFRA schema. Please read the complete article here.

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Dramatically reduce SOA Suite 11g startup time by cleaning the MDS by Maarten Smeets

September 17, 2016 Leave a comment

SOA Suite can sometimes be a bit slow to start. This is especially the case when there are a lot of composites to load. Customers using different versions of composites can benefit from undeploying non-default revisions of processes which do not have any running instances (see for example here). Undeployment in most cases is an asynchronous process which does not give feedback. It can partially fail without you noticing (apparently not an atomic transaction). This sometimes leaves composite remains; parts of the composite which are still loaded at startup but are not visible from the Enterprise Manager. Removing these can dramatically reduce server startup time. Especially in an environment which has been used for some time and environments with many versions of composites. Reducing the time required to get the soa-infra application fully up and running is of course mostly relevant for 11g SOA installations and less for 12.1.3 (which does some lazy loading) and 12.2.1 (which supports parallel deployments, also during server start-up).

In this article I’ll demonstrate how these left-over composite parts can be identified and removed on an 11.1.1.7 SOA environment. First try this procedure on a development or test environment before executing it in production! Using this method is entirely at your own risk. Only try it if you understand what you are doing. If something breaks, tell me so I can update this article. Thanks!

Please mind that these actions, although they help with the start time and memory usage of your SOA environment, have less impact on run-time performance than for example purging of instances and reducing the amount of deployed composites (or tweaking datasources, soa-infra database, JVM, etc).

Cleaning

What is a composite in the MDS?

WebLogic Server first brings up its Managed SOA server. After this managed server is up and RUNNING, the soa-infra application is started. After the soa-infra application is started, the composites are loaded from the MDS and put in memory. Read the complete article here.

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Jet into the Oracle OpenWorld 2016 User Experience Exchange

September 17, 2016 Leave a comment

10, 9, 8, 7 . . . Ignition Sequence Start . . .

Oracle OpenWorld 2016 lifts off in September! And boy, have we been putting some passion and power into that user experience (UX) greatness to share with you. Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) Senior Director Misha Vaughan (@mishavaughan) tells us:

"I am proud to say that the team has even more fantastic experiences lined up for attendees at Oracle OpenWorld this year. Near and dear to my heart is our Oracle OpenWorld User Experience Exchange. This will be our fourth annual event, and it just gets better every year for partners, customers, and analysts alike!"

Consider Yourself Invited

If you are an Oracle Fusion Middleware and PaaS Oracle PartnerNetwork member, Oracle SaaS customer, Oracle Technology Network Ace of any species, or a UX thought leader discovering the world of digital transformation, then you cannot afford not to spend an hour at our Exchange.

If you are a partner, you just might be interested in building a PaaS4SaaS simplified UI using the Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET) and Oracle Alta UI, for example.

Design and build a SaaS simplified UI in Oracle Jet? No problem. When you sign up for the Exchange.

Or perhaps, an Oracle Mobile Application Framework accelerator kit for SaaS UX takes your fancy?

Apply UX design patterns to Oracle MAF in Oracle JDeveloper and use smartphone native features? Find out more at the Exchange.

About the Exchange

This is an exclusive, hands-on, in-person event that demonstrates the Oracle Applications Cloud UX and our shared enablement on offer, as well as some near-future Oracle UX and technology-based proof of concept ideas that’ll inspire you to explore new business opportunities.

Your Exchange Experience

We’ll be showing the roadmap for the full Oracle SaaS portfolio; extensibility tools for business users to make the Oracle Applications Cloud their own; new mobile app and JavaScript front-end UI Rapid Development Kits for partners to design and build Oracle Cloud service solutions; some cool social innovation projects, such as the award-winning Asteroid Data Explorer; innovative magic sauce from the OAUX emerging technologies team, including the incredible "step-in-and-try" Smart Office; and more! For registration details please read Ultan’s article here.

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SOA Suite 12c: Topology Suggestions by Jay Kasi

September 16, 2016 Leave a comment

In this article, I make some suggestions and provide opinions on topologies for SOA Suite 12c that is commonly used and supported. Only the EDG topology is thoroughly tested by Oracle though.

