deltalounge

One of the projects I’m involved in, uses Oracle ESB (from SOA Suite 10.1.3.3 MLR 18) running on AIX 5.3. Instead of using the default in-memory JMS the ESB is configured to use Oracle Advanced Queueing (AQ). Although there were tuning efforts before, the performance wasn’t up to par. AQ seemed to be the bottleneck, especially the dequeueing part. During the day we saw the number of messages queue up. Generally these numbers would decrease after business hours. This should have been a big problem if the number of messages wasn’t going to be tripled or quadrupled in the next month(s).

Upgrade the JVM

Previous attempts in cooperation with Oracle Consulting hadn’t done the trick, yet. To get a fresh view and some out-of-the-box thinking Marc joined the team. He performed a scan of the systems settings. Researching Oracle’s knowledge system resulted (searching on AIX & ESB & DB Adapter) in the clue to upgrade the JVM (6848406 – SLOW PERFORMANCE ON AIX ESB USING FILE AND DB ADAPTER). Although we were skeptic at first, because why tried a similar path before, we decided to give it a shot. The previous attempt resulted in errors in our code without enhancing the performance of the system.
With the AIX system a Java 5 is delivered in /usr/java5, to be more precise:

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$:/jdk/bin>./java -version
java version "1.5.0"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build pap32dev-20080315 (SR7))
IBM J9 VM (build 2.3, J2RE 1.5.0 IBM J9 2.3 AIX ppc-32 j9vmap3223-20080315 (JIT enabled)
J9VM - 20080314_17962_bHdSMr
JIT  - 20080130_0718ifx2_r8
GC   - 200802_08)
JCL  - 20080314

To change this stop the SOA Suite and:

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cd $ORACLE_HOME
mv jdk jdk.orginal           # rename jdk directory
ln –s /usr/java5 jdk         # Creates symbolic link

and the start the SOA Suite. With this newer Java version we had a significant performance improvement.

Remaining issue

If the change is performed as described above Enterprise Manager doesn’t allow you to browse the oc4j_soa anymore. This will result in the following error message:

Unable to make a connection to OC4J instance oc4j_soa on Application Server someserver.local. A common cause for this failure is an authentication error. The administrator password for each OC4J instance in the Cluster must be the same as the administrator password for the OC4J instance on which Application Server Control is running.

This can be solved by applying the patch for base bug 5261515. The patch adds some security jars and properties that are not in the AIX Java5 version.
Since this patch introduces issues in our code, we are working around the Em problems for now, while trying to resolve the issue.

Today I give a presentation at the Oracle NL 25 years event – Celebrating a tradition in innovation. Although there are a lot of pictures the words are in Dutch, as was the language of the audience…
The story is based around practises developed in the last five years working on SOA projects. Despite all the desillusions on SOA projects that get a lot of attention this year, good results are achieved for our customers using these practises and guidelines. I’ll elaborate on them in future blogposts.

Still searching for the correct answer on the question: What skyline is in the picture on slide 12?

From today there is a SOA Suite 10.1.3 familiy member available for WebLogic Server 10.3. Oracle SOA Suite 10.1.3.5.1 has been released. As described earlier we were looking for a recent SOA Suite version that is certified for a recent WebLogic server version. And here it is: Oracle BPEL Manager, Oracle ESB, Oracle Rules, and OWSM (basically all versioned 10.1.3.5.1) are certified with WLS 10.3.1.

• Download SOA Suite 10.1.3.5
• Dive into the certification matrix 10.1.3
• Expect the documentation pages to be updated shortly.
• 10.1.3 Support status and alerts on Metalink

Update – Installation instructions

Installation instructions for SOA Suite 10.1.3.5.1 on WebLogic Server can be found in these blogs:

• Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond
• Solution Architect Kavin Mehta

In the SOA still dead blogpost based on his impression of the SOA Symposium 2009, Joe McKendrick asks the question:

Is SOA still dead?

My personal opinion is that SOA is still alive or reanimated. The declaration of the SOA Manifesto has contributed to this. The least it has done is start discussion online and offline. These discussions will lead to a better understanding for the participants and those following them. The result will be more mature and successful (in business terms not technology) SOA implementations. This would be quite an achievement if the statistics that Anne Thomas Manes presented are accurate:

fewer than 10% of companies have seen significant business value in their SOA efforts.

Although the quotes on this page seem rather negative, I’m still an optimist on the case for SOA. It brings us solid principles and guidance in developing software of better quality.

Views on the SOA Symposium

The proclamation of the SOA Manifesto has resulted in most of the blogpost on the SOA Symposium. However there are post dedicated to a broader spectrum of the SOA Symposium. These give an impression or reflect back on things.

Reading the blog of Linda Terlouw, I remembered having the same expectations on the “Service-Oriented Solution Evaluation Criteria” session: some info on how you can measure whether or not (or to which extent) a service conforms to certain principles. Instead it was a summary of the principles as they are defined by Thomas Erl.

Comments, like this one, are appreciated.