Solution

As the last part of the error message suggests, check for file system stuff:

1. Is the share and/or mount your file / ftp adapter is pointing to still available?
2. Can the share be reached from your SOA Server?
3. Does the directory name exist?
4. Are the required permissions available?

Correct inaccuracies.

Common Issues and Workarounds for File/FTP Adapter

There is an extensive document on solving issues with file and FTP adapters on Oracle support. The documentation for file and FTP adapters can be found:

1. 11g JCA File / FTP adapter
2. 10g File / FTP Adapter

This guide is aimed at installations for developers and not for production machines. Unfortunately the installation of OSB is out of scope. I expect it to be upgraded to PS4 (11.1.1.5) soon. I could find any missing instructions while installing PS4 on a Windows7 VirtualBox.

This document looks very similar to the installation chapter in Getting Started with Oracle SOA Suite 11g R1.

Update

It was confirmed by Simone Geib, Product Manager in the Oracle SOA team, that both the OSB part and the PS4 update are coming soon.

Update September

The update for SOA Suite PS4 (11.1.1.5) including Oracle Service Bus is now available.

Fault Handling in SOA Suite

Ronald van Luttikhuizen en Guido Schmutz presented on Fault Handling in the SOA Suite. There is a clear need for another approach compared to say traditional systems. This is because SOA based systems differ from traditional system on the following aspects: level of heterogeneity, number of (different types of) consumers, asynchronous responses, and the way that transactions are handled.

Guido showed us around in the OSB with a focus on the following features: Result Caching, Service Throttling, Retry mechanism, Service pooling (talking to multiple endpoints) and Fault Message on callback (in async). Ronald gave a demo on how the Compensate and Fault Policy Framework work in BPEL.

This presentation on SOA Suite Fault Handling is also available on slideshare.

Using Oracle Apex as a replacement for BPEL Console

The company where this case was build has a high number of messages running through their BPEL 10g. This causes performance issues in the BPEL Console due to the high number of instances (millions on a daily basis) in the dehydration store (on which full table scans are performed). They created an own more lightweight console in Apex to manage both deployed BPELs as well as instances. Their solution uses the following ingredients:

• A BPEL api – which is included in a BPEL script. They import orabpel.jar for this.
• A BPEL script that exposes a part of the BPEL api as a web service. Embed Java in a BPEL and call the API.
• An Apex front end that calls the web service to perform maintenance tasks.

In my opinion this delivers value to this company, however are there better ways to expose Java as a web service. Besides that this adds additional BPEL instances to the bottleneck resource.

Tuning SOA Suite 11g for perfomance

This presentation was delivered by Vikas Anand. One of the best parts of his presentation was that he didn’t only address the tuning part but also the design part. This mainly focus on preventing the need for tuning afterwards. Some of the design considerations he mentioned were:

• Choose the right tool for the job.
• Design it right – Consider what parts of the integration have to be synchronous and what have to be asynchronous. To which he added the advise to be aware of transactional boundaries.
• Need a holistic view on sizing and capacity – Based on business requirements.
• Plan sizing of dehydration DB – make sure there is a retention strategy and implement dehydration strategy.
• Use the same JVM across (different) clusters.

Tools and Knowledge needed to develop SOA Suite 11g applications

Edwin, Torsten and Guido - Image by Markus Eisele

ADF is the “Paint by the Numbers” for web front end development.

The most common application integration tools/solutions used are Post-it and a paper notepad.

However the real gem I discovered during this first day was:

User Experience Design Patterns

Madhuri Kolhatkar has delivered a great presentation on the effort Oracle has put into creating and implementing User Experience Design Patterns. Extended information is available on the Usable Apps pages of the Oracle website. Great insight on how this can help you in developing and delivering your applications can for example for OBIEE be found on Design Patterns and Guidelines for Oracle Applications. Take special note of the Pattern Selection Tool.

Oracle BPEL

• FMW version 11.1.1.4 and up, there is a new version of the purge_soainfra_oracle.sql. Ensure that you run the purge setup scripts from the 11.1.1.4 RCU or 11.1.1.5 RCU location, respectively, as this contains the latest purge details. Details are in the SOA Admin Guide
• FMW version 11.1.1.1 and up, there is a purge_soainfra_oracle.sql script in the RCU_HOME/rcu/integration/soainfra/sql/purge directory. In the release before 11.1.1.4 you need to apply patch 10297850 to obtain the updated purge scripts. More details are in the FMW Admin Guide on Managing Database Growth. Mark Kelderman posted on how to improve the performance of this script by adding a specific index.
• From BPEL in SOA Suite version 10.1.3.3.1 and up, there is a purge_instances_oracle.sql script in the SOA_HOME/bpel/system/database/scripts directory.
• For BPEL in SOA Suite version 10.1.3.1 you need patch 7162289. After applying this patch purge_instances_oracle.sql will be located at SOA_HOME/bpel/system/database/scripts.
• In case you’re still running BPEL 10.1.2.0.2 check Oracle support document 398578.1 and document 341102.1

Oracle ESB

• For Mediator in FMW 11g refer to the scripts and links mentioned in the BPEL paragraph.
• To purge ESB instances in 10.1.3.4 you need to apply at least MLR#4 to have purge scripts available. There are 3 scripts available:

$ORACLE_HOME/integration/esb/sql/other/purge_by_date.sql
$ORACLE_HOME/integration/esb/sql/other/purge_by_id.sql
$ORACLE_HOME/integration/esb/sql/other/purge_by_instance_id.sql

Update 2011-06 SOA Suite 11gR1 PS3

Recently the SOA Suite Engineering Team published a presentation on Purging strategies in Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 PS3. Besides the information presented in this post, the presentation goes into targeted deletion from the EM and looks into looped and parallel purges. It also mentions the use of database partitioning. That can be very useful when you have long running instances and a large installation (the presentation gives more than 500GB total OR more than 10GB daily depending on environment specifics).

