deltalounge

In the 10g release of Oracle SOA Suite you could set properties to instruct web service calls to go via SOAP or not. If you were calling services on the same server or domain you could gain some performance with a native call and avoiding the SOAP overhead. To do this you would set the optSoapShortcut property.

With SOA Suite 11g on WLS SOAP optimization is automatically configured. In the scenario where you upgraded to 11g R1 and are using this optimization shortcut approach, you should specify the Server URL in the SOA Infrastructure Common Settings. Optimized calls are only active when the host name value (referred to as WSDL URL in the composite.xml) matches the Server URL.

To configure the SOA Infrastructure Common Settings choose from the SOA Infrastructure Menu > SOA Administration > Common Properties. As shown in the screenshot. Other access ways to this configuration screen are described here.

Enter the server URL in the Server URLs section. This URL is published as part of the SOAP address of a service in the concrete WSDL file. Either set both values to the host name (for example, myhost) or to the full domain name (for example, myhost.domain.com). If these values do not match, a regular SOAP call is performed instead of an optimized local call.

One of the scenarios that you have to set the Server URL in order to use the optimized local call is after a migration of AIA to AIA 11g R1.

It is possible you noticed that after the installation of Oracle AIA 11g R1 starting the Managed Server of WLS takes more time than before the installation. This is not only due to the new Composites. There are also some settings you could change to reduce the time the Managed server to which you deployed AIA needs to start up.

Change JDBC settings

To alter some of the JDBC settings that are configured during the AIA 11g installation go to the WLS Adminnistartion console – http://yourserver:port/console. In the Domain Structure choose: > Services > JDBC > Data Sources.

Change the settings of the following JDBC Data Sources that were created during the install of AIA of the AIA Demo:

• AIACentralDS
• AIADataSource
• FODDataSource
• FODDS
• LifeCycleDataSource
• mds-soa
• XrefDataSource

In the Settings for "Data Source Name" select the Configuration and the Connection Pool tab. Expand the the Connection Pool tab by clicking the Advanced link. The alter the Login Delay from 30 to 0 seconds.

This will reduce the time that is needed to start the Managed Server by several minutes.

In this blogpost I’ll share some steps you can take to get your AIA 11g R1 installation back on track. If you do not perform the Pre-Installation Configurations as described in the Foundation Pack 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.2.0) Installation Guide (available as partnumber E17949-01 via eDelivery), it is possible that your AIA installation fails. After checking the pre-installation configuration it is possible to start the installation again if you follow these steps:

1. Navigate to /user_projects/domains/ and delete the edit.lok file.
2. Delete any file located in /user_projects/domains//pending
3. Log into the weblogic console and activate all the changes.
4. Restart SOA Suite and Weblogic domain.
5. Press retry button on the installation screen

If the installation screens are no longer available because you closed them, use the log files to figure out what targets haven’t been performed yet and run these targets (in the sample case below it were Deployments and PostInstallScript):

Move to the /aia30/aia_instances/aia30poc/bin and source ./aiaenv.sh.

ant -f /aia30/Infrastructure/Install/AID/AIAInstallDriver.xml -DDeploymentPlan=/aia30/config/FPInstallDP.xml -DPropertiesFile=/aia30/config/AIAInstallProperties.xml Deployments

ant -f /aia30/Infrastructure/Install/AID/AIAInstallDriver.xml -DDeploymentPlan=/aia30/config/FPInstallDP.xml -DPropertiesFile=/aia30/config/AIAInstallProperties.xml PostInstallScript

Oracle Application Integration Architecture, or AIA in short, recently became available for SOA Suite 11g R1. We did an installation of this AIA 11g R1 release. To prepare for this we used Foundation Pack 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.2.0) Installation Guide. Which is available as part number E17949-01 via edelivery. In the software requirements in the document it is stated that:

Download the AIA-Foundation Pack 11.1.1.2.0 patch 9717829 and follow the instructions in the document “Installing a fresh instance of AIA FP 11gR1 PS2 on Oracle SOA Suite 11g PS2” before you install AIA Foundation Pack 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.2.0). Apply AIA-Foundation Pack 11.1.1.2.0 patch 9717829 after you install AIA Foundation Pack 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.2.0).

