Removing namespace from XML payload

Namespace errors sometimes tend to take an immense amount of time to solve. Extracting content from the payload without the namespace dependencies can be useful for troubleshooting.

The blog posting found here has a solution for this. All credits to the post creator.

In BPEL the "ora:getContentAsString function cane be used. In OSB the XQuery function "strip-namespace" needs to be used.

OZONE Innovation lab

Wipro announced the launch of the OZONE lab for innovation in conjunction with Oracle. It will focus on AIA based solutions, as well as industry specific solutions for their clients. This shows a major committment to AIA and the extent to which it is being used to provide industry specific process solutions.

The press release from Oracle is available here.

Apples from Google to taste better

At the recently concluded Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco there was an interesting panel discssion on "Cloud: The Apps". The panel consisted of Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com CEO) and Dave Girouard (President of Google's Enterprise Unit). The context to the discussion was that major ERP players such as Oracle and SAP were not going to survive in the SaaS based model of the future. The discussion revolved around the fact that the entrenched ERP players were late to the Web2.0 game, and would lose market share with the adoption of SaaS based application models.

Marc Benioff, as expected, slammed Oracle CEO Larry Ellison about his dismissive comments on Web 2.0. He proclaimed Larry's comments to be a sign of weakness, by invoking the chinese military strategist Sun Tzu in stating "When weak, feign strength". 

Dave Girourd explained the disconnect between traditional applications that focused on the business process while giving little attention to the end-user interaction. He saw the new Web2.0 applications essenitially providing a new paraidigm to productivity by focusing primarily on the presentation and interaction layers. He pointed out Microsoft's recent announcement of its Azure Web application development platform and the web-hosted version of MS Office as good starting points. However comparing the Google Apps collaboration suite with hosted MS Office, he said it was like comparing "apples to oranges". He stated then when the hosted version of MS office becomes available it will be possible to compare it to Google Apps, and went on to say that it would be clear that "Google's apples will taste better".

OOW 2008 Theme - Complete, Open, Integrated

The main theme of the OOW 2008 event was Complete, Open, Integrated. Although the buzz words sound great, one had to dig a little deeper to get Oracle's vision around this key theme.
My understanding is as follows:
Complete - Oracle now has 3000 applications in its inventory. The vision of complete is to have one vendor that provides best-of-breed functionality, but more importantly controls the components within those acquired applications that bring unique value. This enables the ability to leverage functionality across Oracle's entire suite of products. This direction, in the form of pre-built integration points (hooks), is apparent in the new tool sets and new functionality within existing product sets that are becoming available.

Open - The usual connotation of open implying "Open Source" (ex: Apache, Python, etc.) does not apply to Oracle's context of "Open". In The Oracle context each application or product suite has a well defined set of interaction points, which can be invoked using an open standard (ex: SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, etc.) The applications are not built using open source tools, but the integration mechansisms are standardized using open source standards. Oracle is also providing hooks for its development environments (IDE) to use open development tools such as Eclipse. In essesnce Oracle has its own definition for "Open".

Integrated - This is a necessity for Oracle. The vision here is that organizations have a complex application foot-print, for several good reasons. Oracle's approach is to not necessarily replace applications, but provide a product to tie applications together in a standards-based approach. This is essentially the AIA (Application Integration Architecture) message from OOW 2007, which has been repurposed as part of a larger theme.

Bottom Line: The Complete and Open message is a consequence of the large number of acquistions. The Integrated message is a necessity. There is a dichotomy in the Open and Integrated message. On the one hand Oracle is pushing the "Open and Standards based" message to encourage partners to build niche solutions. But with the "Integrated" message Oracle is telegraphing its intent to provide out-of-the-box integration, and as Charles Phillips puts it "Eliminate the need for consultants to integrate your applications".

OOW 2008 - Application Integration Architecture

AIA seems to have become integral to many of the offerings from Oracle. It is now assumed that AIA is the integration mechanism across all product stacks, unless stated otherwise. This was quite surprising, since the AIA product suite itself has matured only in the last 6 months. It shows the surprising rapidness with which Oracle has internally embraced the AIA message. This space will continue to grow rapidly, as Oracle continues to use AIA internally and continues to roll out newer (and enriched) versions of the Foundation Pack.

The interesting new development in this space, was the newly announced approach to start building composite (stand-alone) applications using AIA. This is a different direction for AIA, as it takes the AIA Suite out of the integration realm and into the broader domain of composite application development. This would have been the eventual evolution of the product suite, but it seems to have already started moving in that direction.

The implication here is that new applications can be developed which implicitly integrate functionality from disparate systems. With this approach AIA moves from simply being a stack of "pipes" to becoming a "jacuzzi" (or sewage pump, or flush tank, or... you get my point). It has moved from being the plumbing to a usable end-application.

On a side note, I would not be surprised if AIA was rebranded in the near future. AIA is not really an architecture (more like a framework), it has grown beyond simply being an integration platform, and is not meant simply to connect two major application suites. Although all of the above were true when AIA originally came out, it has evolved from "plumber's putty" to now being applicable to a whole host of new areas and would be more aptly characterized by its likeness to "Gorilla glue" (pun intended).