One consideration when deciding on topologies is that Upgrade is always domain wide. All products deployed to the domain must release in the same release train and you should be willing to upgrade all of them at the same time.

Centralized administration is one factor but should not be the only reason to put two different products in the same domain. EM Cloud Control could be used as a solution for that.

Typically Service Bus and SOA Suite belong in different tiers in an end to end architecture so they would be in separate domains. This is true if Service Bus is being used on an enterprise scale routing to multiple SOA domains and other services. However if Service Bus is used primarily for mediating and providing routing for SOA Suite Composites in a domain, it would be in the same domain, but typically in separate clusters for optimum performance and scalability. However it is possible starting in 12c to have Service Bus and SOA Suite in the same cluster. The only possible reason for this is reducing memory and is uncommon.

Governance products like OER and UDDI should not be in a SOA Suite or Service Bus domain. They should be in a separate domain. OER should be in a separate domain from UDDI. UDDI is a third party product and putting it in the same domain may cause upgrade issues.

You can target multiple products to the same cluster by targeting the appropriate user extensible server group to the servers in the cluster.

SOA Suite is targeted to a server by targeting either the user extensible server group SOA-MGD-SVRS or SOA-MGD-SVRS-ONLY.
Service Bus is targeted to a server by targeting either the user extensible server group OSB-MGD-SVRS-COMBINED or OSB-MGD-SVRS-ONLY.
BAM is targeted to a server by targeting either the user extensible server group BAM12-MGD-SVRS or BAM12-MGD-SVRS-ONLY.
MFT is targeted to a server by targeting either the user extensible server group MFT-MGD-SVRS or MFT-MGD-SVRS-ONLY.
ESS is targeted to a server by targeting the user extensible server group ESS-MGD-SVRS. .

BAM sometimes is used outside of SOA Suite and in this case it is typically in a separate domain from SOA Suite. However BAM should be in a separate cluster in the same domain as SOA Suite if it is primarily used with that SOA Suite instance. In BAM 12c, integration between SOA Suite and BAM is a tight integration and is best done in the same domain. BAM and SOA Suite should not be co-located in the same cluster because BAM uses Automatic Service Migration for HA while SOA Suite uses Whole Server Migration.

OWSM Policy Manager must be deployed to only one cluster in a domain. However SOA Suite, OSB, BAM and MFT templates target OWSM PM by default to their own clusters. Read the complete article here.

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Autumn SOA Suite 12c and BPM Suite 12c free on-demand Bootcamps October 2016

September 15, 2016 1 Comment

Training On-Demand: Oracle Business Process Management 12c

This boot camp is an ideal starting point for an implementer who is planning to learn Oracle BPM Suite 12c and use it on BPM projects. The course provides a combination of lecture segments that present conceptual and feature background and hands-on labs that provide practice with the tooling.

It introduces process developers to Oracle BPM Suite 12c. It covers the key concepts, features and processes needed to begin using the design-time and run-time capabilities on BPM projects. Throughout the training, you will benefit from hands-on exercises based upon two case studies. At the conclusion of the course, you should feel comfortable to start using BPM Suite 12c for process modeling, simulation, analytics, business rules and human workflow.

For details please visit the registration page here.

Training On-demand: Oracle SOA Suite 12c Implementation Specialists

Oracle SOA Suite 12c is the latest version of the industry’s most complete and unified application integration and SOA solution. With simplified cloud, mobile, on premises and Internet of Things (IoT) integration capabilities, all within a single platform, Oracle SOA Suite 12c delivers faster time to integration, increased productivity and lower TCO.

The Oracle SOA Suite 12c Implementation Boot Camp provides relevant insight to current and prospective SOA implementers and for those companies interested on becoming Oracle SOA Suite 12c Specialized. Participants will learn how to develop and implement solutions using SOA Suite 12c that will drive their customer organizations run more effectively and efficiently.

For details please visit the registration page here.

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