The Ron Batra Blog: Technology Directions

Oracle Cloud Computing Summary: Updated post OOW 2011

2011-12-14T15:30:00.000-06:00

At Oracle Open World 2011 in October 2011, there were a variety of Cloud Computing Updates, Product Directions and Announcements that I've attempted to reflect in my summary view. I hope you find it useful.
As always, comments and feedback are welcomed.

As you can see from my previous post, a few more products have been added, showing Oracle's increasing focus on Cloud Computing. Also, the focus on Engineered Systems has increased, and it shows the Oracle-Sun acquisition bearing fruit in systems are built, tuned and pre-engineered by Oracle.A variety of articles share more detail about Oracle Engineered Systems Strategy.

Oracle Cloud Computing Summary View: Version 2.0, December 14, 2011.

Some disclaimers:
-This is my view, and how I see it, and does not represent Oracle's or anyone else's view.
-Not all Products are in General Availability (GA) yet. Please talk to your Oracle representative for more details on the above.
-This is my attempt to be current as of December 14, 2011.

Cloud Computing Use Cases

2011-10-30T18:15:00.000-05:00

Greetings,

I wanted to take a minute to share a slide I have delivered in-person presentations recently. In previous presentations, I've covered the different service models of Cloud Computing, and we've also discussed the different models in my posting mainly Public, Private and Hybrid.

In this mapping spreadsheet, I've tried to cover most common use-cases, and welcome feedback - additions to the list or comments.

Figure 1. Cloud Computing Use Cases

With a lot of hype surrounding the cloud, it is easy to get a sense of disillusionment and confusion on how to use the cloud and what's real and not. I like to call out 5 Cloud Computing Realities, and as you prepare your Business Case to go Cloud (or not), I recommend an awareness of these key realities in your decision-making process. While latency due to distances is very real, advances in networking technologies including dynamic and intelligent network routing can help mitigate it to a certain degree.

Figure 2. 5 Cloud Computing Realities

Hopefully the above mappings bring a sense of reality and avoid a sense of "Clouds in my Coffee" situation. Just don't expect the Cloud to be the Silver Bullet for all your problems. Starting your Cloud Journey with the right set of expectations would be the right way to go about, and not "like a mirage".

Obviously, if you are in a business or corporation, quoting a musician of yesteryear may or may not cut it, so fortunately the analyst community has a term called "Trough of Disillusionment". Gartner puts it nicely here as do many in the community.

Oracle's Cloud One-Pager: Revised

2011-09-30T12:21:00.002-05:00

Good Morning,

A few months ago, I had published what I liked to call a "One-Pager" of Oracle's Cloud Offerings. While it is hard to put everything on one-slide, especially with a large variety of products, I have tried to cover the basics, at this level of detail. I may have to develop a second view that drills deeper from say "Platform Products"

This is a revised diagram based on feedback:

1. Re-Branding of Solaris LDOM's as Oracle VM Server for SPARC.

2. Categorization of Hypervisor/Non-Hypervisor based Solutions

3. Focus on Engineered Systems (ExaData and ExaLogic)

4. Addition of Desktop Solutions

5. Focus on Tiers vs. As-a-Service

Disclaimer.Oracle Open World 2011 is around the corner (October 2nd) and historically this is full of Product Launches, New Roadmaps and Updates. So this may need to be updated and revised. The goal is to get my view current with Oracle Products available today.

M&A Week: HP+Autonomy, Google+Motorola Mobility

2011-08-21T23:51:00.002-05:00

This week was an interesting one for M&A activity, with Google+Motorola Mobility and with HP announcing plans to buy Autonomy, a software and services company, based in the UK. The company's core business seem to be Enterprise Search and "Meaning Based Computing", based on research done at Cambridge University.

Word on the street is also that HP also plans to to can its WebOS (RIP Palm) and PC business. There has been a lot of speculation about where HP would be in a few years, and to what sector, it would remain relevant.

I've always associated HP as a Hardware and Infrastructure provider, never a software provider. And this acquisition continues down that path.

Have you programmed in a Smalltalk/PowerBuilder/C/C++/Java/Visual Basic/.NET/Database/Ruby/Grails/ that came out of HP ? x Or an ERP/CRM solution ?

Well...I haven't, and I've been around the block a few times !

The closest perception that comes to mind is HP's Mercury set of tools, and have used those tools a lot in testing and simulation of complex software projects.

Some questions regarding HP's future:

1) Does Autonomy offer enough "interest" in the area of complex analytics, Enterprise Search to where HP can justify the $10B+ purchase ?

2)Potentially getting out of the PC business, something IBM did many years ago - is that a strategy to get out of a low-margin commodity business (sans innovation) or just a way to get some cash back ?

3) Does HP's Cloud Offerings have enough "juice"?

My perception does not lean itself too strongly in the favor of HP. Like a lot of great companies, it needs to "find its way". Investors seem to agree.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), while getting great adoption in the Cloud area, is a fairly crowded field. As it is, Infrastructure has been on a continuous commodity path circa 2000, after the Tech Bust. There is a raft of pure-cloud and managed hosting+cloud players offering IaaS, as well as pure-play Infrastructure providers such as Dell, IBM, HP - all with Cloud plans.

To this point, Derek Harris's recent observation, is interesting that HP has a complete plan for Cloud Computing that sets it apart from IBM and Oracle. IBM and Oracle are somewhat unique that they have hardware plays (more so IBM than Oracle), but with the Sun acquisition perhaps I can see why Oracle is seen that way.

I maintain, Oracle and IBM's software businesses are lynchpins of mission critical applications in the Enterprise, where they tend to dominate. Hence their cloud strategies are tailored more for that installed base and to get them either to Private, Hybrid, or Public Clouds as the case may be.

For HP's sake, I hope their developer-focused cloud services, is a set of differentiated offerings away from the many "Me-Too" IaaS offerings in the market. I will be covering VMWorld, and if announced there, as the rumor seems to be, I'll be all eyes. Based on history, I'm not holding my breath.

What do you think ?
1) Has HP found "its way"?

2) Where do you see HP 3-5 years from now ?

3) In what form do you see Enterprise PaaS ?

Best of Collaborate:Cloud Computing Industry Directions

2011-08-11T22:36:00.008-05:00

OAUG members, please join me in the Best Of Collaborate 2011 series.

Join me for a session Cloud Computing Industry Directions - let us take a walk through the Cloud Computing Landscape from many dimensions.

Date: Monday, August 15, 2011
Time: 10:30am-11:30 am CT.

The session introduces core concepts and compares the market approaches in the market place prevalent today.

Security in the Cloud

2011-08-08T09:43:00.006-05:00

Happy Monday !

I wanted to share I've also started to blog in parallel on ATT's Networking Exchange Blog,
and here is my posting on a mini-series on Security in the Cloud.
Happy Reading !

Oracle Fusion Applications Usability: ITS BACK

2011-07-23T11:29:00.002-05:00

Good Saturday Y'all,

It was very heartening to see the Oracle Fusion Applications Usability web-site back up..resurrected and ready to roll. I can only imagine the hard-work by the content management team at Oracle.

So many products, so many categories, so much great information...Thank You Oracle in many different languages.

I'd encourage Fusion Applications customers, consultants, to-be-customers and anyone interested to read up using this site as a starting point. Oracle has pulled out all the spots and its very interesting to read what kind of experience you can expect.

Hopefully the wiki comes back up very soon as well. Have a great weekend !!

Oracle Fusion Applications Usability: Where is Waldo ?

2011-07-20T11:59:00.011-05:00

Often in our line of work, one set of technologies becomes the foundation for another and lock-step with one another.

-Oracle PL/SQL and Database Development became the foundation for Oracle EBusiness Suite (most of the modules anyway) in a client-server architecture.

-Oracle Fusion Middleware components - SOA Suite, BPM Suite, BI, WebLogic are becoming the Foundation for Fusion Applications.

At the recent Collaborate Conference in April - I had a session on SOA Maturity.

Very interestingly enough, it became very natural to look at SOA Maturity as a building block for getting ready with Fusion Applications. I ended up combining my session content with content from Oracle's Usability Lab and the session was received very well. I got some of the highest ratings I have in recent conferences.

In addition, working with Oracle's Usability Group at OAUG Connection Point Dubai as an Oracle Fusion UX Advocate helped a lot.

The Dallas Oracle User Group has shown interest and while dates are being finalized I plan to deliver a similar presentation in September. I may be presenting similar content in Houston, San Antonio and Austin - near and around Texas.

It was somewhat of a surprise that the Usability Lab Site and related Wiki are down. Hopefully they are being merged and will show up very very soon. Hopefully its just web-site re-engineering and not reading anything more into it at this point. Maybe its a game of "Where's Waldo" on OTN or some other Oracle web-site. Lightly kidding there (kind of halfway...not really!).

I depend on this to get smarter and keep the user community in touch with latest content and information that is shared by Oracle - people ask questions about Product Groups/Families and such. In addition the work done by the Usability team is truly cutting edge (heat charts and retinal (eye) following tracking devices) is truly inspiring.

Here's to bringing it back it quickly, ORCL!!

Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards for 2011

2011-07-11T08:37:00.007-05:00

FLASH UPDATE: Submission Date extended to July 29th.

Good Morning and hope you had a great weekend.

I wanted to bring the attention of the Oracle community to an exciting event that happens every year at Oracle Open World. Think of this as the Academy Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware

If you have done innovative, cutting edge, exciting work using Oracle Fusion Middleware, please use this link to get yourself heard and recognized.

Customers may submit nominations for multiple categories.

Application Grid and Oracle Exalogic
BI and EPM
Data Integration
Enterprise 2.0
Fusion Development and Application Development Framework
Identity Management
SOA, AIA, BPM

The deadline is July 22nd, not very far. If you are in a bind for time and know a great story, feel free to submit an application or reach out to me where I can help the community (OAUG, IOUG, ODTUG, any) funnel the awards to Oracle. You can email me at ronbatra@gmail.com.

For additional information please email Oracle at Innovation-Middleware_us@oracle.com

The benefits and recognition are significant:

Free registration pass for Oracle OpenWorld 2011 in San Francisco
Award presented to winners during Oracle OpenWorld by a senior Oracle executive
An Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation trophy
Placement in an Oracle press release
Placement in Profit magazine and/or Oracle Magazine
Oracle Excellence Award Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation logo for inclusion on your own Website and/or press release
Oracle Fusion Middleware podcast opportunity

Here's to a great submission, and an excuse to break out your Tux and Gown (lightly kidding there!)

Facebook's Database Architecture: Think ExaData; Exalogic ?

2011-07-08T12:14:00.010-05:00

Good Morning,

While parsing through my blog-feeds and the twitterati - one posting caught my eye. More so, perhaps because I've been a database guy for a few years, so it catches my attention.

The issue is the MySQL database architecture of Facebook, and comments made by Michael Stonebraker have been echoed all over the blogosphere. This article by Derrik Harris caught my eye and goes into details of sharding, servers and transactions.

By the way, this is typical of every startup I've known. Costs have to be kept down, and we need something to "hold data and transactions", until the hockey stick catches up. Great problem to have from a business standpoint, but often the technical limits of a system get pushed.

So, every "Like" on Facebook is probably a database entry. Can you image the user population of Facebook, all over the world, posting pictures, comments, "Liking" etc. Even if you kept pictures outside the database and maintain some kind of bridge function (pointers if you will), the sheer amount of transactions make it a very interesting database challenge, perhaps even a distributed database challenge. Since FB connects Friends, and you cannot have some friends offline while some are online. Thus it would seem the entire Facebook database architecture would be in one-site, (Disclaimer: I haven't worked first-hand into the FB database architecture, and my comments are based on my reading on the twitterati and blogosphere)

Coming from the Oracle Database world, where row-level locking, atomic nature of transacations and liberal use of archive logging, rollback, and HA features like Oracle RAC are table-stakes, I can't help wonder how ExaData would fare in a replacement project for Facebook's Database. MySQL is also shephered by Oracle, but fundamentally MySQL and the Oracle RDBMS are different products and I do not know of any intersection paths between the two.

Would a "few" Oracle ExaData boxes clustered together by Infiniband and RAC take Facebook to a newer technology level. There is a healthy mix of solid state and traditional disk lookups. Perhaps the storage may be a problem even with hybrid columnar compression. Thus we may have to architect an external storage solution. One could also argue that it may be optimal to blend the database architecture with a mix of ExaData and MySQL. Leave the really-fast, high throughput transactions in ExaData and some of the less critical in MySQL.   Sounds like an interesting challenge right...Here's to hoping someone is already designing these challenges.

Looking at the Application Architecture, Web and Application Server scaling do not seem to be a problem here. In most cases, TomCat and Apache scaling does not seem to be a problem, and my impression on the level of Java used in Facebook, seems to be relatively light - POJO's, no Java Beans, if at all. Thus ExaLogic may or may not have a play here. But it really depends on how the Application and architecture is re-written or re-engineered and that can change quickly.

However, ExaData and ExaLogic to handle Facebook together may be a really elegant solution - minimize sprawl, provide a high-speed Infiiniband connection, and rock together.

I do not know of any company of the stature of Oracle (maybe IBM or Microsoft - just maybe) putting significant investment capital into a database solution that can handle transactions of this nature as Facebook.

This thread promises an interesting watch across the different channels. The often-heard viewpoint of Facebook wanting to be open-source may come in the way.

Oracle's Cloud Offering - Summary View

2011-06-15T21:48:00.004-05:00

Good Evening,

While going through several materials on Oracle's different products and their positioning in the Cloud space, I had created a one-pager summary view. The graphic is enclosed here. (Disclaimer: For a full decision, this may not cover all the dimensions, and you may have to do more analysis. This is how I see it)

As you can see, Oracle Enterprise Manager is extended as the foundation for Systems Management in the Cloud Space.
What I love about this approach is it keeps the installed based happy and takes them gradually in the journey towards a Private Cloud.

In addition, as you can see, you do not always need virtualization to enable the Cloud. When all the software assets are purchased, a Private Cloud makes a lot more sense.

Enjoy !. Whether you are looking for a SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS or bare metal - I hope this graphic helps you tell the story to your leadership.

Cloud Model Value Propositions

2011-06-08T10:13:00.005-05:00

Good Morning ! And hope whereever you are, you are safe from the weather gods this season. We have drought in Texas and the mighty Mississippi and Missouri are flooding. Mandatory water restrictions in Austin, but we learn to manage, some boat rental and dock businesses are not doing that well though.

Now if there was a "Water Grid" similar to a Power Grid connecting the entire nation. Wait a minute !. The Power Grids also do not always work with each other. The physical constraints of transporting power with transmission losses are subject to distances as well as protocols that make it easy or hard to exchange power, depending on the configuration and set-up and interoperability and of course, some politics.


Figure 1. Cloud Computing Deployment Models

I've come to believe this is life...and such things happen in the Cloud Computing space as well, while there are initiatives like the OpenStack movement, helping to create common standards, yet for Clouds to truly inter-operate with each other, we have some work ahead of us. (Hint Define: Interoperability)

Which makes me get all passionate about Hypervisor fragmentation and how that is one of the many challenges the Cloud Computing Industry faces today. That is often one of the key items for Cloud Interoperability in Hybrid Clouds. That will be the subject of another post.