OOW 2008 - Industry focus

Healthcare continues to a be an area of focus for Oracle. Charles Phillips announced creation of the Healthcare Global Business Unit (GBU) which implies a huge international foucs in this domain. The message to techies is start reading up on HL7, it will be a "very very nice to have" in the near future.

Also interesting was the announcements of the 2 new acquisitions of AdminServer and Skywire. Although the acquisitions had already been announced in June-08, the fact that they were highlighted in key note sessions shows their importance to Oracle. Both these applications help employers manage insurance related functionality. This is a new area for Oracle and may be part of a larger attempt to provide and outsourced business administration service such as workday.com

Applications Unlimited and Fusion Applications

Nothing new in this, except for a reaffirmation that all ERP application suites will be indefinitely supported. I guess there must still be Oracle customers who need to hear this message every morning, to reaffirm their faith in Oracle and not call 1.800.872.1727.

The strategy for Fusion Applications seems to be more focused towards leveraging the latest in Web 2.0 and BI technologies. The core functionality would be based on an AIA framework. The vision to use end-user friendly products is appealing.

Also it was not surprising to hear that Fusion applications would be available both on premise and in a hosted model. What was surprising was to hear that it would also be available in "any combination" of models. This points to a radically different delivery model for a major ERP suite.

BEA's impact on Fusion Middleware

Components of BEA will be morphed into the Oracle Fusion Middleware Suite. The strategic direction for each product line and the overlapping functionality has been made clear by Oracle (subject of a separate post).

The relevant points of interest are
1. Oracle ESB will become Oracle Service Bus. implying in techie terms that Oracle ESB is dead... long live BEA Aqualogic.
2. Oracle Java Machine is also dead... long live BEA JRockit.
3. OC4J is over... BEA J2EE Container comes out the winner.
4. Oracle Services Repository will be replaced by Aqualogic Enterprise Repository.

The major component that carries over from Oracle Fusion Middleware is Oracle BPEL.

CEP and EDA replace SOA as buzz word

SOA is no longer as major a buzz word as it used to be, although the concept is now well adopted and is intrinsic in most of the newer releases of Oracle products.

The newer buzz words in the SOA domain are EDA (Event Driven Architecture) and CEP (Complex Event Processing). Both of these terms are finer aspects of SOA and focus on managing and monitoring the triggering points in a SOA environment.

The Oracle Complex Event Processing and Oracle WebLogic Event Server are products in this space.

Cloud computing with Amazon

For those new to the concept of cloud computing, it is similar to the concept of leveraging disparate functionality in a SOA environment. However, in this case the Oracle Database and Middleware products are hosted by Amazon, and the database and middleware functionality can be leveraged as a service. (A picture would explain this better... future post). Lookup EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and AMI (Amazon Machine Images) for more information.

These are powerful new development in this uber-geek domain. What it does mean is that databases are being commoditized and you could essentially use a database in the same way as you use a telephone. Sounds surreal... so did SOA 4 years ago.

Footnote: Don't imagine these clouds to be white and fluffy... darkish grey and Amazon-shaped would be more appropriate.

Oracle Beehive

This was a new product suite announced during OOW. This is a reworked version of the Oracle Collaboration Suite, and Oracle's "Enterprise 2.0" offering.

This suite consists of 2 sets of functionality:
1. Communication tools such as email/voice mail/chat
2. Coordination tools such as Calendaring and document sharing.

With the number of bees painted on the sidewalks around the convention center, it was obvious that Oracle was strongly pushing this new product suite.

The combination of Oracle Web Center, Beehive and Oracle Content Management is Oracle's answer to Enterprise 2.0. It will be interesting to watch how Oracle integrates this pseudo-social networking tool into the enterprise.

Application Grid

The concept behind the application grid is to provide a virtualized in-memory data layer which can be accessed by any application. This has significant impact in improving performance and de-coupling physical data from applications.

The application grid is labeled Weblogic Application Grid and is a combination of Oracle Coherence (an in-memory data grid), Oracle JRockit (Java Virtual Machine) and Oracle Enterprise Manager.

The application grid is to the database, as AIA is to SOA. This is a space to watch out for, as the concept is still nascent, but would have huge impact on future application design.

Note: This is really an application layer product, and is different from the database grid product suite which is implicit in all Oracle databases.

The new BI... Hyperion and EPM

Last year OBIEE was the only Oracle BI offering. With the acquisition of Hyperion there is a whole new product suite and toolset that Oracle is now part of the Oracle ecosystem. There is overlapping functionality between these major product suites and this has caused the BI space to become less clear.

The Enterprise Performance Workspace (a Hyperion product) may eventually replace the OBIEE dashboard functionality. The SmartView offering in this same space is intriguing as it provides integration with MS Office products. Expect more confusion before the dust settles in this area.

The Essbase database appears to be the clear front runner in the OLAP space. It will eventually become the tool of choice for OLAP processing and OLAP based applications.