Update 2011-07 Purging the Extreme Edition

Mark Kelderman posted a blog on Purging SOA Suite 11g Extreme Edition. He give a SQL script that deletes data from Mediator, BPEL, BPM, Workflow and Composite, and after that reclaims disk space.

Update Purge Oracle Service Bus

Marc Kelderman posted on his blog on Purging OSB Report Data. Besides the default way to delete the data using the console. He also gives a SQL script to purge directly in the database.

SOA platform

Again after this session I came to the conclusion that in my opinion BAM is used too little.

During the session was raised whether people in the audience were using non-Oracle databases as dehydration store and Meta Data Store. The mainstream is using Oracle as dehydration store. And although it is certified, it is advised to use Oracle as the database for this purpose. On the Application Server, given the maturity of the J2EE platform, there is less discomfort in operations to deploy the SOA Suite on a non-Oracle App Server.

ADF

Only today I found out that there is an interesting JDeveloper 11g extension. The extension validates ADF code quality. Seems an interesting extension to check code quality besides the already available Java tools.

BPM

When comparing BPEL and BPM and looking into when to use what tool, the following was stated: For all things with human interaction BPM is the tool of choice. In integration driven appraoches BPEL is the tool of choice.

In Oracle point of view BPM includes:

• People
• Systems
• Documents

without the need for separate platforms.

Example of a custom Spring Java worklist application for Oracle BPM.

The product does not have schedular to schedule BPEL processes. Need to schedule the BPEL processes through SOA11G and not through unsupported softwares(Quartz).

And the business need:

Some processes need to be scheduled at a particular time and at a particular day and should not be started Manually, increases the maintenance cost of the software.

These together indicate a clear need to schedule reoccurring processes. Although I’m not so sure that this functionality should be provided by this platform. One could see advantages in centralizing all scheduling task. There a good commercial product available for cases like that (Redwood’s Cronacle for example).

On Oracle Technet there is a good document on Configure a SOAScheduler for a composite in SOA Suite 11.

One Job, multiple Schedules

We need a Class that implements Job. Something like:

package net.deltalounge.quartzdemo;
 
import java.util.Map;
 
import org.quartz.Job;
import org.quartz.JobExecutionContext;
import org.quartz.JobExecutionException;
import org.quartz.SchedulerException;
 
public class DemoJob implements Job {
    public DemoJob() {
        super();
    }
 
  public void execute(JobExecutionContext context)
     {
      Map dataMap = context.getJobDetail().getJobDataMap();
      RunMeTask task = new RunMeTask();
      String someString ="init";
      someString = context.getTrigger().getName();
      System.out.println("Quartz demo output: "+someString);      
    }
}

And we need a Class that creates and starts the Scheduler. This Class can also schedule the jobs. Here we actually see that although one Job Class is enough we need to declare mutiple JobDetails.

package net.deltalounge.quartzdemo;
 
import java.util.Map;
 
import org.quartz.CronTrigger;
import org.quartz.JobDetail;
import org.quartz.Scheduler;
import org.quartz.impl.StdSchedulerFactory;
 
public class QuartzAppCronTrigger {
  public static void main( String[] args ) throws Exception
      {
        //scheduler task details
        JobDetail job = new JobDetail();
        job.setName("someJob");
        job.setJobClass(DemoJob.class);
        //
        JobDetail job2 = new JobDetail();
        job2.setName("someOtherJob");
        job2.setJobClass(DemoJob.class);
 
        //configure scheduler time
        CronTrigger trigger = new CronTrigger();
        trigger.setName("someJobTrigger");
        trigger.setCronExpression("0/30 * * * * ?");
 
        //configure scheduler time 2
        CronTrigger trigger2 = new CronTrigger();
        trigger2.setName("someOtherTrigger");
        trigger2.setCronExpression("0/20 * * * * ?");
 
        //create the schedule
        Scheduler scheduler = new StdSchedulerFactory().getScheduler();
        scheduler.start();
        scheduler.scheduleJob(job, trigger);
        scheduler.scheduleJob(job2, trigger2);
      }
 
}

If you don’t define multiple jobs prepare for an error like:

Exception in thread "main" org.quartz.ObjectAlreadyExistsException: Unable to store Job with name: 'someJob' and group: 'DEFAULT', because one already exists with this identification.
	at org.quartz.simpl.RAMJobStore.storeJob(RAMJobStore.java:222)
	at org.quartz.simpl.RAMJobStore.storeJobAndTrigger(RAMJobStore.java:195)
	at org.quartz.core.QuartzScheduler.scheduleJob(QuartzScheduler.java:732)
	at org.quartz.impl.StdScheduler.scheduleJob(StdScheduler.java:265)
	at net.deltalounge.quartzdemo.QuartzAppCronTrigger.main(QuartzAppCronTrigger.java:36)

Oracle WebLogic Server installation

Download wls1033_oepe111150_linux32.bin for installation on Linux. Install using the command ./wls1033_oepe111150_linux32.bin:

Install WebLogic 10.3.3

[Show as slideshow]

Oracle Service Bus installation

Start the Disk1/runInstaller.sh and specify the JRE/JDK location /oracle/osbhome/jdk160_18/.

Install Oracle Service Bus

[Show as slideshow]

Configure a WebLogic Domain

Configure a Domain using the Oracle Fusion Middleware Configuration Wizard using ./config.sh in the /oracle/osbhome/oracle_common/common/bin directory.

A straightforward configuration of the WLS Domain requires the following steps:

[Show as slideshow]

Start WebLogic

./startWebLogic.sh and Have Fun!