Recently presenting at conferences and meeting customers, I wanted to share my summary thoughts on the value propositions of Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud models. Disclaimer: These are summary level items, and for a full evaluation of all your dimensions, you will likely need to delve a big deeper.

Let us first get a high-level summary of what Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud deployments models may look like. Figure 1 outlines these - a simple way to visualize things are "inside the firewall" or "outside the firewall". Virtual Private Cloud is a special case inside a Public Cloud although the definition can vary.


Figure 2. Public Cloud Value Proposition

As you can see, a Public Cloud is a great way to totally move your expenses to opex vs. capex. And buy capacity as you grow your business.

Figure 2. Private Cloud Value Propositio

Private Cloud is all about control. You are in charge of your roadmap and Cloud Journey and destiny. Of course, some cost center would be capitalizing and then others may rely on an internal subscriber-basis.

Figure 3. Hybid Cloud Value Proposition

The only similarity between a Toyota Prius or a Chevy Volt or other hybrids and a Hybrid Cloud is that they use two or more Deployment models (Gas and Electric Engine). Analogies apart, it means having some computing assets in a non-cloud, some in a Public Cloud, some in a Private Cloud, or some combination in-between.

With that, over and out, until my next posting.

Conference Presentations: Top 10 Tips

2011-04-21T22:46:00.010-05:00

So coming back from Collaborate, and having been presenting at IOUG/OAUG/Open World events for some time now, I've had the opportunity to study different styles of presentations and techniques in the different sessions I've attended over the years.

Also, recently, I've been speaking on Cloud Computing, SOA and Fusion Applications at OAUG-Dubai, OTN-Denver and OAUG-Collaborate - somehow it all was in less than a month, so my memory is fresh. I find there are some sessions where people spontaneously break out into applause when you end the session, and there are some sessions where the audience just leaves and does not even look back at the speaker.

So I thought, let me take this opportunity to sum up a few basic tips which apply to any audience.

1. Connecting with the Audience: You have to try to make eye-contact - the lectern is not a place to hide behind !! If I get early, I try to mingle a bit and break the ice a bit. Self-deprecating humor helps, but be careful.

Also I find, unless you are a major celebrity, people may or may not respond to jokes appreciatively - People get their fix of humor watching Leno or Letterman or Conan or equivalent..

A far better tact is to talk about the show or something everyone can relate to..."Heard the Exhibit Area had some cool give-aways"...or "What do you think of the keynote yesterday"...Engage the audience...and try to make it a two-way street. I end up always learning new things from the audience and the questions they ask me.

2. Summarizing Before and After: Always great to say what you will be saying and the goal of the presentation. After all your time, and the audience's time is valuable. Using the classical rule of three, try to summarize key points as you weave the story, and at the end, recap and tie it all together.

3. Delivering the Presentation: Dry topic or not, you have the power to literally make the audience yawn (or not). A topic becomes dry only if you have no passion about it, and the lack of passion shows. Just as a business audience may find a technical area dry, the reverse also applies. Do not just read the deck. The audience can read it. Instead, tell a story about the pictures and graphics.

4. Know Your Audience: Always good to poll the audience in the beginning. Helps you tailor your speaking style - to summary/high-level or detailed topics.

5. Pacing Your Self: An average slide with enough data points takes about 2-3 minutes to deliver. 15 slides means 45 minutes giving yourself 15 minutes for Q&A. Sometimes the best questions come while you are delivering the session and make you think on your feet. This can be a rush - trying to "consult on the spot", but you owe the entire audience attention. Thus keeping answers short and relevant are taking it offline is often the best strategy.

6. Speaking Pace: Speaking slowly and crisply always is good and helps get the message across. Remember - you know the content cold, but perhaps not the audience. They may be learning new concepts and you need to pace yourself to their absorption rate.

7. Energy and Posture: In general I find a relaxed posture works the best. Keeps you comfortable and connected with the audience, whether you are a keynote speaker or a session speaker or panelist. Too high "mad scientist" nervous energy can put some people off - unless your goal is to get people all fidgety and excited about something. Too slow, monotonous drones, can put people to sleep - literally. You need to convey energy and enthusiasm and be happy about given the opportunity to present and have a captive audience. Like most things in life, its a balance, and if you watch the audience you can tell which end of the spectrum you are at.

8. Slide Preparation: There is something as a "too busy" slide or an "eye-chart". There is also something that my 10 year old can create in 10 minutes in Power Point. The text, font and colors must be "easy on the eyes" and read properly, in most cases, top-down, left-to-right flows. Animation rarely works, unless used very selectively for a few choice emphasis moments. Again, you must add value by speaking to the slide, not reading it out. Thus sometimes, less is actually more.

9. Thanking and Spreading Good Karma: Thank the audience for their time and participation, and appreciate the interaction and having the humility to say "I hope you found this useful" works well. Imagine if the at the end of the audience, there was a Face book "Like" Button. You want everyone in the audience to "Like" the session.
10. Contact and Keeping in Touch: Please exchange your contact information and for topics too big to discuss or someone wants a slide deck etc. exchanging business cards is always a good way. It extends the value of the conference beyond the four-walls of the show.

Looking back, I feel I've been also fortunate to have two great bastions of leadership in my career - GE and Deloitte Consulting, where presenting tips were continuously polished and refined, to where some of the above became second habit.

So, I hope if you read this and you find these tips useful, in keeping up with recent social media trends, you end up "liking" this article ;-)..here's to that.

Have a great weekend,

Collaborate Day 4 and Wrap Up

2011-04-20T20:47:00.003-05:00

Day 4 of Collaborate was great as well - a Wednesday. Session content was uniformly spread out covering content from technical and functional streams. I had to leave a day early and delivered my session on SOA Maturity.

It was very interesting how SOA Maturity becomes a baseline for readiness for Fusion Applications and the audience was able to absorb that well. Another key data point was the spread of Fusion Middleware - more than 60% of the audience in the room had some coverage of Fusion Middleware and SOA in their projects - either implementing or implented or thinking of implementing.

Wrapping up, my key observations and themes for the show were:
-The SIG meetings this time seemed to go a step up and also get into more technical depth.
-Lots of interest around EBusiness Upgrade Paths - to R12.
-Lots of interest around Cloud and ExaData in particular.
-Lots of bubbling interest around ExaLogic and positioning of WebLogic in general in the technology stack.
-A lot more people implementing SOA and getting more mainstream.
-A lot of interest around Fusion Applications skills, technology, functionality, and Steve Miranda at the show with several sessions added credence to the Fusion Applications.
-The messaging around configuring vs. coding and Fusion Applications is seeding that message.
-Of course, a lot of interest in co-existence of Apps Unlimited and Fusion Applications.
-Great sessions on Fusions Usability, Oracle VP Jeremy Ashely led a session where Oracle ACE Director, Bex Huff led the demo.

-The user groups, OAUG, IOUG, Quest did a stellar job of content, and added their own dimension to the mix. Oracle is a strong participant in the user group community and this time was no exception.

-The value of networking at such an event cannot be under-estimated. I typically use this time to catch up with my alumni - GE, Deloiitte Consulting, ACE and OTN community, friends etc....Sharing tips and tricks, and user-experiences, besides catching up on a personal front with friends and professional colleagues is invaluable. It raises the energy level and buzz considerably and we go back all charged up, and ready to take on bigger and better things.

Collaborate Day 3: April 12

2011-04-14T08:49:00.002-05:00

Day 3 of Collaborate was great as well. Very good attendance in at 8:00 am sessions (although I hear that is a bigger challenge on Thursday mornings after the traditional Wednesday big event - this year the Harry Potter show at Universal Studios).

Developing your Cloud Roadmap

-
My session on Cloud Computing Industry Directions was at 8:00 am. I covered the Cloud Industry in broad brushes, and narrowed it down to understanding value propositions of Hybrid, Public and Private Clouds, took the audience through the issues with Hypervisor fragmentation while discussing Oracle's Cloud Computing Strategy. Finally, top 3 take-aways for each level of organization leadership from Business Leader to CIO to Developers were covered. ExaData, ExaLogic, OVM, Assembly Builders, Solaris Containers - were some of the key areas reviewed.

-I'm including some of the key slides here, and more in detail in my presentation.

Sample Decision Point

With the positioning of WebLogic in most key Oracle products, an investment to beef up Weblogic capability - with or without ExaLogic - would be a great strategy.

I was double-booked with another session on "Fusion Applications - now or wait" which was a panel led by Paul Rombach and Debra Lilley. Thanks to Mike Rulf, he stepped up and covered my content there.

-A recurrring theme was interest around Cloud Computing - in particular early adopter experiences and Fusion Applications: Steve Miranda had two sessions - deeper than the keynote in which he talked about details of early adopters, as well as key technologies - SOA, BPEL, WebCenter, Java/ADF and BPM as central to Fusion Applications.

-There was the OAUG GEO/SIG best practices lunch at the Peabody (did not see the Duck Parade). I also realized there was an impromptu "Flash Dance" in the lunch area at the Convention Center...Was told the energy level went very high and the buzz were infectious.

-The evening had several dinners - including the Oracle ACE Dinner. I ended by being a butterfly and covered a few - a bite here, a sip of two here and there, and that was end of Day 3. I

Famous Ducks at the Peabody

Collaborate - Day 2: April 11

2011-04-12T06:54:00.004-05:00

Today was a great day, full of energy and enthusiasm.

-Motivational Speaker/Opening Keynote by Dan Thurman: I was double-booked due to work and could not attend having to take a few work related calls. I heard great things though later on catching up with people who attended this. Great way to pump up before the show and give everyone a few nuggets to think about.

-A good blend of sessions on several areas - Quest, IOUG and OAUG all providing excellent content on Core Technologies, Applications and Middleware threads. Lots of great functional sessions as well as well as sessions on professional development threads.

-Cloud Computing Keynote by Oracle SVP's Steve Miranda and Joanne Olsen:
This was a great session, while Mr. Hurd could not make it - he sent a message over video. What I liked the most about this session was the two person format - Steve and Joanne made it very natural and came across as advocates and very relaxed. It was definitely not a high pressure marketing based keynote, although they shared really good perspectives about Oracle's Cloud Journey and Strategy.

-Exadata and Exalogic as private cloud enablers.

-Fusion Applications as a SaaS, On-Premise and Hybrid models - with customer testimonials and modules and functional areas covered. Steve and Joanne explained co-existence of Fusion and Apps Unlimited (existing EBUS, Peoplesoft and JDE)

This was followed by:
-Exhibitor Booth Area with good refreshments and interesting booths etc.

-GeekFest in the evening for the very technically inclined.

That was a full-day. Onto to polish the slides for tomorrow and that would take me to Day 3

Collaborate - Day 1

2011-04-10T23:28:00.001-05:00

So winding down Sunday (feels like a week-day) for the first day of Collaborate. There were a lot of great sessions in progress including SIG's that met today.

Starting off the day with the FMW SIG meeting at 10:00 AM, it was encouraging to see an almost full-room at 10:00 am. The three main themes were (Much thanks to Oracle and VP - Markus Zirn - the FMW SIG Liasion for sharing relevant content)
-Advancement of BPM - empowering the business user
-ExaLogic and evolution of Weblogic in more stacks - data center efficiency
-FMW as Composite/Full development environment - developer productivity.

The questions and interest was strongly around migration to Release 12.x of EBusiness and understanding the duality of Fusion Applications and traditional (EBUS, PSOFT, SIEBEL, JDE, etc.) as complimentary offerings. The audience was also keen on understanding the evolution of WebLogic into the technology stack and the point Release of EBUS when this would be available (12.2 is what the forecast is).

I spend the afternoon with members of the OAUG Fusion Council - Debra Lilley, Mike Rulf, Floyd Teter to polish some of the content around the Soup-to-Nuts sessions and also with our upcoming panel on Tuesday am regarding Fusion Applications.

The evening was a great one:
-The FMW SIG won the award of excellence - again - repeating a proud tradition.
-The reception at the Peabody for OAUG was great as well.

Hello Monday !

VMWare acquires Wavemaker

2011-03-09T22:54:00.006-06:00

So its official, VMWare is acquiring WaveMaker, a Java Development product based on the Spring Source framework (already bought by VMware and now a VMWare division).

About WaveMaker:
If you have downloaded and taken WaveMaker for a spin or rather surfed a wave or two, you may have liked it for its drag-and-drop style of application development, with several short-cuts to make a developers life easier. Of course, I'm dating myself to my client-server days, it reminds me of the early days of how PowerBuilder and Visual Basic were loved by developers.

The developer profile that uses this product would be developers who are not fond of programming from scratch, and appreciate a guided, graphical framework for developing apps in Java. Also they likely do not have any need for J2EE....i.e. Can do their job guided by the springsource framework.

I guess the next question is what does mean for the cloud space, in particular the application development, more specifically, the PaaS space.

My predictions:

This will be a competitor to Force.com, while it may lack the eco-system of SalesForce.com, VMWare does have a fairly robust partner ecosystem in the IaaS space and also in the springsource community.
VMForce.com may not get as much attention, and SalesForce.com may find it needs to take control of the destiny of making Force.com a reality in the Java space by itself.
Expect VMWare to take some time to bundle this with ...maybe vFabric in some form, where other components for application development are packaged.
Expect EngineYard to be courted for a Ruby-on-Rails acquisition , similar to Heroku being acquired by SalesForce.com

Interestingly enough, I was in the middle of reading an interesting article by Kamesh Pemmaraju at the Sand Hill Group and was just trying to connect the dots to where PaaS would evolve in the Cloud in 2011.

This is in line with what I've been saying all along, the divide in the Cloud is really between the commercial products and open-source. Events such as these, bring more robustness to open-source products. Since they are free, being open-source, they offer potential to be monetized in the Cloud. In this case the monetizing potential possibly by WaveMaker and now VMWare.

The day when there are products of the quality of SQL Server, Oracle Databases, DB2, WebLogic, WebSphere and such in the open-source community, when the divide may no longer be a divide.

Ultimately this is a small step for VMWare to try to move up the value-chain, trying to grow beyond an arms-dealers of IaaS and Virtualization into PaaS and application development.

Top Reasons to go ExaData

2011-03-07T15:57:00.006-06:00

Continuing my exploration of ExaData, I thought I'd take a minute to consolidate my thoughts into key reasons for which Oracle ExaData could be a good fit for your needs: These are not formalized use-cases and those would need slightly more detail.

1. Eliminate Software and Hardware Assembly Time

2. Procure a well-engineered, high performance machine - all the thinking and design done by Oracle.

3. Easier path for HA using Oracle RAC.

4. Great fit for OLTP, DSS and mixed workloads.

5. Great fit for Oracle Database (and related Infrastructure) consolidation

6. Strong fit for Private Cloud Database Operations. You can control the level of self-service provisioning you like.

7. Good fit for a Hybrid Cloud offering Database Services.

8. Finally, an additional bonus is One Party to deal with (or One-Throat-to-Choke) as you may see it.

There may be more, these are the top of my mind, until I complete a top 10 list.

One of the bigger concerns I had when I began my ExaData exploration journey was the concept of making non-ExaData Oracle Databases work with an ExaData Oracle Database.