Please be careful: patch 9717829 is only required if you are using SOA Suite 11g R1 PS2 (11.1.1.3). This can become clear when reading the document “Installing a fresh instance of AIA FP 11gR1 PS2 on Oracle SOA Suite 11g PS2” and the readme.txt that comes with the patch.

If you’re installing AIA-Foundation Pack 11.1.1.2.0 on SOA Suite 11g R1 PS1 (11.1.1.2) this patch is not needed.

AIA Foundation Pack 11g Certification Matrix

The certification matrix for AIA FP 11g R1 can be found here. It states:

AIA Foundation Pack 11gR1 (11.1.1.2) is certified against Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 (11.1.1.2) or Oracle SOA Suite 11gR1 (11.1.1.3) through patch 9717829.

In the blogpost on the release of SOA Suite 11gR1 PS2, I mentioned a link to the documentation index. Since it hasn’t been update by now, I suggest you go to the middleware documentation page. This page is more up to date and has the link to the web library and download address (Alert! approx. 860 MB) of E14571-01 – the Fusion Middleware Online Documentation Library 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.3.0).

SOA Suite 11gR1 PS2 installation notes

Besides the reference in the documentation library to the Install Guide and the Quick Install Guide, there are several blogs describing the installation of 11.1.1.3. Which is actually a patch on 11.1.1.2:

• This post by Oracle ACE Eric Elzinga;
• The installation steps described by Theo van Arem;
• Installation of 11g PatchSet 2 on Windows by Niall Commiskey, members or Oracle PTS in EMEA;
• The one on Oracle blogs by James Taylor includes OSB 11.1.1.3

SOA Suite on Amazon EC2

This week it was announced that BPM 11g R1 is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). This AMI includes SOA Suite 11gR1 Patchset 2 and JDeveloper with the SOA and BPM extension. In AWS filter on 64-bit and put soa-bpm in the search box. This should enable you to find oracle-soa-bpm-11gr1-ps2-4.1-pub. Some of the tips I posted on x SOA Suite in the cloud could be useful here as well.

To work with the Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite 11g (BPA) as a team, you need a central repository. This post will give you a quick insight in the installation steps of the Oracle Business Process Repository, as the repository for the BPA Suite is called. The complete installation and administration guide can be found here (as PDF). Turn to paragraph 2.4 if you’re installing on Windows of 2.5 if your installing on Unix/Linux.

Installation steps

• Create a database with the AL32UTF8 character set.
• Create two tablespaces ARISDATA and ARISINDEX using automatic, unlimited growth. Make sure there is a temporary tablespace called TEMP or alter the SET DL_TS_TEMP=TEMP. If you choose other names alter the SET DL_TS_DATA=ARISDATA and SET DL_TS_INDEX=ARISINDEX in the envset.bat or envset.sh. The envset file can be found in the \Setups\DBMS\Oracle of the V17759-01_2of2 DVD.
• Alter the envset.bat file to reflect the settings of your database:
  

  1 2 3 4 5 6

  REM The path 2 sqlplus.exe SET DL_ORA_BIN_PATH=   SET TARGET_HOST=localhost SET TARGET_PORT=1521 SET TARGET_SERVICE_NAME=ARIS

• Run the envset.bat (or .sh) and install.bat (or .sh) from the \Setups\DBMS\Oracle directory of the V17759-01_2of2 DVD.
• Run the setup.exe from the \Setups\Windows\Business Process Repository directory of the V17759-01_2of2 DVD. Choose the options to install with an existing repository
• Choose to run as a Windows service of you’re on MS Windows.

Other useful links

• Download Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite 11g.
• Look into the certification matrix (XLS).
• Download the samples and the guide that comes with it.

There are several advantages when working in a project with Oracle SOA Suite to have a local installation of the SOA Suite on your workstation. While developing and trying bits of code you can’t break other peoples work as you can on a central server. Running FMW 11g on a workstation with say memory on the low end of the spectrum can be challenging. In this blog I’ll show you some additional (to this previous post) measure that my blogless colleague Rob Heikoop came up with.

