deltalounge

Although there can be a lot of debate on what is Architecture in the world of IT, what IT degree programs discuss about architects, and on who is an architect and who isn’t, I think it is clear that it is not exactly Brain Surgery. And i think that is actually a good thing. Although the implementation of a (Service Oriented) Architecture is in most cases bound to hit vital parts of an organization it isn’t …

And even though there can be just as many parameters in the larger equations, architecture isn’t exactly rocket science either…

There is a growing number of Twitter Apps that trick you into giving them access to your account and so enabling them to send spam on your behalf. Should you (like me at least once) fall for this trap, here is an easy way to prevent further damage. Use the following url: http://twitter.com/settings/connections or click the links that are highlighted in the screen shot on the right to manage your Twitter connections.




After that you just click Revoke Access below the Application that is using your account to spam others. An example is depicted in the screen shot below (for a non spamming App):

Wishing you and your family all the best for 2011!

That you may enjoy life’s little (and not so little) miracles each and every day.

While using the AIAMigrationUtility the following error occurs:

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[exec]   [upgrade] Jul 26, 2010 3:02:04 PM oracle.viewgen.ViewGenerator main
[exec]   [upgrade] SEVERE: Upgrade failed. Check the logs for any exceptions. Ensure that the WSDL URLs specified in the project are reachable and a valid 10.1.3.x project is used for upgrade. Before re-attempting upgrade, restore the original project code source from the backup directory.
[exec]   [upgrade] oracle.j2ee.ws.wsdl.LocalizedWSDLException: WSDLException: faultCode=OTHER_ERROR: Failed to read WSDL from http://serverdomain:8001/orabpel/default/AIAAsyncErrorHandlingBPELProcess/1.0/AIAAsyncErrorHandlingBPELProcess?wsdl:WSDL not found
[exec]   [upgrade]         at oracle.viewgen.plugin.bpel.BPELPlugin.createComponentType(BPELPlugin.java:172)
[exec]   [upgrade]         at oracle.viewgen.ViewGenerator.main(ViewGenerator.java:223)
[exec]   [upgrade] Caused by: oracle.j2ee.ws.wsdl.LocalizedWSDLException: WSDLException: faultCode=OTHER_ERROR: Failed to read WSDL from http://serverdomain:8001/orabpel/default/AIAAsyncErrorHandlingBPELProcess/1.0/AIAAsyncErrorHandlingBPELProcess?wsdl:WSDL not found
[exec]   [upgrade]         at oracle.j2ee.ws.wsdl.xml.WSDLReaderImpl.openAsStreamConnection(WSDLReaderImpl.java:541)
[exec]   [upgrade]         at oracle.j2ee.ws.wsdl.xml.WSDLReaderImpl.readDocument(WSDLReaderImpl.java:427)
[exec]   [upgrade]         at oracle.j2ee.ws.wsdl.xml.WSDLReaderImpl.readWSDL(WSDLReaderImpl.java:366)

There is a regular expression in the replaceAIAAsyncURL target that doesn’t handle the versioned url. You can either replace it so it allows for version numbering:

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<replaceregexp match="http://[\S&amp;&amp;[^/]]+(?::\d
+)??/orabpel/default/AIAAsyncErrorHandlingBPELProcess/.*AIAAsyncErrorHandlingBPELProcess\?wsdl"

or manually alter the bpel.xml files replacing the

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http://serverdomain:8001/orabpel/default/AIAAsyncErrorHandlingBPELProcess/1.0/AIAAsyncErrorHandlingBPELProcess?wsdl

with

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http://fmw11g-server:8001/soa-infra/services/default/AIAAsyncErrorHandlingBPELProcess/client?WSDL

or the versioned wsdl of the Async error handling.

In today’s post you can find out why you need a changelog, and what activity to add to your upgrade roadmap.

After a recent upgrade of SOA Suite to a more recent patch level, we saw errors that some of us vaguely remembered. They were traced back to transaction timeouts in the BPEL Server. Searching Metalink, OTN, and of course Google we found out we had to change the transaction-timeout and min-instances in the orion-ejb-jar.xml. More detailed information on these settings can be found on in the SOA Suite best practises. However they are not in the spotlight of this post. So let’s go back to the main story.

At that time it seemed strange that the suggested values in the documentation, and as mentioned in blogposts, conformed with the ones we thought set in production.

Need for a changelog

Fortunately we have a changelog. We checked it, and indeed the values should correspond. We set these during a previous tuning effort. Time to check the actual orion-ejb-jar.xml in the production environment. Oops! During the SOA Suite upgrade our fine tuned orion-ejb-jar.xml was overwritten with one with default values

Recommendations

What can you learn from our experience:

• Maintain a changelog – also for configuration settings;
• Include a post upgrade action in your plan to check whether all tuning and other configuration settings are still at the appropriate values;
• Oh, and by the way, keep your test environment in sync with production (including all configuration settings)! So all this can be well planned and tested before the actual go live.

There are two places to determine the version of the SOA Suite you are running:

• The SOA Suite welcome screen
• Oracle patch utility

SOA Suite welcome screen

SOA Suite version

Oracle patch utility

For a more detailed look we turn to the Oracle patch utility OPatch. The OPatch utility is located in the /OPatch directory. It is run with options and command-line arguments. A User’s guide can be found here.

The lsinventory command reports what has been installed on the system for a particular Oracle home directory, or for all installations. A result for using this command is shown in the screenshot:

opatch lsinventory

Overview of SOA Suite versions

An overview of all release downloads can be found on OTN.