You may wonder, after all an Oracle Database is an Oracle Database. However, there are some key considerations I'll cover in my next posting with some pointers from some notable gurus, who have shown how to make this journey. Those are features that make the ExaData machine so powerful, however you need to plan ahead.

Have a great Monday !

2011-01-28T20:21:00.016-06:00

This was a busy week - all things Oracle in a way, mostly. I have to thank Debra for being a champion for the ACE Directors for a Fusion Applications Usability Workshop at Oracle HQ. Of course, the 65-70 degree sunny weather helped get everyone in a great mood.

-I was able to combine three days of very good IOUC stuff with meetings with Oracle Product Teams, reception with the ACE community (Thanks Lillian, Vikki and Justin, you rock!) , and Fusion Applications Usability Workshop at the Oracle Apps Usability Labs.

-The IOUC brought together about 150+ leaders from different communities globally, and it was great to see the breadth and depth of Oracle products and solutions represented so well.

-This was my first visit to the Oracle Applications Usability Center http://usableapps.oracle.com, where I met a group of really smart, talented and driven people. On a sidebar, I continue to remain impressed by the talent management at Oracle - a place where smart, driven, hard-workers thrive.

-The methods used for usability are very sophisticated these days - sensors in application screens, retinal trackers to see where the eye wanders, and heat-charts. And the people that make it happen are great to work with. The team is very diverse - ethnographers, social anthropologists, cognitive psychologists, and behavioral research scientists, information scientists, experts in human-computer interaction, architects, UI developers and engineers, product engineers - all combine to make a world-class product.

I did not anticipate the level of sophistication that went into designing a new application from a usability perspective, but it makes sense in hindsight - apps have to make a lot of people productive, so every bit of time and effort in using an application saved - is money saved.

-There were about 8 Oracle ACE Directors who were past of a small group called the Fusion UX Advocates - a program designed to work with Oracle Usability Labs - to provide feedback and guidance - and a fresh pair of eyes perspective.

It was great use of my time and besides a learning a lot of new things, I took the flight home very impressed with the quality of the people running the Labs and the technology behind Oracle Fusion Apps Usability.

Have a great weekend, over and out. Next week, I'll plan to cover the evolving world of Cloud and the role Exa* (Data and Logic) are playing in this space.

Cloud Computing Series: VII: Appliances vs. Assembling Components

2011-01-20T00:04:00.018-06:00

So recently while shopping for a replacement refrigerator, I was struck by the amount of simplicity and complexity masked into an appliance.

The refrigerator does the following functions:
-Provides 29 Cubic Feet of Storage
-Provides Chilled Water
-Refrigerates foods at different temperatures in the cooling area
-Freezes foods in the freezer.

It has just the following two inputs (connections) I need to make:
-Electric Connection.
-Water Connection.

I would have liked a larger Sub-Zero refrigerator, but the space in our kitchen (read: data-center) was tight. So we decided to go for a Samsung French Door Style and add a refrigerator in the garage and an under-counter wine-cooler. (read: distributed computing/data-centers)

We take refrigerators for granted, and this technology has been around for gosh - like 100 years almost - yet I was struck by the simplicity in which complex internal parts - compressor, motors, fan, blowers, evaporators - all are Integrated and Assembled "in the factory" so all I have to do is to "plug-it-in". Samsung does the job of integrating everything.

If it were not pre-assembed, I would be likely assembling some components:

Body

Compressor

Coils

Fan/Blowers

A Bunch of Wiring, Switches, Insulation, Thermostats etc.

A LOT of Testing, Certification, Electrical Test, Pressure Test etc. etc.

This takes People, Co$t, and more Co$t.

Thus, you will agree with me, buying a refrigerator is a no-brainer vs. building it.

You may have guessed where I am going with this..? What's a refrigerator doing on a Technology Blog...

In my next posting...stay tuned...

Oracle Book Review: Oracle Fusion Middleware Patterns

2011-01-15T13:18:00.012-06:00

I wanted to share 2 books I've been reading since the holidays.

1. Oracle Fusion Middleware Patterns, Principal Authors: Harish Gaur and Markus Zirn.
http://www.amazon.com/Oracle-Fusion-Middleware-Patterns-Harish/dp/1847198325
I just completed reading this and it was a great read. The authors have done a stellar job of capturing real-life implementation experiences using an architectural approach to cover the entire Fusion Middleware product set.

I give this book high ratings for the following reasons:

-This book reads consistently uniformly from cover to cover despite rich content from so many industry experts. It reads very well and its handy on your bookshelf - when one wants to revisit a use-case or an integration pattern. The distillation of knowledge all-in-one-place makes it a must-read.

-For a quick "What" and a bit of the "How" this book is definitely one of the better books I've read in recent years. Thus ideally meant for architects, leaders, and technology and integration managers.

-The earlier books on Fusion Middleware were focused on the very technical details of SOA Suite and service orchestration using BPEL and Data Integration a Service Bus. Other Fusion Middleware component books are available, but this books brings it all together in a easy-to-absorb manner.

-Interaction between the different products - Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle BAM, Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Essbase and Hyperion, Oracle Data Integrator, Oracle ADF and Oracle EBusiness Suite, Oracle BPM Suite, Oracle BI Publisher - is explained very well via use-cases and reference architecture diagrams. I like that many authors contributed and the information is all in one place.

-SOA Composite Development concepts covering E-Business Suite, SOA Suite, ADF, WebCenter and WebCenter Spaces and BI Apps are explained well, and you realize FMW has become a full development platform.

-SOA caching for Service State and Service Results and implementation of Coherence for Grid Caching. I find this to be very useful - and was able to refresh my concepts and understood the solution.

-A use-case showing integration of relational and multi-dimensional data using Oracle Data Integrator.

-Every use-case is a real implementation and accompanied by XML/code samples, screen-shots and easy description of concepts and value drivers.

If you are a FMW Developer looking for best coding practices to program any of the individual products, this book is likely not the best fit, but for a end-to-end architectural approach and real-life case studies, this is a great read.

2. Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, Principal Author: Porus Havewala.
http://www.rampant-books.com/book_1001_advanced_techniques_oem_grid_control.htm
I have just started to read this with anticipation, Porus knows Grid Control, High-Availability, RAC and other Core Database technologies very well. In addition, this is the first book to cover 11g EM Grid Control.

With that, over and out, for the weekend.

Cloud Computing Series: VI: My Cloud is Cloudier than yours !!

2011-01-12T23:21:00.037-06:00

So, there is a lot of rhetoric being played up by different players in the IT Computing Enterprise Landscape, and for many reasons.

Its a matter of perspective, and from where each player is coming from, it makes sense for respective approaches.

This is how I see it, and to each his/her own:

1. In a game of keeping up with the Joneses, everyone wants to be "Cloud-Enabled" or "Cloud-Centric" or in some way or form associated with the "Cloud".

2. This has helped market capitalization of several companies go through the roof, with investors going gaga. Of course, "this time its different !!". Now where did have I heard that before ? Analysts project Cloud Computing to be a $40-80$B market - depending on what report you read, and by 2012 or 2015, again depending on what you read.

3. Am I saying Cloud Computing is a bubble ? Certainly not, but there are some bubble elements in the marketplace.

Changing gears for a minute, let us take a cursory glance at market evaluations.
Disclaimer: This is not mean to be a stock-picking guide, and my goal here is to just present information.

On one hand there are companies of the stature of Oracle, IBM, Microsoft - deep pockets, trusted clients and customers, and a lot of R&D dollars that go into new products. For them, this is clearly not their first rodeo.

They have seen many trends, adapted, survived and thrived over the years. They get the competition, but also clearly get how their products are used best in the industry.

Indeed, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM have their own hypervisor (virtualization layer) positioning, as does the entire marketplace. But that is subject for another blog posting where I'll detail the two ends of the virtualization spectrum - Xen/KVM on one-end and VMWare on the other end.

4. On the other hand, you have the "new pure-play cloud players". I certainly do not claim to know what that means, but what is the game ? It is the age-old game of salesmanship and marketing; everyone trying to compete and make themselves more relevant than the existing competition.

For example:
-SalesForce.com, a very successful SaaS player (even before the word cloud was launched), trying to become a PaaS player with enhancements to Force.com and the launch of database.com, and acquisition of Heroku, a Ruby-based platform with a high level of automation and a rich management framework that the compliments Ruby-on-Rails framework.

-VMWare - with a solid grasp on virtualization in the Enterprise trying to extend this beyond , Public and Hybrid Clouds. The Spring Source acquisition and launch of VMForce with SalesForce.com, trying to position it in the PaaS space.

These are trends in the Enterprise Computing space happening right now.

5. While I am not commenting on the merits or de-merits of companies trying to compete, I reiterate my message to IT and Business Decision Makers:

- Cloud Computing is not a Silver Bullet.

- Virtualization is not Cloud Computing, while it is used a lot.

- Cloud Computing can help trim some costs, but only some.

- Cloud Computing can help with CapEx vs. OpEx. type of decisions. You know, "Lease the car, vs. buying it". Faisal's blog http://faisalgh.blogspot.com/2010/11/own-lease-taxi-zip-car.html, details this paradigm well.

-Cloud Computing undoubtedly helps agility, reduce infrastructure provisioning time, and adds a new level of efficiency to IT projects.

- When someone says their "Product/Solution is in the Cloud", ask them basic questions to seperate the spin from the reality. I would start with "tell me what that means" and see which way the conversation goes.

Talking of other large Enterprise software brands, IBM and Microsoft have similar strategies, while the state of readiness of each is somewhat different.

Will the computing market head in a drastically different direction ? Well, the pay-as-you-go model for a consumption based pricing is a paradigm shift. That applies to IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) in today's state of readiness.

A recent presentation (http://www.slideshare.net/samramji/darwins-finches-20th-century-business-and-apis) from Sam Ramji of Apigee comes to mind - about Darwin's finches. I find this preso particularly appealing; the story telling and the case study is classic, and I find myself being able to map this to many areas of the technology landscape, including survival of the fittest in a very Darwinian way.

In my next post covering ExaData, OVM, Exalogic, I will outline Oracle's Cloud Computing Strategy and why it makes a lot of sense for existing and new customers. This is a solid strategy, one that is current - and will prevail for the long-term. Much more importantly, this strategy is key to Oracle's installed base and makes the transition to Cloud Computing easier.

Cloud Computing Series: V: Understanding ExaData, ExaLogic and OVM

2010-12-22T09:40:00.011-06:00

So continuing my thread of Databases in the Cloud, let me take a few minutes to explain a high-level overview of Oracle ExaData and its role in the Cloud.

So What is Exadata:Exadata is a pre-configured, pre-engineered database appliance meant for high-performing database workloads and throughput. It combines hardware and software engineering in a highly-optimized configuration.

A modular architecture, in its current version (X2-8), it does not have any virtualization software, but as I've talked in my previous posts - Cloud and Virtualization can be very much mutually exclusive !! Oracle sees this is a very 20:20 manner.

While you can read the Product Literature http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/exadata/index.html, I've attempted to outline key features here.

1. Unlike traditional database servers, with attached NAS/SAN/any certified storage, that run the Oracle RDBMS software, Exadata makes intelligent use of storage and caching technologies to distribute SQL processing to the storage sub-system.

2. It consists of 2 x Database Servers, each with 1TB memory, 8x8 Core Intel Xeon Processors (about 2.2 Ghz), 8x300GB 10,000 RPM SAS disks, in addition to 8 Infiniband Ports, 8 10GB Ethernet Ports, 8 1 GB Ethernet Ports, Battery Backed up Cache, Switches for Infiniband, Redundant Power Supply among other components.

3. In addition, 14 X Exadata Storage Servers with 12 x 600 GB 15,000 RPM High Performance SAS disks or 12 x 2 TB 7,200 RPM High Capacity SAS disks.

4. It also includes 5.3 TB Exadata Smart Flash Cache

At a conceptual level, these differentiate it from traditional Oracle database servers, which do not have the integrated engineering and the hardware-software integrated as tightly as here.

5. The database software is Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition (requires
11.2.0.2 or higher), Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Partitioning, and other Oracle Database options

6. The Operating System is Oracle Linux 5 Update 5 with the Unbreakable Enterprise
Kernel.

7. The Storage Server runs Oracle Exadata Storage Server Software, which has some cool features, all engineering to provide a high-performance computing environment:
• Smart Scan Technology
• Smart Flash Cache
• IO Resource Manager
• Storage Index Technology
• Hybrid Columnar Compression
• Smart Scans of Data Mining model scoring

You can read up detailed product data sheets at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/exadata/dbmachine-x2-8-datasheet-173705.pdf?ssSourceSiteId=ocomen, and fully absorb the computing power packed into this machine.

Now to look at where we can use this engineering combination of hardware and software:

Ideal Use Cases:
Some of the use cases that are perfectly aligned for ExaData are:

1. Infrastructure Consolidation with or without Private Cloud

2. High Performance Database Workloads

3. Creation and federation of a Highly Available, High-Performing Computing Infrastructure that can combine ExaData and ExaLogic appliances as needed. (A federated architecture essentially)

4. Pre-Engineered High Performance, Highly Available Database Solution

In my follow-on articles I will share about snippets about Oracle ExaLogic, Oracle Virtual Machine, Direct Provisioning, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Assembly Builder - products and tools that help complete Oracle's Cloud Computing Strategy.

Cloud Computing Series: IV: Database.com, ExaData on Demand and connecting the dots

2010-12-16T22:28:00.008-06:00

So this has been an eventful week or two, with Salesforce.com showing some interesting and aggressive moves. (NYSE: CRM, P/E around 250, but that is another discussion).

1. Purchase of Heroku (www.heroku.com) as a pure-play PaaS offering. Heroku is a full development framework in the Ruby programming language. Instead of the Ruby-on-Rails framework, Heroku provides a self-service framework with a lot of elegance built into the solution. It is relatively a newer programming language, but one easy to fall into love with. I have written small pieces of code in #Ruby and loved it for its elegance and "natural programming style". (Disclaimer: I have not attempted to scale it). Heroku claims a large following - over 100,000 apps.

This gives SalesForce.com - a "Pure-Ruby-as-a-Service-Cloud-Play", I do not what that term means, but clearly it seems to be the term to use, to be recognized into the #cloud #computing glitterati.

2. Launch of Database.com - a *aaS offering what seems to be an Oracle 10g database version (Disclaimer: I have not fully kicked the tires yet).

Again, this is considered a "Pure-Database-as-a-Service-Cloud-Play". Again, the #cloud #computing glitterati notion !!

I can wax eloquent on pure vs. non-pure *aaS Cloud Offerings, but the short-answer is, the above solutions seem to have:
1. Multi-Tenancy
2. Abstraction of Application/Platform Layer with Service Provisioning done from a Web UI.
3. Abstraction of Hardware Layer and Components

I have strong opinions of a non-public cloud provider like SalesForce.com offering a database.com service with the only application development environment "next to it" being Force.com and VMForce.com - when it is released.