Rob came up with two things:

• Create an All in One AdminServer as described on the Oracle wiki. We skipped BAM in the installation Use only one Domain in WLS. You’ll have to combine the admin en the SOA_domain. Running just one domain saves memory.
• Keep the database centralized. In the central database each developer has it’s own SOA schema that is especially created for him. To do this run the RCU for every developer and use the prefix to reflect for example the developers initials (example of using RCU on slideshare). Not running the database on your workstation saves memory and CPU.

In order to have new developers being able to use this quickly we copy the reference installation (with plug-ins, patches and the works) and alter the configuration:

• Alter the scripts in the C:\Devel\SOAMiddleware\user_projects\domains\soa_domain\bin directory to reflect your workstation name instead of that of the reference machine. You can do this easily by using an editor like Notepad++ and use Search > Find in files > Replace in files. Otherwise you’ll be stopping your teammates server…. (again sorry Rob)
• Change the configuration files in C:\Devel\SOAMiddleware\user_projects\domains\soa_domain\config\jdbc to reflect the prefix created especially for you while using the RCU. Again Notepad++ can help you here.

Now you can start the tools:

• WebLogic Server: C:\Devel\SOAMiddleware\user_projects\domains\soa_domain\bin\startWebLogic.cmd
• JDeveloper: C:\Devel\SOAMiddleware\jdeveloper\jdeveloper.exe

Previous I mentioned a preview of the 11g R1 PS2 new features. Here are a few links for this new release – 11.1.1.3.0:

• SOA Suite 11g R1 PS2 new features.
• Download page
• The documentation index will probably be updated soon.

Existing PS1 users simply apply the patch to upgrade to 11.1.1.3.0.

Other releases

• Oracle Service Bus OSB 11g R1
• Business Process Management BPM 11g R1

From the time the news that Oracle was going to acquire Sun there has been much debate on what this would mean for MySQL. Today Edward Screven, Oracle’s chief corporate architect, revealed the future of MySQL in a keynote at The O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010. The simple message was:

MySQL matters to Oracle.

Prior to this keynote mister Screven told Reuters:

We are increasing our investment in MySQL… on every front.

Oracle is already the biggest player in the database market. With Microsoft’s SQL Server as the target for MySQL, Oracle believes it can boost it’s sales. From this perspective MySQL gives Oracle an entry to other parts of the market. While on an other aspect Oracle has improve the relation with Microsoft, since it’s Operating System Windows is the number-one destination for MySQL downloads! While Linux is the number-one OS for deployments.

InfoWorld also had an interview with Edward Screven before the keynote. Here are some quotes from the InfoWorld interview:

MySQL has some properties that Oracle does not,It’s small, it’s easy to install. It’s easy for developers to get going with it.

And on the open source community edition:

I don’t see foresee any substantial changes from how MySQL AB or Sun made the distinction [between what was in the community and commercial editions]. I expect that core features will end up in community edition. There will be some value-add, like monitoring or backup, that make sense in the enterprise edition.

and

It would be a mistake for us to starve the community edition because that would impinge upon the ubiquity of MySQL.

The MySQL community now includes several forks of the MySQL core tool like MariaDB and Drizzle. Both produced by ex-MySQL employees. These are experimenting with different data storage engines and other enhancements.

I think it will be hard for those guys to create a forked product with the kind of commercial support that our customers need for production applications. We’re really focused on ensuring that MySQL becomes a better product and appeals to our customers. What we’re fundamentally selling here is support.

Sources: Reuters and InfoWorld

Other Sources

• The Register: Oracle drops top architect into MySQL skeptic zone
• The Wall Street Journal: Here’s proof we’ll improve MySQL

Recently, in a press release, Oracle introduced Oracle SOA Governance. This component of Fusion Middleware consist of the following components:

1. Oracle Enterprise Repository – OER
2. Oracle Service Registry
3. SOA Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager (SOA Management Pack)
4. Web Service Manager

According to the press release it is already fully integrated with Oracle Amberpoint:

Oracle SOA Goverance 11g is fully integrated with Oracle AmberPoint, a leader in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Management. The new solution provides organizations more continuity of closed-loop governance processes across both Oracle and third party applications.

Besides that it is not clear to me what is new. The latest version of the Enterprise Repository was release a month ago. Any ideas? Please leave them in the comments.