A few items to think about:

A) "Next to it" and Network Latency:
So what does "next to it" mean. It simply means, putting an Application environment in a low-network latency configuration. In a Public Cloud Provider, or in a Private Cloud data-center, Gigabit Ethernet has been around for a long-time. If not Gigabit Ethernet, typically Servers (Database and Application Servers) are connected on a fast-enough backplane to have no network latency lag - no matter what the I/O patterns and transaction profile is (OLTP/DSS/Hybrid - most common case).
.
B) Database:Lone-Ranger:
Having worked with many technologies, and database the longest, I know a few things about relational databases, the platform is not very useful, if you cannot make an application development environment work with it - securely, and retrieve data in a timely manner. Henc a database needs an application environment to work with.

C) REST/API Access/ Over the Internet:
I am curious to see performance for a serious application from a latency standpoint when the database and application server environments are segregated by distance. So say, you have an application server in your shop, and you use database.com in SalesForce.com's data center.

D)Cloud still runs inside a Data-Center
Remember this: #Cloud #Computing does not mutate the laws of physics, distances, network latencies, and a data center. Thus database.com, is offered from a data-center in this case, Salesforce.com's data-center.

A good questions is What does Oracle do next ?
I think the answer is already there in a press-note release on December 3rd:
http://www.oracle.com/newsletters/information-indepth/on-demand/dec-10/exadataod.html
about #Oracle #ExaData on the #Cloud. I will discuss some points of view about it in my next posting.

The database is Oracle's major pillars, and something it started its business from in the 80's. I respect Oracle's development strategy around the database immensely and admire the Product from its scalability, and breadth of solutions it can cater. If you have worked as an Oracle DBA, you will know, this is a deep deep area.

However, some of the considerations I mentioned about database.com also apply to ExaData-on-Demand.

Cloud Computing Series : III :

2010-08-09T18:47:00.018-05:00

I would like to keep the focus of this posting on Virtualization and Cloud Computing. While they are used inter-changeably a lot, they are NOT the same. Figure 1 is an IS-IS NOT about Cloud Computing. We see the core requirements of getting services (Infrastructure, Platform and Software) as key tenets of Cloud Computing Serviced
Delivery.

A key point to be noted is that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) existed even before virtualization became a known technology, or even before Cloud Computing was coined as a term. Examples of Oracle-on-Demand, SAP-On-Demand, Salesforce.com - even social media such as Facebook are examples of SaaS.

My point of view is simply that virtualization is not the centre of the universe of the cloud computing, while it may seem that way when you look at market shares. In my next posting, I will talk about different virtualization platforms, how they parallel the operating system offerings, mentioned in my first part of this series. Figure 2 depicts an IS-IS NOT table about virtualization.

In addition, in my future posting(s) we will discuss how this poses a fresh set of challenges - whether you are an IT shop considering a Private Cloud, or a Public Cloud Provider or have a Hybrid Cloud Configuration.

Cloud Computing Series: II :

2010-08-02T14:13:00.014-05:00

Happy Monday !

So continuing my previous thread from last week about Cloud Platforms and potentially lock in, let us first take a look at one of the key requirements of Cloud Computing.

In this figure I'm showing some basic requirements, and some advanced requirements. My context in this is squarely from an Information Technology Decision Maker or a Business wanting to kick off a new software project that needs Computing Capacity and Tools.

Please notice that nowhere does the technology to enable the Cloud bubble up as a core requirements. In most cases, this is virtualization. However, we will talk about Cloud and Virtualization in a separate topic. They are closely related, but most definitely are not synonymous with each other.

Through computing history this has been the case all along, the business never says - "I need a Customer Care system, hence I want a system running Red Hat Linux 5.0 or Windows 8.0". They may say I need a really fast system, or give a response time requirement and as technologists it is our job to map and design an adequate system that can scale well.

Let us not forget this very core foundational concept as we get past the politics of adoption, to make Cloud Computing into a fully mainstream method of computing.

Cloud Computing Series : I :

2010-07-29T07:35:00.017-05:00

This past weekend I was cleaning up my attic and found somewhat old Computer Journals (Circa early-mid-90's)...so I thought a walk down memory lane may be in order, to best share my thoughts.

Windows Server was a relatively unknown concept. The journal abounded with pictures of DEC, Compaq, Tandy, HP, IBM, Sun and a few other operating system vendors. Apple was on the decline, WordPerfect and Borland were getting overcome by the Redmond, WA juggernaut.

For the database purists, remember Digital Equipments's RDB! The Intel architecture was derided as toys by the "real server folks". Remember the Informix and Oracle's one-upping on Highway 101. Remember Sybase vs. Oracle.

We had client-server before the web evolution started. Thus we had Oracle Designer and Developer 2K, Power Builder, fat-clients !!

Coming to the point, that was a time, when multiple OS options was the vogue. One chose an application (Database, Application Servers (Netscape Hello !) - and then chose an OS and hardware platform - based on the organizations plan and roadmap.

Of course this has consolidated to a degree. The strong have survived and Intel architecture has grown exponentially over the years.

While it may be groovy to wear that cool shirt lying in the back of your closet, the trend is now repeating itself in the Cloud Computing Space all over again, and needs close watching.

Cloud Computing Presentation at Austin City Hall

2010-07-08T09:27:00.005-05:00

Hello Austin and World (today's forecast is Cloudy with a 60% chance of showers). Never believed Austin could be cooler than NYC and DC, in the heart of summer !!

Talking about Cloud, this would be a nice segue to talk about my session last week at Austin City Hall.

The presentation last week to the Austin City Hall was well received. I was invited as a guest speaker by Global Equations (http://www.globalequations.com) who were the principle organizers of the event.

Global Equations is doing a stellar job of connecting businesses across the globe in unique and innovative ways to optimize usage of human capital and capabilities.

The event was a business development meeting attended by representatives from the private sector and the government of Dominican Republic who were promoting DR as a near-shore destination. This was attended by local businesses in Austin who were looking for business opportunities.

The session was very well-organized and lots of interest on Cloud Computing as an enabler.

We talked about Cloud Delivery Models - Public, Private, Hybrid as well as by now the 3 classic Cloud Offerings:
- Software as a Service.
- Platform as a Service.
- Infrastructure as a Service.

Small and Medium Businesses (SMB's, where Cap Ex and Cash Flow are always considerations to be managed actively - were particularly interested.

We also dispelled some myths about Cloud Computing:
1)It is not free,
2)It is not literally in a "big cloud somewhere" with infinite capacity,
3)"Salesforce.com" is not the default definition of Cloud Computing.

Key value drivers remain:
1) Ease of Provisioning.
2) Op. Ex. vs. Cap Ex.
3) Pay-as-you-go/Build for current needs and expand as you go.

Oracle 2010 Innovation Awards

2010-07-08T09:14:00.005-05:00

All, I wanted to share Oracle has launched their annual (2010) Oracle Innovation Awards.

This year Oracle has 6 categories where they will be looking to honor customers and their partners who are creatively using Fusion Middleware to deliver unique business value:

(i) Application Grid
(ii) SOA/BPM
(iii) Identity Management
(iv) Enterprise 2.0
(v) Data Integration & Availability
(vi) Fusion Middleware for Applications

Nominations close on Friday, August 6th 2010, winning customers will have a chance to win a FREE registration to Oracle OpenWorld 2010 and get featured in Oracle Magazine. Partners of winning customers will also be recognized at the Award Ceremony held at Open World.

Additional Details at:
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/innovation-awards-077827.html

This is a great way to share your best practices on a global stage, get recognition and be known as a leader in your industry.

If you have any problems submitting, you can reach out to me, and I will be more than happy to connect you with the Oracle Product Management team that runs this program.

Cheers,

SOA Maturity WebCast

2010-06-15T21:17:00.004-05:00

All,
I am presenting a web-cast organized by FMT Systems on SOA Maturity. This is basically the same presentation that was delivered at the Collaborate conference in April 2010.

Stay tuned, here is the URL:
http://www.fmtsystems.com/04-news/events.html

See y'all at 11:00 AM CST on Wednesday, June 16.

Ron

Enterprise Solutions Cookbook

2010-02-24T08:25:00.003-06:00

All,

I wanted to share Oracle's Enterprise Solutions Cookbook. Enterprise Solutions Cookbook

This is a very useful series of article that showcases real world customer examples using multiple Fusion Middleware components to drive flexibility and innovation.

The Enterprise Solution Cookbook article series was created to provide architects and IT leaders with an up-close and personal view of ten real-world IT solutions - with the viewpoint of quick time-to-market and accelerated efficient implementations.

This is a great forum to read up on implementation success stories as well as contribute content and share your experience with peers in the industry.

Enjoy !!

Ron Batra

Austin Community Involvement

2009-12-17T15:27:00.006-06:00

I am posting today on a somewhat unrelated technology area, but realizing life is not all about technology - hopefully you find it interesting, especially if you live in the Austin area or the cities (burbs) around Austin.

Last week I attended a dinner hosted by the Austin PMI Chapter at Barton Creek Country Club (too much overcast to enjoy the greens)...The chief speaker and guest of honor was Chief Art Acevedo.

http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/police/chiefs.htm.

An entertaining, energetic and lively speaker, Art lighted up the evening. Art and his wife Tanya I'm told are involved in almost every charity and social cause and yet high on Austin's socialite scene - admirable !! I found Art to be a very approachable person and emits warmth.

Beyond the charm and glitter, the key messages were:

1. We (The Austin community) needs to be involved, way more. A handful of people showing up at City Hall to decide policies and resolutions on pan-handling, video surveillance etc. is not enough.

2. Keep Austin Weird - is just that - an old mantra that comes in the way of technology and progress. If you haven't done anything wrong, why would you object to video cameras at strategic locations in town ? Remember its for everyone's protection.

3. Austin needs to shed its "town" mentality and grow up as a city. History proves that when people like to live in a vibrant environment, they will move there, good roads or not.

This is necessary to keep our kids safe and to avoid them falling into common school traps of violence, drugs - etc. etc. The Austin PMI chapter did good by inviting Art. Was a treat to listen to.

Now I'm wondering, if Twitter can be used as a Law Enforcement tool by the community...Bet its being used already.

Cloud Computing 101

2009-10-31T21:57:00.009-05:00

I got feedback from a few friends that before I go into the depths of the technology around cloud architecture - let us first talk a bit about Cloud Computing in general and then we can go into what is needed to make Cloud Computing work on a larger scale.

While my scope may be somewhat influenced by Application and Machine Integration in an Enterprise Application use-case scenario, the concepts translate infinitely beyond the Enterprise.

For example, some social situations:
- You could be walking and your phone alerts you to Wi-Fi networks at Coffee Shops....Some of those may be free to you, depending on the carrier relationship.
-You are at a music festival and there is a cloud that goes beyond posting of messages, but takes some actions...e.g ticket booking for a particular band is running low. This could be posted on a web-site and fed to a mobile device, if desired.
-In a sports arena, you are in a location where your friends are across the stadium...A "stadium cloud" helps you navigate to your friends.

I could go on and on - the scope is limited by imagination only.

From a traditional business technology perspective - Enterprise Applications and Infrastructure perspective - Cloud Computing is the culmination of Advanced Virtualization and Service Oriented Architecture technologies - to provide computing as a service. It helps break the silos between different infrastructure components so that resources are more spread out (Servers, Storage, Firewalls etc.) and can be utilized by many consumers.

Cloud Computing has many definitions and forms and you may have heard the following related terms:
-Software as a Service
-On Demand Computing
-Application as a Service
-Pay as you go
-Platform as a Service
-Infrastructure as a Service

The above terms can have different perspectives:

Cloud Computing Perspectives:
- From the CFO's viewpoint it could be CapEx vs. OpEx.
- From the Business Leader's perspective - you may have a budget you have to spend this year - or lose it near year.
- From a CIO perspective - breaking down computing silos is important.
- From a CTO/IT Director perspective - it gives more uniformly used capacity in the data-center.
-From an IT Manager's perspective, one less platform to worry about and less "religious platform wars" between team members. But hey, better get sharp on virtualization software.

At a technical detail level - they all differ a bit and sometimes build upon or compliment each other.

Cloud Computing:
A lot of people agree today that Cloud Computing is a methodology in which the details of the underlying infrastructure technology is hidden or abstracted. This is enabled by virtualization technologies and sharing of resources, and providing in some cases a self-service model, where you can buy this service over the internet, in a model that scales with usage.

SOA and Cloud Computing

2009-10-30T10:02:00.012-05:00

I'm sharing a few concepts related to SOA and Cloud Architecture. This posting as well a few next ones are going to be product-agnostic and the focus will be to cover new concepts. In this article, I intend to cover the basics of Representational State Transfer (REST).

If you have been following cloud computing, it is highly unlikely you have not come across the Representational State Transfer (REST) and RESTful API's. If you haven't - no worries - my goal is to provide a introduction.

If you have been doing Web Service and SOA development, probably your mindset (as is mine somewhat) relates to SOAP over HTTP. The decision to use REST vs. SOAP is something that is pretty fundamental and should be done during the design phase of an integration project. This is more relevant in cloud architectures mainly due the nature of the command invocation as well as quantities of data transferred.

So what is REST all about:
For the purist - the Fielding Dissertation is a good place to dive pretty deep in where it all began: This is posted at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm.

Continued in next post

Wrapping up OOW

2009-10-20T08:53:00.007-05:00

I had to leave OOW early - and attended Larry Ellison's speech via web-cast. Of course, Governor Arnold brought a lot of humor to the show.

My takeaways from the conference:
Overall, Oracle has its mojo working very well. In particular the story of integration across product lines and the three big "pillars" line of businesses - Databases, Applications and Middleware seems to be well-knit. In particular Thomas Kurian was able to describe product line innovations and features very well, not only at his keynote, but also in deep detail at the ACE Director briefing on Friday.

In my formal and informal meetings at OOW, my perception was Oracle Executives for each of these pillars appeared very well-versed with their Product lines and were able to zoom effortlessly from the high-level strategy and requirements to intimate details of each product. This is a great sign of top-quality leadership at every level of the organization.

From a partner-relationship standpoint, Oracle is doing a stellar job - in working with Technology Evangelists, User Groups (OAUG, IOUG, Quest, ODTUG, Primavera..etc etc.), SI and Vendor Channels with innovative and unique ways to tap the potential at every market point.

Database Overview:
-Oracle Database Technology 11gR2 is rock-solid. New Features offer incremental value to a solid product.
-Acquisition of Golden Gate poses interesting questions for Stream Technology.
-The OLTP X Machine offers a giant scalable environment in a box - and horizontal and vertical scalability. IT leadership in certain environments has been waiting for a solution like this for many years. For those for whom this solution is bigger, you could try to forecast 2-3 years out and see if the upfront investment makes sense.

Applications Overview:
-Fusion Applications Momentum continues to grow. Oracle is planning to release these in 2010 with a SaaS as well as host-it-yourself configuration. Screen shots and initial seeded modules were shown at the show.
-Other less known acquisitions -Lodestar (Meter Data Management) and Customer Care and Billing (CCB, former SPL) are part of Oracle Utilities. I hear adoption growing and with the Smart Grid/AMI space, this area is poised to grow.
-IT Leadership with traditional PL/SQL skills would be smart to grow their competencies in ADF, BPEL and BAM, some of the key technologies in Fusion Applications.

Middleware Overview:
- Fusion Middleware continues solid growth with the SOA, BI and Identity Management areas to keep on growing. The Oracle Identity Management Platform is growing richer with every release. SOA Suite 11g has compelling features, not just for Mash-ups and Web 2.0 type of applications, some of the features to improve message size and payload size make it an attractive upgrade.

Thank you for visiting and continuing to read my blog.

Thus, from the top 3 "what's hot" perspective, this is what I see in my crystal ball for 2010 (not in order):
1. Fusion Applications (later half of 2010)
2. Cloud Computing, SaaS, PaaS.
3. Fusion Middleware
4. Smart Grid Related (Oracle Utilities) - ties with 3

Covering Thomas Kurian's Keynote @OOW

2009-10-13T10:38:00.024-05:00

Thomas Kurian just started his keynote at 8:30 AM. Fortunately, no high-winds yet, just rain:

1. Love the integrated picture of key Oracle technologies. Database, Applications and Middleware.

2. Talking about Oracle Applications - finalizing on Oracle Database and Oracle Technology Stack.

3. Amazing - the depth and breadth of Oracle products. Oracle has its mojo working very well. I continue to be impressed every year progressively.

4. Seems his presentation will be tailored around solving customer problems using Oracle technologies - Database, Fusion Middleware and BI. This is the Avitek Case Study - slick multi-channel collaboration- linking from Siebel (Product Catalog) to E-Business Suite....and live-chat in real-time. Very cool.

5. People want a fully-branded collaborative e-Commerce system.

6. Seibel CRM + Fusion Middeware (BPM being displayed by Dave Shaffer).

7. We see the AIA pre-built integrations plus BPM process modeler and also shows the integration of different technologies.

8. While the details are too long to cover, I recommend looking at the flow-diagrams when this will be posted on YouTube.

9. Mapping a similar situation to Ingersoll-Rand's business and technology issues.

10. "Avitek" also has Security and Governance issues.

11. Steve Miranda is talking with Norm (CIO of Qualcomm) - alerts around Risk and Fraud (this is the demonstration of the GRC(Governance, Risk and Compliance Suite). Besides showing the number of controls - the GRC product also shows relationships graphically (for example - an approver should not have a conflict of interest).

12. Oracle Database Vault showed the security controls for the Database Administrator.

13. Seems like the next issue will be scalability and capacity. I love how Oracle has built a roadmap for MAA (Maximum Availability Architecture). This covers pretty much the entire technology stack.

14. In the demo - The Weblogic Grid is working fine, looks like adding Coherence to the existing capability. This is the beauty of high-availability at the software level. The Coherence Grid reduced the database load.. Of course, Oracle RAC and Active Data Guard complete the picture.

15. Now, Oracle Enterprise Manager shows end-to-end monitoring.

This completes the "wing-to-wing" picture of a well-knit Oracle solutions picture.

Michael Dell is here.

Covering OOW 09

2009-10-13T10:30:00.007-05:00

Greetings,

All -hope everyone is able to navigate around the rain situation...fortunately no high-winds in SF yet.

Highlights of my OOW 09 visit so far:
Sunday:

-SIG Day: Besides the OAUG Fusion Middleware SIG, this was a great day to listen to the communities interests and concerns. We had a good turnout.

-Besides Mr. Ellison's keynote, attended the ACED Dinner. It was cool to listen to the "father of Java" - Mr. Gosling.

Besides the great food and connection with other ACE Directors, had great fun with Justin's birthday cake.

The OTN team does a stellar job - Vikki, Lillian and Justin thank you, thank you !!. The OTN lounge is a great spot to relax, catch up and view the keynotes and catch up on cool technology.

Monday:
Besides the keynotes, and a few selected sessions on SOA and Database 11g, the OTN night was great. Got an opportunity to catch up with the community and view different solutions in the demogrounds.

Tuesday:

FMW SIG Meeting @OOW 2009

2009-10-08T08:56:00.002-05:00

Please mark your calendars for an exciting event at OOW, 09. The FMW SIG (formerly the SOA SIG) has always brought top-notch speakers from Oracle, as well as the industry and consulting organizations.

Continuing this trend, and sharing the latest with SOA Suite 11g, here is our planned agenda. In a nutshell, If you wanted to ask the question " Why should I migrate to SOA Suite 11g" or "How is SOA Suite 11g a compelling option" - you should attend this session. This is a small session before the full momentum of the conference picks up, thus a great opportunity to visit with Oracle Product Management and leading SI implementators

High-level agenda:
a) SOA Suite 11g New Features Presentation
-Demed L'Her, Oracle
b) (SOA Suite 11g and Composite Development Adoption Experiences -
-Basheer Khan, Innowave and Faisal Ghadialy, Fujitsu
c) SOA Suite Product Demonstration - covering SOA, ADF, WebCenter and ESB integration
-Demed L'Her and Nishit Rao, Oracle
d) Any other topics of matters related to SOA Suite and Oracle Applications
-Markus Zirn, Oracle

Looking forward to seeing you@OOW.

Regards,

Ron Batra and the FMW SIG Board

SOA Suite 11g New Features Summary

2009-08-15T15:10:00.008-05:00

I've complied a list of features that make upgrading or implementing SOA Suite 11g worthwhile. In the few weeks, I will share more details about each feature.

As a disclaimer, this material is mostly from Oracle released documentation on SOA Suite 11g, but just summarized here.

Nothing like a summary to put everything on one page.

You can see a slideshow here:

SOA Suite 11g is here !!

2009-08-07T11:04:00.002-05:00

All,

SOA Suite 11g is here. I have been reading up and following it and kicking the tires. There is a great deal of thought-ware and how-to information out there.

I am going to start a small mini-series on my blog about the New Features in SOA Suite 11g...and above all connect the technology to a business perspective.

This is not going to be my blog on cloud computing or private clouds, but purely on SOA Suite 11g.

Please stay tuned. This will start next week.

Regards,
Ron Batra

ODTUG 2009

2009-06-28T14:41:00.011-05:00

I just got back from one of the better conferences I attended in recent times and share with the community. Of course, have to thank the ACE Director Program for a lot - very well organized program.

Overall - the conference was easy to get around, great location, and good track/contents. This was my first ODTUG conference and enjoyed the focus on development and tools.

I feel a bit "so yesterday" with blogging, while Twittering is the norm these days. I can see the utility of it at conferences - mainly to know what colleagues and friends are doing. In any case, I'll cover the major events, ole-fashioned, asynchronous, non real-time....

0. Friday, June 19th: This was the ACE Director Product Briefing at Oracle HQ. Again, an excellent event. Eddie is industrious at capturing and blogging, and here's a link to the the beginning of the ACED reunion.

http://awads.net/wp/2009/06/20/video-oracle-ace-director-product-briefing-at-oracle-hq/

1. Sunday, June 21st:
My focus was on #odtug SOA tracks in Cypress I and II. The day started with an excellent preso by Demed L'Her on SOA State of the Nation. Of note was the thread on short-term ROI and what the marketplace is looking for as ideal SOA projects. SOA Suite 11g to be released very soon has been three years in development and helps take it to the next level. The focus should be on the solution architecture, and not on the product limitations.

Right after the session on convergence of SOA and BPM, this was followed by the session on airport case study led by Lonneke Dikmans - fellow ACE Director. It was fun to share different perspectives on solution architecture - business and technology and be able to zoom in and out simulating different audiences.

In the afternoon was treated to Clement Utshcig's "SOA is Dead, Long Live EDA" session. This continued the theme on the previous session by Demed and the theme was the focus is on Event Driven Architecture as an Integration Paradigm, not just SOA for SOA's sake.

Continuing the case study, we went into the keynote by Steve Miranda - on Fusion Applications. While the screen shots were cool, they whetted the appetite to drive deeper into sessions - later on by Duncan Mills and others.

The evening reception was fun, and "Stanley the ACE" was out again in full form. http://www.wtfistheacevest.com. Stanley's travels and journey, are documented here with different links.

Of course, I resisted tweeting to #odtug, or to #stanley, or to #whatchamcallit...Wonder how long I can resist being behind the curve. Perhaps caught by Oracle Open World.

Monday: June 22nd:
ODTUG does a cool thing with the ambassador hat, and this is a great way to help the conference and yet attend the session. Justin captured this nicely at http://blogs.oracle.com/otn/2009/06/thanks_for_the_memories_odtug.html. I ambassadored and attended a session by John King (Can I make XML Go Faster). This explained different design considerations of XML and how applications access models such as canonical repeatedly and how milliseconds can add up to minutes and hours when an interface fires several times a day.

Followed up with Chris Judson's "What is a Canonical Data Model and Why......One"...I attended half of this and then tried to pick up Lewis Cunningham's session on Cloud Computing with AWS (Amazon Web Services) and 11g (Oracle Database)..

Took a coffee break and then attended Duncan Mills's session on Fusion Design Fundamentals. This was an excellent session showing the Application Development Framework architecture and the evolution of the Model View Controller architecture. This session sets the foundation for several other sessions at ODTUG and for PL/SQL developers and RICEW Developers - this should be a nice transition path to follow.

I do not see PL/SQL ever going away completely, but its good to know how to architect business login in a place other than the database.

The evening ended with a shop-and-dine event in Monterey....Harshad Oak, Basheer Khan and I ended up exploring Monterey downtown with a bracing walk from Fisherman's Wharf to Cannery Row where we ate at a Mexican joint and took the shuttle back. Met all the ODTUG crowd on the way back to the hotel.

Tuesday: June 23:
Brad Brown's preso on a Building a SOA-Based ODS was good..lots of good content. Tom Kyte's Database Worth Practices and Anno Andriessen's ADF Development were great sessions. In the afternoon Mark Rittman's OBIEE Optimization Methodology and Susan Duncan's session on ADF Development were nice.

The ACE Director's Meet and Greet was followed by the ACE Director Dinner at the Best Western..this was a blast and great networking. Illustrious company - Steven Feurenstein, Cary Millsap, Dan Vlamis and other luminaries from the Oracle illustrati.
The bonfire by the waves was a blast and it was way cool....Vikki and Lillian - were outstanding hosts and the smores and coffee were a blast. Of course, Stanley had a few antics of his own and a few of the ACED's played frisbee in the dark after dinner with waves lapping. This was a cherised memory and great bonding amongst the ACED community.

Wednesday, June 24:
My focus today was on Fusion Development and Designing and I attended the sessions that seemed to lay a good foundation...starting with Grant Ronald, Peter Koletzke, Avrom Roy-Faderman and Duncan Mills's in the afternoon.. I snuck into Chris Muir's session on Web Services without SOA - good back to basics kind of content.

The evening was the reception - the stand-up comedian was a hoot and I got to know Lucas Jellema and as several ODTUG members can vouch - he can really move on the dance floor..Good conversation and I winded up ODTUG.

The organizers were gracious and well-organized, and made the conference a pleasure. Location was superb - the hotel and Monterey was awesome. I took time out to drive the 17 mile drive around Pebble Beach to Carmel and Big Sur. Magnificient views here.

Collaborate 09 - FREE Hands-on Labs (AIA, IdM, SOA, BPA, BI Apps)

2009-04-25T07:45:00.000-05:00

Are you interested in Oracle’s Middleware, AIA or BI Apps offerings together with Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel)?

Join Oracle for one of our FREE Hands-on Workshops at Collaborate 09, to learn how you can leverage Oracle Fusion Middleware, AIA and BI Apps in your existing Oracle Applications environments today. This year, Oracle is offering 8 different hands-on labs, led by Oracle Experts, including:

- Service-enable Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle SOA Suite BPEL Process Manager
- Service-enable PeopleSoft with Oracle SOA Suite BPEL Process Manager
- Service-enable JD Edwards EnterpriseOne with Oracle SOA Suite BPEL Process Manager
- Service-enable Siebel CRM with Oracle SOA Suite BPEL Process Manager
- AIA: Best Practices Integration to Oracle Applications using AIA Foundation Pack
- BPA: Model and Automate Oracle Applications' Processes using BPA Suite
- BI Apps: Dashboard and Reports using Oracle Business Intelligence Applications for E-Business Suite
- IdM: Automate, Secure, and Audit Your E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Applications with Oracle Identity Management

Oracle will provide laptops, network and servers for these free hands-on labs. You will also learn about the application technology roadmaps and certifications with Oracle Fusion Middleware.

The hands-on labs are offered Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (9 total sessions), and are open to all registered Collaborate attendees but require additional reservations

You can register at
http://www.oracle.com/webapps/dialogue/dlgpage.jsp?p_ext=Y&p_dlg_id=4136274&src=2931347&Act=69

Come along, and you will also have a chance to win an iPod Shuffle at each Workshop

Oracle Fusion Middleware - Webcasts

2008-10-01T09:39:00.007-05:00

I wanted to share with the community the following web-casts.

1. Live Webcasts

The Oracle Fusion Middleware Product Management team would like to invite you to join us for a series of live webcasts through October and November for each of the Best Practice Centers. The links below link directly to the invitation.

· Live Webcast: Leveraging the Enterprise Service Bus with E-Business Suite (October 7, 2008 @ 9:00AM PDT)

· Live Webcast: Consuming PeopleSoft Pages using WSRP in WebCenter(October 14, 2008 @ 9:00AM PDT)

· Live Webcast: Building a Complex Web Application Using ADF and Siebel (October 21, 2008 @ 9:00AM PDT)

· Live Webcast: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Oracle Fusion Middleware (November 4, 2008 @ 9:00AM PDT)

2. JDE Best Practice Center

Launched JD Edwards Best Practice Center at OpenWorld last week.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/fmw4apps/jde/index.html

Come here to start creating SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) with your JD Edwards EnterpriseOne applications today. "Best Practices" are offered for how to service-enable JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Business Services, and then build integrations, business processes and composite applications using Fusion Middleware technology such as BPEL, ESB, BAM, ADF, and WebCenter. Experts from JDE Development, Consulting, Product Management as well as leading System Integrators and customers, will show you how.

Main link to all Best Practice Centers (EBS|PSFT|SEBL|JDE) is here:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/fmw4apps/index.html

The Best Practice Centers are "must-see" sites for Application Developers, Application Technologists, Fusion Developers, and Middleware Developers, that want to better leverage their applications investments. You will learn techniques on how to integrate with other applications, streamline business process, expose application functionality as Web services, build composite applications, and new Web 2.0 interfaces and deliver Web reports.

Enjoy the learning !

Thomas Kurian's Keynote @OOW

2008-09-22T16:57:00.013-05:00

Attending Thomas Kurian's keynote session, these are the highlights:
1. Comparison of old world computing with new world computing
Dedicated Hardware was never used properly, siloed out.

2. Oracle Application Grid is the new answer:
a Better cost, power and efficient hardware
b Risk free scale up and scale out
c. Higher performance - no single point of failure

3. Build FMW stack on top of Oracle Application Grid
This includes all products of Oracle FMW.

4. Development Tools:
Direction to unify development across all dimensions:
JDeveloper 11G will be very shortly available:
DBMS Development
Java EE Development
EJB 3 and JPA Development
Hibernate Development
Spring Development
JSF Development
Struts Development

So, a community of open-source developers do not feel left out.

5. ADF is a Model View Controller based framework working with multiple channel applications
This works with browsers, email clients, PDA, phone, MSFT office

6. Application Life Cycle Management also showcased with JDeveloper.
Define and Track a Project
Design
Develop
Collaborate with Others
Check-in, version control
Profile and Test
Change and Manage
The point to note is inter-operability.

7. ADF is optimized now for performance and scalability.

8. SOA Development
BPMN with BPM Suite
Unified Metadata model
Thomas's graphic showing the Business (BPMN) and IT Developers (BPEL) was great.

9. Service Bus is the backbone.

10. BPEL Process Manager - Human Workflow etc.

11. Imaging and Process Management - in one single run-time integration is developed.

12. Event Driven Architecture and Processing.

13. Dave Shaffer's Agile Development Demo was cool. It showed how BPEL, BPM integrate and how business rules could be changed quickly. BPM studio integrating with EBusiness Suite. The adapter wizard facilitates metadata browsing. Oracle's Enterprise Repository with dependency analysis and BAM's integration with ADF was informative. Bottomline is now Developers can do BAM development with JDeveloper, including BAM simulation.

14. Back to Thomas Kurian's - components of Oracle Application Grid:
JRockit - high speed JVM with predictable performance, better garbage collection and improved latency.
Weblogic Application Server: JPA (Toplink), Web Services, Security and JSF Development support.
Coherence: Allows a Java Program to fetch data base rows into an in-memory grid. This is very cool stuff and I want to try this "at home".

These 3 components with the advances in workload management, clustering with Tuxedo gives what looks like the main components of Oracle Application Grid.

15. The coherence data grid was featured. The garbage collection shows a pause. Next JRockit's JVM performance was shown. How do you stop "show-stoppers". JRockit's "Real Time" garbage collection mitigates this. This is done by setting configurable parameters.
-Web Logic Application Control is impressive.

16. Oracle JRockit Real Time is very impressive numbers. This sets several record for transaction processing.

17. Oracle Coherence storing 1.7TB/second sustained data access. This is phenomenol.

18. Oracle Tuxedo's numbers are very impressive - too less time to write about them.

19. Oracle Identity Manager and Role Manager:

20. Identity Analytics: Access and Identity Auditing.

21. OID stores 2Billion Directory Entries (as many people in China), 50MM users can log in simultaneously !!

22. Java Tuning Pack with JRockit Mission Control:

23. SOA Governance

24. Finally the Fusion Middleware Customers were shown. It seems BEA has done very well for Oracle and have added a lot of cutting-edge customers.

Developing an error handling framework using Oracle BPEL and BAM

2008-08-15T14:02:00.022-05:00

In this article, that I am writing with a colleague of mine, we show how to develop an error handling framework using Oracle BPEL and BAM. Saumitra Chattopadhyay is an Integration Architect in Deloitte Consulting's Oracle Fusion Middleware Practice with over 15 years experience in Oracle Applications Development and Integration, and over 6 years implementing Middleware Solutions. Saumitra has developed an innovative solution that uses components of SOA Suite in a very efficient way - that we are show-casing here.

Overview
An efficient error handling framework is essential for the success of any enterprise level Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) integration project. This article shows the development of a framework that integrates a real time dash board, error handling and alerts using Oracle Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) tools

This common error handing framework can be used for auditing and error reporting for services and interfaces developed using Oracle BPEL/ESB, as well as extensions to the Oracle EBusiness Suite developed using other tools. The auditing component allows staff to quickly view the run history of interfaces and other services. The error management component allows users to view errors reported by the BPEL/ESB framework and other services.

Approach
The exception framework consists of several Oracle BAM objects that are utilized by BPEL/ESB services and other non BPEL services. This allows each BPEL service to report auditing information, errors, and basic reporting data in a consistent manner while leveraging code re-use. For each BAM object defined, there is also a corresponding BPEL/ESB service exposed as a web service that allows non-BPEL/ESB processes to report audit and error information to the framework.
This framework also sends notifications to the appropriate roles, in case of any error. The BAM report and dashboard incorporates features - so that only users with the appropriate authorization and authentication permissions will have access to the functionality.

Design Assumptions
This solution is architected using the following assumptions:
· All BPEL services will submit error or audit information to the framework using the BAM objects defined as part of this specification.
· Applications other than BPEL processes that wish to submit errors to the framework have two options :
a. Calling a standard SOAP web service with an XML payload to submit their data.
b. Writing the audit & error information in a central table, this in turn will be synced with the BAM using Enterprise link.
· Email notifications will be sent out when errors are encountered. Notification contact information will be stored in the BAM schema. One or many contacts will be possible for each type of error.
· A detailed error table will be created in a separate schema. This will store the detail errors generated by the interfaces
· Interfaces and extensions developed using non-BPEL tools will populate the central exception table. This is important for a project with a large Oracle EBusiness Suite development component
· Errors in BPEL process will be captured in BAM by sensors
· Errors in non BPEL process will be captured in a central error table
· Data from the error table will be sent to BAM using Enterprise Link
· Error report will be published through BAM dashboard on real time basis
· Error email notification will be sent through BAM alerts

BPEL Process Error Scenario
In all situations, BPEL services or processes will report errors to the framework using the supplied BAM objects. In a BPEL process environment, errors can occur in the following broad three categories:1. Errors in adapters: They are generated by the adapter framework itself. The handling of errors is different for inbound or outbound interaction. In either case, when these errors happen, BPEL sends the error message to BAM using sensors.
2. Errors in BPEL processes: Two types of errors can happen within the BPEL process.
Technical errors: Any activity can generate some error while executing. They can be caught directly through the use of the built-in try/catch mechanism and the error can be reported using the standard BAM sensor technique.
Business process errors: Any Partnerlink may incur a business process error (e.g. Credit Check could not be performed for a person). These errors can be captured in BPEL process and be reported to BAM using sensor.
The calling BPEL process must assemble all of the relevant error information prior to passing the data to the BAM sensor.
3. Errors in non BPEL processes
In any integration project, we need to develop a significant amount of services in the end application which in turn can be invoked as web services from BPEL. These services are developed using the core technology used by that application. For example, if we are integrating E-Business Suite with other applications, we need to develop some services using PL/SQL and the scheduler (Concurrent Manager). Errors within concurrent processes cannot manipulate the BAM objects directly.

It is expected that one of two approaches will be used with any concurrent process (PL/SQL) code developed:
· Calling a standard SOAP Web service with an XML payload to submit their data.
· Writing the audit and error information in a central table, and this will be synched with the BAM using Enterprise link.

BPEL Process Audit Scenario

Capturing audit information of the interfaces is very important to provide performance/load/downtime statistics, as well as regulatory in some environments.
Users are typically interested in knowing:
a. Min, max & average transactions passing through the interface on daily/weekly/monthly basis.
b. Peak time for any interface
c. Transactions failed by day/month
d. Min, max & average time taken by Interface
Audit information can be captured in the BPEL process using sensors. At least two sensors, one at the beginning of the flow and another at the end, are required. In addition to this, audit information can be captured from other important activities within a BPEL process.

BPEL Process Report Scenario
In addition to Error and Audit information, users are interested to see reports based on the business data passed through the interfaces. For example in a purchasing interface, users may like to know: Maximum PO amount approved in a day, Total PO Amount approved/rejected.
To get these kinds of reports, we have to capture business data in a report object from BPEL activity using sensors.
Figure 1. Integration Architecture
Error Correction & Resubmit
After receiving the error alert/notification, in some cases users will like to correct the data in the interface table and resubmit the process from the middleware, instead of resending the message from the end applications. For example, let us say an EDI850 (an Inbound Sales order) sent by a customer fails to create Order in your ERP system, due to some data issue in your system. In this case it may not be feasible to ask the customer to resend the same document.
In this case user need a correction from where users will be able to query the error records, analyze the errors, correct the errors (if necessary) in the interface staging table(s) and finally resubmit the process.
Most ERP applications store the inbound data in the interface tables before importing into the base table. If that is not the case, a staging/interface table can be created in the middleware DB server. In either case, error transactions are flagged as ‘Error’ in the interface table. BPEL instance ID is also stored in the interface table, this helps to link records in the Error table with the records in the interface table.

A correction form can be created with the following features:
· User will be able to query records using, Unique Business document number (e.g. Order Number), or BPEL Instance Id.
· Records will be displayed in the form, along with the detail description of the error.
· Users can correct the fields which are allowed to update
· Finally they can resubmit the transaction.
· BPEL Resubmit API can be called from the form to resubmit the old instance
· Or a new BPEL Instance can be started.

Conclusion
Oracle BAM Active Studio is a robust web based reporting tool for creating and delivering reports. From BAM Active Studio, power users can share reports with other users and create alerts for report delivery using email. Reports are either real-time reports, with live data updating on screen, or point-in-time reports. BAM dashboard can also be linked to any enterprise portal.
BPEL is integrated with BAM on real-time basis using sensors. Combining the powers of BPEL & BAM, we can create an efficient and user friendly integration framework that can serve multiple purposes.

Tuning Messages in an Oracle E-Business Suite – ESB Integration Environment

2008-04-14T17:53:00.005-05:00

Introduction and Scope:
In a large scale A2A (application-to-application) integration of Oracle E-Business Suite into an Enteprise Application Framework using Oracle SOA Suite, let us consider the sub-case of publication service (mainly Oracle Project Accounting with some other data elements). This service publishes data elements Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), from where five other applications subscribe to the data elements being published. The focus of this article is to show an iterative process in tuning the messages generated in an event driven architecture framework. Figure 1 shows the conceptual architecture. The focus of this paper is on message sizing and not so much on service invocation and related topics such as adapter selection etc.

Event Driven Architecture and Messaging: In an event driven architecture, changes to data elements can be transferred in real-time/near real-time through an ESB framework. These data changes are converted into a message that is published to the ESB. In older file transfer based integration methods, delta transactions were simply collected and written to a file and this file was transferred to the target system(s). In most cases, the file-size was never an issue. In an event driven architecture and an ESB framework, message sizing and volume of messages is one of the key design decisions to be made. In most cases, business events cannot be changed, so the focus is on tuning message sizing and throughput. To do this well data cardinatity and affinity needs to be closely examined and implemented in the final design.

Consideration on Integration Design Patterns:
In this scenario of integrating N+ Enteprise Applications, the canonical model design pattern works well – it allows domain value mapping as well as dynamically addition of new subscribers. In this case, while designing the publication service, we started off with 5 subscription services; however that number can change dynamically without any major code rework. It is usually worthwhile to invest time upfront in designing the canonical model and validate rigorously the business requirements that drive the design of the service.

Oracle EBusiness Suite Integration Repository:
The Oracle Integration Repository maintained at http://irep.oracle.com/ lists integration methods available for each product family in the EBusiness Suite with the most common choices being Concurrent Programs, EDI, Interface Views, Java, Open Interfaces, PL/SQL, Web Services and XML Gateway Maps. In our case of the outbound interface in an ESB framework (publishing to the ESB) - our business requirements drove us to extract data from different product families and combine them into a large message. We chose to develop a system of views and triggers as explained later on in the section.
Data Elements to be published:
The design of the publication service is driven largely by the requirements of the subscribers. However, reading between the tea-leaves and trying to forecast future data needs can often pay off by avoiding redesign of the publication service in the future. Data elements from Human Resources, General Ledger, Purchasing, Project Accounting had to be combined into one large message to be published to the ESB. Design Approach 1: Complex SQL View and Staging Tables
In the first iteration of the design, we used a combination of views, PL/SQL program units and a parent-child relationship structure created between 4 staging tables. Table 5 has to retrieve a data set based on a Project ID field. This query has to navigate the parent-child relationship between 4 tables for every result-set. A trace of the adapter code found a lot of fetches, even with bind variables; it was obvious there was some room for efficiency here. We traced the SQL calls made to the database using traditional Oracle database tracing methods.

The key point to note here the amount of joins the adapter code had to do to put together a result set that could be transformed into an XML message. This led to a significant difference between SQL elapsed time and actual execution time. This can increase even more if the Oracle Application Server and Database Server are in different locations and network latency can come into play – and applies to every message published. The average message size was 54KB and we averaged about 10000 messages per day.

Design Approach 2: Adding GROUP BY Clause
In the second iteration, we changed the SQL of the Delta Transactions View, and added a GROUP BY clause. This was done to reduce the number of transactions populated in the cost transactions table. The message size reduced to about 40KB, and we averaged about 15,000 messages per day.

Design Approach 3: Flattened Table Structure with simplified logic
To reduce the recursive SQL and the joins coming from the parent-child relationship, we decided to created a flattened (essentially a de-normalized table) where data elements are referenced by project id and date. The temp table creates only records that do not have an ID in table 1. Once a message is published on the ESB, we do not need to store the same data elements in the temp table, and let the ESB queues and its persistence take care of managing data consumption by the publishers.
We found our messages reduced to 14KB and while the number of messages went up, we were able to process 50000 messages in 2 hours. This was well within the acceptable processing window.

Estimating message size:
We used two measurements to determine message size. In an ESB environment, a message is a combination of data elements and an XML structure (tags). The data elements sizing is calculated from the tables where the data originates – eg. VARCHAR2(60) + DATE + NUMBER – one can take the maximum possible and assume that as the upper limit for the data elements. To the bytes obtained from this, we added the size of the XML tags relevant to the data mapping. Since XML is text, this is relatively uncomplicated. However, this is an estimate and not the actual amount that will pass through the ESB, where transport methods and protocols can add their overhead to a message.

Conclusion:
Tuning messages can start from the data extraction layer. Depending on the complexity of the data sets, and related affinity, a publication service can use traditional SQL tuning methods to enable adequate throughout of messages through the adapter. Depending on the integration environment and number of end-points, a high-volume of small sized messages may be processed faster than a smaller number of, but larger sized messages. Message sizing is a key element in an event driven architecture.

Architectural Considerations (end)

2008-04-09T14:47:00.003-05:00

Summarizing Key Differences:
In summary, we have covered key concepts of JMS and Oracle ESB and in comparing the two approaches (traditional file-based point-to-point) integration with a JMS based integration, some key differences are:

Re-usability of Service/Data: The Pub-Sub Canonical pattern allows for re-use, and this is valuable in an Enterprise with different applications having System of Records.

Content Based Routing: Data contained within XML messages are distributed from the source application to a target application using content based services. The process of defining rules to route messages based on the message’s content, is called content-based routing. Routing rules reduce the amount of logic needed at the RDBMS tier – instead bringing the logic to the middle-tier – flexible per each routing. Also, content-based routing means basically the contents of a message are analyzed before a service is invoked. This can provide a high-level of sophistication – i.e.: Invoke an Oracle Database Adapter if the data element does not need to go to an Applications environment, but can go directly to an Oracle table, bypassing API’s and other integration approaches.

Web Services Security and Governance: As is observed, in the overall architecture, the loose decoupling poses some questions around security, which groups and organizations have different levels of data access. The Governance component around it – helps define System of Record and helps understand what the Master Data Systems are. For example, an HR Application is probably the Employee Master, as would a Sales Application be a Customer Master. It can be a critical success factor to architect and resolve these matters before the implementation, so that roadblocks are worked out. Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM) may work for most organizations or you may have to use a combination of OWSM and some other tool existing and bridge them appropriately.

Document Transformation: This concept, with the JMS concept is really the backbone of sharing of data and transformation from one scheme to another.

Adapter Based Services: Adapters facilitate the communication of messages and data between the JMS and different systems. A brief summary of some adapters supported by Oracle ESB are:

File/FTP Adapter Service: The inbound adapter reads data from a local or remote file-system transforms the message into an XML message and sends it to the ESB when a new text file appears in the system. The reverse happens in the case of an outbound adapter service – it transforms the contents of XML messages to a text file and writes them to a local/remote file system.
Database Adapter Service: An inbound database adapter service sends an XML message to Oracle ESB when an SQL insert, update or delete operation is performed against a database. An outbound database adapter transforms the contents of an XML message into a SQL insert, update, or delete operation on the target database.
JMS Adapter Service: In case your environment has more than one JMS platform, then the JMS adapter services is needed to write to and read from a Java Message Service external to the Oracle Enterprise Service Bus. Like the other adapters, these are also outbound and inbound services.
AQ Adapter Service: An inbound AQ adapter service sends an XML message to the Oracle ESB when a new message is received by an Oracle Advanced Queuing single or multi-consumer queue. An outbound AQ adapter services sends messages from Oracle ESB to an Oracle Advanced Queuing single or multi-consumer queue.
Oracle Applications Adapter Service: This adapter services is also inbound and outbound and is similar to the Oracle Database Adapter, but is more aligned with using Oracle Applications Interface methods – such as Interface Tables, API’s, Concurrent Programs etc.
MQ Series Adapter Service: This is a native MQseries adapter service (inbound and outbound). It provides the message communication between the Oracle ESB and a message queue.

In Conclusion:
Integration around an Enterprise Service Bus can be the first foundational step in an all-out SOA effort. The core technologies used in ESB architecture are Java Messaging Service, XML based XLT transformation, platform independent adapter services. The big benefits are reuse of services, platform independence, and optimization of system resources and reduced integration points.

Siebel Best Practice Center - Webcast Replay.

2008-03-12T08:35:00.003-05:00

In February, OTN had a webcast show-casing Siebel-SOA Suite Integration. This webcast is now available for replay for those who may have missed it.

The replay is now available from the Siebel Best Practice Center - Webcast Replay.

The next Siebel Webcast is scheduled for April - please stay tuned to join OTN to learn more about "Consuming Siebel Web Services in WebCenter".

Architectural Considerations (Continued)

2008-03-04T10:02:00.006-06:00

Table 3: Subscribing Oracle Applications from a JMS Framework:

Step	Description	Rationale
1.	Gather and Analyze Business Requirements	This is the main driver behind your integration approach
2.	Identify Source System/Application	This identifies the system of record (ideally in most cases) where data elements are being changed
3.	Identify Target System/Applications	This identifies the applications that need the changed data elements to do its function. These can be several applications. As a subscriber, the interest would be in knowing if the elements changed are available in a canonical format on the JMS. If not, either an existing canonical model has to added elements to, or a new canonical model designed. In keeping with principle of re-use, unless a message size is too large for the JMS to keep up, in most cases, one would try to use an existing canon.
4.	Identify Data Elements to be subscribed	This breaks down the data transfer to business elements (invoices, payments, employee job description) that are going to be subscribed to.
5.	Identify System Elements to be subscribed	Identify sources where data will be stored in the source after subscription – Tables, Views, Files etc.
6.	Identify frequency and volume of change	This helps design an interface that needs to be activated/run/fired daily, several times a day or weekly. And a suitable time-period for data exchange. Identify any processes causing mass updates and design for them appropriately – maybe an ETL process is appropriate. As a subscriber, you will be constrained by the design of the publishing process to a degree, but until you consume your data, as explained before, data does not get lost from a topic or a topic-queue bridge.
7.	Install and configure Oracle Applications Adapters, or Oracle Database Adapters	Enables transfer between the Oracle Applications environment to the ESB/JMS environment. Converts the changed records to a messaging format. The Adapters enable transfer of data changes into a message that is placed on a queue or a topic. The Adapter will need a schema owner in Oracle Applications that can read the tables handling the changed record. You may have to think through the Security Aspects and Data Governance here, or think of using a utility like Oracle Web Services Manager to maintain security and governance over changed data.
8.	Architect or use existing design patterns for JMS objects	These would be deciding the design of JMS Topics and JMS Queues and if any bridging would be required.
9.	Architect Canonical Message forms	In most cases Canonical forms taken by a message would be 1. Request canonical form and 2. Response canonical form. Messages need to have unique identifiers from each source system to enable accountability and tracking of transactions and message publishing and consumption.
10.	Identify Oracle Applications Interfaces (API) appropriate for the data transaction	Identify what Oracle provided interface works best for this subscription and its type. The logic would be the same as a traditional inbound interface. If no API is available, then you may to write one – this should be a rare case. In most cases, with 11i Apps, you would be choosing an Open Interface Table or a PL/SQL Package. In some cases you may choose an XML message map directly if available, but with an Adapter, an API that gives you changed records is sufficient to transfer the data from the ESB.
11.	Develop staging tables/intermediate tables	These are normally a mirror copy of the Oracle Applications Transactional Tables/Core Tables with some additional columns for logging and error tracking. This is a temporary step before the data is sent to the core transactional tables of Oracle Applications.
12.	Document Transformation (Map the XML canonical format to changed rows (table format)	The XML message is converted into changed rows and with the help of the Adapter – the changed rows are inserted into the staging/intermediate tables. This is done for logging, and also as a final step before calling the API’s mentioned in step 8 to insert data into transactional tables. This can be done visually in JDeveloper using the XML Style Sheet Transformation (XSLT) mapped. This is a key step to understand in the re-use and interchange since using XSLT – one can transform XML schemas to different applications needing the same data, multiple times if needed.
13.	Design for dependencies	You may have to analyses code, design, workaround for dependencies such as sequence numbers, de-active triggers if any in target tables and activate them. In some cases, some Oracle Applications Alerts may have to be disabled.
14.	Confirm subscribing	This is part of the adapter service process. At this point control is handed back to the Oracle Applications environment and the JMS topics and queues are notified that a successful subscription was completed. The subscription process ensures the adapter is able to extract data elements from the canonical form and enable communication to the end-object – table, view or file system.
15.	Develop validation and translation program(s) – Traditional Approach	This is mostly done in PL/SQL to validate the data in the staging table as well as perform as business logic validation developed in the requirements before calling the API to insert the changed rows into the core/transactional table. An example of a translation is - , St. could mean Street. – in an address field. An example of a validation is Social Security Number must be in a format xxx-xx-xxxx. The validation program may correct this format.
16.	Develop validation and translation program(s)	Oracle’s ESB supported conditional actions for complex routing rules. These rules are declarative, not procedural and are generated by the GUI available as part of the Oracle SOA Suite.
17.	Develop error/logging table	This is needed to identify errors after the subscription is completed - during the validation and translation stages.
18.	Schedule the interface	Depending on the organizational support model – you have several options here – Oracle Concurrent Manager, or an external scheduler. The validation program in step 13 is called. The PL/SQL program can be called directly by the Database or Oracle Applications Adapter as well.
19.	Track the errors and solve them	Errors can be inserted into a logging table and a Concurrent Request output or an Oracle Alert can to email someone responsible for correcting the data element. An external scheduler may also do the same function. You may also have an Enterprise Wide Monitoring tool to enable monitoring of the error/logging table. This depends to a large degree on the support and operational model in the organization.

Architectural Considerations (continued)

2008-02-21T08:56:00.004-06:00

The Message based Integration Approach:

Now that we understand some core principles of JMS, let us look at the typical steps undertaken to integrate Oracle Applications into a JMS based Middleware framework.

Table 2: Publishing from Oracle Applications to a JMS Framework:

Step	Description	Rationale
1.	Gather and Analyze Business Requirements	This is the main driver behind your integration approach
2.	Identify Source System/Application	This identifies the system of record (ideally in most cases) where data elements are being changed
3.	Identify Target System/Applications	This identifies the applications that need the changed data elements to do its function. These can be several applications.
4.	Identify Data Elements to be published	This breaks down the data transfer to business elements (invoices, payments, employee job description) that need to be published
5.	Identify System Elements to be published	Identify sources where data is stored in the source – Tables, Views, Files etc.
6.	Identify frequency and volume of change	This helps design an interface that needs to be activated/run/fired daily, several times a day or weekly. And a suitable time-period for data exchange. Identify any processes causing mass updates and design for them appropriately – maybe an ETL process is appropriate.
7.	Install and configure Oracle Applications Adapters, or Oracle Database Adapters	Enables transfer between the Oracle Applications environment to the ESB/JMS environment. Converts the changed records to a messaging format. The Adapters enable transfer of data changes into a message that is placed on a queue or a topic. The Adapter will need a schema owner in Oracle Applications that can read the tables handling the changed record. You may have to think through the Security Aspects and Data Governance here, or think of using a utility like Oracle Web Services Manager to maintain security and governance over changed data.
8.	Architect design patterns and canonical message forms	Design patterns for JMS Topics and Queues and if any bridging would be required. In most cases Canonical forms taken by a message would be 1. Request canonical form and 2. Response canonical form.
9.	Identify Oracle Applications Interfaces (API) appropriate for the data transaction	Identify what Oracle provided interface works best for this extraction and its type. If no API is available, then you may to write one – this should be a rare case. In most cases, with 11i Apps, you would be choosing an Open Interface Table or a PL/SQL Package. In some cases you may choose an XML message map directly if available, but with an Adapter, an API that gives you changed records is sufficient to transfer the data to the ESB.
10.	Decide data extraction method	Depending on data-volume and latency requirements, one could design a trigger, or have a materialized view and its log table capture changed data elements.
11.	Develop data extraction routines, and schedule the publishing process.	You could have a BPEL process kick off the extraction or a scheduler such as Oracle Applications Concurrent Manager or an external scheduler.
12.	Develop staging tables/intermediate tables	These are normally a mirror copy of the Oracle Applications Transactional Tables/Core Tables. This is a temporary step before the message is dispatched to the ESB/JMS environment.
13.	Map the changed records to the XML canonical format	The relational form of rows is converted into a message with its attributes to enable transportation on the JMS queue/topics as relevant. This is a key design step, since the subscribers of this data need this map, and really one of the backbones behind the reusability. This can be done visually in JDeveloper using the XML Style Sheet Transformation (XSLT) mapper.
14.	Design for dependencies	You may have to analyses code, design, workaround for dependencies such as sequence numbers, de-active triggers if any in target tables and activate them. In some cases, some Oracle Applications Alerts may have to be disabled.
15.	Confirm publishing	This is part of the adapter service process. The publication process ensures the adapter is able to extract data elements from the source - table, view or file system and publish the result set to the appropriate JMS object (Topic or Queue or a bridged object as appropriate.

Oracle Fusion Middleware Labs at Collaborate 08

2008-02-15T17:47:00.002-06:00

I wanted to share Oracle Corporation has an exciting lab schedule planned out for Fusion Middleware (SOA Suite) out at Collaborate in Denver. The labs will be held at the Hyatt. All labs are presented by experts from Oracle, these hands-on labs are free for registered Collaborate attendees. Oracle will provide laptops, network and servers for these free hands-on labs. The sessions will include end-to-end demos, highlighting how multiple Oracle Fusion Middleware components integrate with and extend these packaged applications. No prior knowledge of BPEL or J2EE is required.

Audience: Application Developers, and Application TechnologistsDate/Time: 9 sessions spread over Monday April14, Tuesday April 15, and Wednesday April 16.

For reservations, you can use the following link, Seats are limited, so please be sure to reserve your seat today !!
http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=2931347&Act=69

The summary is:

PeopleSoft Enterprise Section: Service Enable PeopleSoft with Oracle SOA Suite
For Collaborate registered attendees, this is a FREE 2-hour hands-on session to create BPEL processes that integrate with PeopleSoft using Web Services.

Oracle E-Business Suite Section: Service Enable Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle SOA Suite
For Collaborate registered attendees, this is a FREE 2-hour hands-on session to create BPEL processes that integrate with E-Business Suite using Web Services.

Siebel Section: Service Enable Siebel with Oracle SOA Suite
For Collaborate registered attendees, this is a FREE 2-hour hands-on session to create BPEL processes that integrate with Siebel using Web Services.

Architectural Considerations (continued)

2008-02-08T22:32:00.000-06:00

Figure 3: Topic showing a Publish-Subscribe Model

Anatomy of a Message:

One of the cornerstones of a message-based architecture is converting of data elements into a message format. To understand how messages work, let us review the basic components of a JMS message.

Header: Header is mandatory and contains information about pre-defined fields used by clients and providers to identify and route messages. These fields are: JMSDestination, JMSDeliveryMode, JMSExpiration, JMSPriority, JMSMessageID, JMSTimestamp, JMSCorrelationID, JMSReplyTo, JMSType, and JMSRedelivered.
Properties (optional): If we need values beyond the header fields, then this is used. Some examples may be to provide compatibility with other messaging systems, or use them to create message selectors. They may include information about which process created the data, timestamp of creation, processing instructions, sorting and routing of messages.

Body (optional): This is the part where our data-elements are stored and communicated. There are five types of message body formats. These are TextMessage, MapMessage, BytesMessage, StreamMessage and ObjectMessage. These forms allow data exchange in different forms and provide compatibility with existing messaging formats.

In the Oracle SOA Suite ESB component, an integration developer does not have to worry about the underlings of JMS, however the theory is explained here to present the concepts. Messages written to a topic can be bridged to a queue for load-balancing between multiple consumers. Queues can also provide optional persistence for guaranteed delivery.
The key point to note is that a JMS message is not a command; it transfers data and tells the receiver that something has happened. A message doesn't dictate what the recipient should do and the sender doesn't wait for a response. This decouples the sender from the receiver, making messaging systems and their messages far more dynamic and flexible than request-reply paradigms. So during the design phase, architecting the message’s canonical forms is very important and a critical success factor in message based communication. Two commonly used canonical forms are – Request Canonical Form and Response Canonical Form.

Architectural Considerations (continued)

2008-02-03T09:55:00.000-06:00

Key Features in the JMS API in the J2EE 1.3 platform relevant to integration:
This is not meant to be a deep-dive on the JMS API - rather I'm just presenting high-level technical concepts:

Application clients, Enterprise JavaBeans TM (EJB) components, and Web components can send or synchronously receive a JMS message.

Application clients can in addition receive JMS messages asynchronously. (Applets, however, are not required to support the JMS API.)

A new kind of enterprise bean, the message-driven bean, enables the asynchronous consumption of messages.

A JMS provider may optionally implement concurrent processing of messages by message-driven beans.

Message sends and receives can participate in distributed transactions.

When a persistent message reaches the physical destination, the message server must place it in a persistent data-store (typically a relational database).
If a message server goes down for any reason, it recovers the message and delivers it to the appropriate consumers.

Point-to-Point and Publish/Subscribe Messaging Approaches:
To confirm fully to the JMS API specification, a J2EE provider must implement two approaches to messaging: point-to-point and publish/subscribe. Oracle ESB is a fully compliant JMS API environment and provides for both approaches.

Point-to-Point (PTP) Messaging:
This approach uses message queues, senders and receivers. Each message is addressed to a specific “queue”, and receiving clients extract messages from the queue(s) established to hold their messages. Queues retain all messages sent to them until the messages are consumed or until the messages expire. Use PTP messaging when every message you send must be processed successfully by one consumer.

Key points to note in PTP Messaging:

Each message can have only one consumer.

A sender and a receiver of a message can be asynchronous. The receiver can fetch the message whether or not it was running when the client sent the message.

The receiver acknowledges the successful processing of a message.
Use of PTP methodology is recommended when a message has only one consumer.

Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) Messaging:
In this approach, each client application addresses messages to a specific topic. A message publisher and a message subscriber are anonymous from each other and can dynamically publish or subscribe to the messaging content. This is an example of what “loose coupling” is all about. Topics retain messages until they are distributed to the one or more consumers.

Key points to note in Pub/Sub Messaging:

Each message can have multiple consumers.
A client that subscribes to a topic can consume only messages published after the client has created a subscription, and the subscriber must continue to be active in order for it to consume messages.
A JMS API concept called “durable subscriptions” allows client applications to receive messages even they are inactive.

Use of Pub/Sub methodology is recommended when a message has multiple consumers.

Architectural Considerations (Continued)

2008-01-30T21:33:00.000-06:00

Figure 3: Application Integration based on a Java Messaging Service (JMS) Architecture

Integration approach using Java Message Service (JMS) Technology:
Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is built on JMS technology, and we consider the ESB as the first foundational step in a re-usable architecture. JMS is an Application Programming Interface (API) that was designed by Sun Microsystems and its partner companies. In addition to loose coupling, distributed communication and platform neutralness, JMS also provides asynchronous communication. The JMS API defines a common set of interfaces and associated semantics that allow programs written in the Java programming language to communicate with other messaging implementations. JMS is based on the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE).

As a core design principle, the sender and receiver of messages do not have to available, nor know platform details about each other’s architectures, other than message format(s). With the J2EE 1.3 platform, message beans enable asynchronous consumption of messages. A JMS provider can optionally implement concurrent processing of messages by message-driven beans. For more details on JMS, readers are advised to refer to documentation by Sun Microsystems, while we cover some key concepts here.

A simplified high-level architecture showing an integration effort built around a JMS backbone is shown in Figure 3. Key observations are – interfaces are reduced, data elements are combined into reusable messages and exchanged (published or subscribed) on the JMS based Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

Architectural Considerations (Continued)

2008-01-30T21:20:00.000-06:00

Figure 2: Application Integration using traditional point based integration, a few years out

An Inconvenient Truth – Point based Integration:
Point based integration (or point-to-point – depending on how you define it) is a direction the industry is shifting away from. It is the method IT shops and practitioners have used for many years – file-based, remote procedure calls, ftp etc. It is the proverbial IT duct-tape, and while point-based integration does not directly cause global warming in keeping up with spirits of our times, however some top pet peeves are:

No re-use: The analogy that comes to mind is that of a chemical factory with different chemicals flowing from one tank to another with dedicated pipes - each time a chemical has to be transferred a point-based integration is the equivalent of making holes in a tank containing chemicals and connecting the tank to another with a dedicated pipe. Instead of chemicals – data elements flow in these pipes. Anytime two chemical containers (applications) need to exchange data – we lay a new pipe – i.e.: create a new interface.

Wasted System Resources: One could rationalize that hardware is relatively inexpensive, but the rationale to sometimes pull the same data 10 times a day and transfer those to different systems causes more activity on the backend, and IT organizations end up with a complex method to schedule interfaces. In reality, what one SQL query may do – is done sometimes 10 times, with maybe a data element here or there.

For example, an outbound interface from HR and Payroll may contain EMPID, SS#, ADDRESS, JOB-TITLE elements.

Another outbound interface may contain EMPID, SS#, ADDRESS, JOB-TITLE, COMPENSATION, LAST_JOB_CHANGE.

A third one may contain EMPID, SS#, and COMPENSATION. And these interfaces may be replicated to 5 other systems. It does not take a rocket scientist to see all of these can be combined into one SQL query and one outbound. But the point-based method makes it impossible. Also, IT staff gets allocated to other projects, consultants go somewhere else and the next person responsible for the interface may or may not use an existing one. The mentality of “If it isn’t broken – don’t fix it” sometimes prevails and people will code a new interface.

Multiple Integration Points: Unless you are a fan of complexity, keeping things less complicated always seems to work as a basic integration rule. Point –based integration seems to proliferate integration points as systems grown and business needs evolve.

Application Upgrade Dependence: With much of the validation (business) logic resident in the RDBMS tier, upgrading becomes an issue. Even a simple SQL package changing can wreak havoc on integration, performance, and data-integrity. A complex architecture with multiple interfaces obviously can become a major draw on testing, resourcing and future functionality.

Architectural Considerations (continued)

2008-01-29T21:48:00.000-06:00

Platform Dependence, Tight Coupling and Dependency on Relational Database Backends:
The above approach works well in the case of systems with different back-ends relational databases. This may be, for example, an interface connecting a Peoplesoft HR System with a DB2 database and an Oracle Financials System with an Oracle database. A similar process can be executed for information exchanged outside the Enterprise with external systems. Enterprises with similar back ends sometimes use Oracle DB Links between two Oracle databases and execute queries remotely. This is an example of a Remote Method Invocation. As observed, these are tightly coupled systems and while that can be an advantage, over time such interfaces tend to spread all across the Enterprise, and while all are tightly coupled, it leads to very little re-use of components or data flows. Figure 1 shows a point-to-point traditional integration method. As an Enterprise’s needs grow, a few years out, this leads to repeated re-work, very little re-use and a very tightly coupled architecture. Each interface may need a specific skill set to support and from a leadership standpoint, this is a tough problem to have.

Figure 1: Application Integration using traditional point based integration

Architectural Considerations (continued)

2008-01-25T20:05:00.000-06:00

The Traditional Integration Approach (Point-to-Point):

The traditional integration approaches tend to be database centric in most cases, and this depends to a degree on the volume of data transacted, changed and ultimately transferred from a source system to a target system. Some of the typical steps and approaches are described here.

Table 1: The Traditional Integration Approach

Step	Description	Rationale	Direction
	Gather and Analyze Business Requirements	This is the main driver behind your integration approach	Inbound/Outbound
	Identify Source System/Application	This identifies the system of record (ideally in most cases) where data elements are being changed	Inbound/Outbound
	Identify Target System/Application	This identifies the application that needs the changed data elements to do its function	Inbound/Outbound
	Identify Data Elements to be moved between Source and Target Systems	This breaks down the data transfer to business elements (invoices, payments, employee job description)	Inbound/Outbound
	Identify and document known processing rules, translation rules, filtering rules, foreign key rules, derivation rules and default values.	This helps understand if you need to build translation logic into your code. For example, a phone number with xxx-xxx-xxxx format may need to be translated to (xxx)xxx-xxxx format on a target system. Similarly understand requirements around processing rules, filtering rules, foreign key rules, derivation rules and default values.	Inbound
	Identify Direction of data flow	Helps decided if the interface is outbound (from Oracle Applications to an external system) or inbound (to Oracle Applications)	Inbound/Outbound
	Identify frequency and volume of change	This helps design an interface that needs to be activated/run/fired daily, several times a day or weekly. And a suitable time-period for data exchange. Identify any processes causing mass updates and design for them appropriately.	Inbound/Outbound
	Identify System Source Elements	Identify sources where data is stored in the source – Tables, Views, Files etc.	Inbound/Outbound
	Identify Target System Elements	Understand if an Oracle Applications Core Table is available to receive the data. Build a customized table, if one does not exist.	Inbound/Outbound
	Map Source System Elements to Target System Elements	Map columns, fields and attributes between the source and target applications. Identify and document columns, fields and attributes that may not have a direct match and plan to build validation or translation logic around those elements	Inbound/Outbound
	Identify Oracle Applications Interfaces (API) appropriate for the data transaction	Identify what Oracle provided interface works best for this integration and its type. The types available are PL/SQL, Open Interface Tables, XML Gateway Map or a Web Service. The traditional route used to be PL/SQL packages and Open Interface Tables.	Inbound/Outbound
	Decide data extract format	Data exchange format such as .CSV file, or fixed length text file , or a delimited text file	Inbound/Outbound
	Decide data extraction method	Depending on data-volume and latency requirements, one could design a trigger, or have a materialized view and its log table capture changed data elements.	Inbound/Outbound
	Develop data extraction routines	Write SQL queries or a PL/SQL program or an equivalent platform specific method to write changed records to a suitable file format.	Inbound/Outbound
	Develop interface transfer method	This is a combination of a scheduler extracting the data to a file and transferring the file to the Oracle Applications environment.	Inbound/Outbound
	Develop staging tables	These are normally a mirror copy of the Oracle Applications Transactional Tables/Core Tables with some additional columns and are built to ensure data moves cleanly into this table before being input to the Transactional/Core Tables.	Inbound/Outbound
	Develop PL/SQL program unit(s)	This program units are coded to accomplishes the following: Data Validation Processing Rules Translation Rules Filtering Rules Foreign Key Rules Derivation Rules Default Values This program unit enters the data into the Staging Table(s). Included in this design is sometimes an error table, and a log-table, where the program makes entries for resolution and logging.	Inbound
	Design for dependencies	You may have to analyses code, design, workaround for dependencies such as sequence numbers, de-active triggers if any in target tables and activate them. In some cases, some Oracle Applications Alerts may have to be disabled.	Inbound
	Schedule the interface	The API described in step 12 is invoked by a scheduler with the appropriate arguments (external or Oracle Applications Concurrent Manager) and data is imported from the staging table into the Oracle Applications Transactional/Core Tables. Sometimes entries have to be staged due to relational dependencies in the core tables and this can be built into the scheduler routine.	Inbound/Outbound
	Validate input data and Error Resolution	Resolve the failed records identified in the errors table described in Step 18. Validate input data by SQL queries or from the relevant application screens.	Inbound/Outbound

Architectural Considerations (continued) -

2008-01-23T23:29:00.000-06:00

Traditionally an implementation of Oracle Applications is commonly done in a phased manner with the following distinct milestones – Solution Definition and Design, Build/Development, Test/QA, and Production. The Solution Design phase gives rise to a list of objects that have to be built or developed – commonly called a RICEW catalog (Reports, Interfaces, Conversions, Extensions and Workflow). Some methodologies combine Workflow into an Extension and call it the RICE catalog, while some methodologies call out Interfaces into a separate phase called Integration that parallels development. To a large degree, that depends on the project complexity and the Enterprise Architecture of the implementation.

Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services:
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a journey and the readiness of each Enterprise is different, and is determined to a large degree by the state and platforms of existing applications, organizational Vision, alignment of Information Technology (IT) and Business Units, and finally Organizational and change management readiness. By itself, this is a complex equation and is out of scope of this publication. While the definition of SOA and the concept of Services Orientation vary in different computing and industry circles, a few guiding principles remain abiding and seem to be commonly accepted by most think-tanks and practices:

Loosely Coupled Applications
Interoperable Applications
Platform Neutralness
Reuse
Open Standards Frameworks

Several schools of thought believe a SOA framework makes full use of commonly used Web Services Protocols such as SOAP, XML, HTTP/HTTPS, WSDL, and UDDI. In the fully orchestrated SOA environment, Web Services are exposed, and typically an XML based UDDI registry publishes Service Descriptions and allows their discovery, Business Events trigger changes and enable transactions and information exchange between loosely coupled systems. Organizations and implementations starting out on their journey to SOA may start off by reducing point-to-point integration to a re-usable architecture build around an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), as the first step in the journey. Once a middleware core is in place, the other components of SOA can follow as a multi-step process.
Scope:

This article focuses on the Integration of Oracle Applications EBusiness Suite 11i into an Enterprise Architecture. It introduces Oracle Applications Interface Design in a Java Message Service (JMS) based framework and compares this methodology with the traditional point-to-point integration methods. This article is meant for technical managers, developers, architects, system designers and project managers who may be looking at their first integration effort around an ESB based framework. The focus is not on the syntax and the tools used, but rather on the approach and an examination of the technologies used and the architectural issues involved. Design of the Software Infrastructure components of Oracle ESB mainly 10G AS is not in scope – and this would have covered designing for load balancing, high-availability and reliability, message sizes, throughput, memory and data structure sizing.

Finally the scope is restricted to interfaces integrating different applications that use a relational database backend. For example, data from a Peoplesoft HR Application system transacting Employee Job-Assignments, Job-History, Personal Information (Address, Social Security) needs to be fed to a Project Management Application that needs Employee Salary Information or Assignment level to calculate Project Costing for employees assigned to projects.

Architectural Considerations for Integration Oracle Applications into a SOA based middleware framework - Introduction

2008-01-20T21:18:00.001-06:00

I recently wrote a white paper comparing point-to-point integration with SOA based integration. The goal of the paper was to cover core technical concepts at a high-level, before delving deeper into a SOA based framework - where a reader tends to get lost in Web Services terms and definitions. This is more true for IT shops with strong PL/SQL centric development methodologies, and often the Java/Web Services teams are seperate from the Oracle Applications development skillset - often knowledge of Oracle EBusiness Suite modules and strong SQL and PL/SQL.

Ongoing, after I'm done presenting this white paper, I hope to take us into the solution at a more detail level, where we can look at examples on integration Oracle SOA Suite with Oracle EBusiness Suite.

I'll cover core concepts here - section by section

Oracle WebCast on BPEL, FMW with Siebel

2008-01-13T22:41:00.000-06:00

I'm excited to share an upcoming Webcast by Oracle Corporation. This is part of a new series and will be providing tips and techniques for Siebel Developers and Fusion Middleware Developers - with the focus on creating Service Oriented Architecture solutions. Experts from Siebel Development, Consulting, Product Development as well as leading System Integrators and customers will be joining us in the exciting learning opportunity.

The registration link is here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/fmw4apps/siebel/webcasts/jan2008.html )

I've also cross-posted this to the SOASIG listserve. This promises to be an exciting event and I'll share more details here in the next week.

This is also meant to annouce the the availability of the OTN Best Practice Center - Siebel and Fusion Middleware. This is at: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/fmw4apps/siebel/index.html

This Best Practice Center covers:

five 20 page long tutorials (also see: http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/fusion_middleware/fusion/index.html)
expert blog contributions

Oracle plans to have similar centers for Oracle EBusiness Suite and Peoplesoft Applications, with Siebel as a pilot. Email me for feedback that we can take to Oracle directly on this.

ACE Director Initiation

2008-01-11T20:14:00.001-06:00

In this blog I intend to discuss about different Oracle technologies and solutions I've worked with and am working with, as part of the Oracle ACE Director program.

A little bit about me - I currently work as a Technical Manager at Deloitte Consulting. In this role I get to deliver multiple technologies and solutions in the Oracle Ebusiness, Peoplesoft and JDEdwards space. I'm currently working as a technical lead delivering a large complex transformation using Oracle Project Accounting on the East Coast. In this role I get to implement several technologies - Oracle Applications Technology Stack, Oracle Database 10G, Middleware Integration, Oracle Internet Directory and its two-fold integration with Microsoft Active Directory and Oracle EBusiness Suite, using Oracle Single Sign on.

This will be a more focused blog, vs. http://oracletechnologist.blogspot.com/ where I had a mixture of technology and personal stuff.

For my Oracle World 2007 report, please visit http://oracletechnologist.blogspot.com/