Oracle as a hardware vendor

This topic has been written about ad-nauseum since Larry Ellison made the announcement on 9/24/08. The large "X" that hinted about this throughout the venue added to the buzz. Here is a very brief recap:
1. Oracle Exadata - A specialized storage device that returns query results, rather than data blocks to the database server
2. HP-Oracle Database Machine - A VERY big (64-CPU) database server, offered in conjunction with the above mentioned storage option.

For large terabyte sized datawarehouses, this is a compelling value proposition. We should expect the hardware offerings to be scaled down over time to serve the small-to-medium business segment. The macro effects of this hardware play by Oracle will be far reaching.

Metalink becomes MySupport

The new support website (although the link remains metalink.oracle.com) is revolutionary. Instead of being a static search based content provider, it now recognizes the systems that you have based on your CSI, and provides analysis of these systems. You do need to switch on these features on the host system, which incidentally are switched on by default.

More importantly The UI is dramatically different, with a portal based look and feel. The ability to add portlets of content specific to your needs is very useful. This new website shows how content searching should be.

AIA PIP's and Application compatibility

The AIA Foundation Pack (FP) 2.0.1 was released in mid-March 2008. There have been a number of PIP's that existed prior to this release of AIA FP 2.0.1. There are PIP's based on this release of AIA and of course a large number planned to be released on future releases of AIA.

It is important to note that the PIP's provide generic process integration functionality between major application suites, but these PIP's have specific application version compatibility implications. For example the popular Siebel CRM to Oracle EBS PIP which integrates the Quote to Order process flow was available as part of AIA 1.0. This PIP was certified for EBS 11i.10.2 and Siebel 7.8. The newer version of this PIP (built on FP 2.0.1) will, provide the same functionality but will be compatible with Siebel 8.0 and EBS 12.1. This leaves users of EBS Release 12.0 (12.0.1 through 12.0.4) without AIA certified PIP's for integration with Siebel.

There is a difference between certified and workable. Although, the older versions of the PIP can be retrofitted to work with EBS 12.0, it will not be explicitly certified or supported by Oracle. This does leave gaps in the AIA based PIP's that are certified for specific applications. It would be important to get specifics on the application version that are supported when deciding on the integration framework.

COLLABORATE 2008 - Complete, Open, INTEGRATED

The COLLABORATE 2008 in Denver lived up to its expectation of being a great networking and educational event. The sessions ranging from "Using Rich components in ADF" to "From OCP to CIO" covered a wide array of topics. It was also interesting to listen to the speech by Eric Burton on "How to get Volunteers" during the OAUG SIG coordinator luncheon.

Charles Phillips keynote speech centered around the key points of Complete, Open and Integrated.

Complete in terms of breadth of technology ie: Database, Middleware and Application, as well as breadth of functionality offered by the Oracle ERP packages.

Open in terms of the standards used and the ability to extend the applications.

In the "Integrated" space Charles Phillips detailed the Application Integration Technology (AIA) offering and explained how it formed the foundation for Oracle's integration initiatives. This area will receive renewed attention as a result of the announcements made at COLLABORATE 2008
.

AIA versus SAP's Business ByDesign

There has been a tendency to try and equate SAP's Business ByDesign with Oracle's AIA offering. This is an unequal comparison as the two offerings are fundamentally different.

SAP's Business ByDesign is a SaaS based on demand offering for the SMB market. With this offering SAP provides a pre-built set of business processes built on a base of 2100 web services. The functionality that is provided is supported by SAP, and cannot be customized.

Oracle's AIA offering is a platform for integration and extension. It provides a set of pre-built integration solutions (PIP's), and the platform can also be used to build extensions and customizations. This offering is not targeted for a specific market segment.

The only common feature in these two offerings is that they are based on a SOA framework.

AIA and Intellectual Property (IP)

AIA provides Oracle partners the ability to build out extensions to core ERP. This raises the question of ownership of IP. Oracle has built out 3 models for AIA based development with corresponding IP implications:

1. Co-development: This is an invitation only model wherein Oracle will invite partners who have deep vertical expertise, to co-develop with Oracle. This model helps Oracle leverage the deep vertical expertise provided by a partner. The partner gets exclusive marketing rights to this co-developed functionality as well as the opportunity to build out a skill base in AIA. IP is owned by Oracle
2. Oracle Certified extensions: A partner would build out functionality based on the Oracle AIA framework. They would go through a certification process with Oracle. A certified offering would be co-marketed with Oracle. Oracle would own the IP and the solution would be eventually supported by Oracle.
3. Partner/SI owned solution: A partner would build out a solution on an AIA based framework. The solution would be owned and maintained by the partner. Partner owns the IP.

PIP as a starter-kit

The Process Integration Pack's (PIP's) that Oracle currently provides are built on the AIA Foundation Pack and are essentially aimed at building out end-to-end process flows across major Oracle product suites. This is partly a necessity based on Oracle's acquisition strategy. By creating the AIA framework Oracle has created an extensible integration/extension platform that it uses internally to stitch together process flows, and at the same time provide an extension platform for the wider partner community.

The current Oracle supplied PIP's create flows such as quoting in Siebel integrated to ordering in Oracle EBS. These PIP's essentially are a "starter-kit" providing base integration between major product suites. These PIP's will essentially be extended to fill out industry specific needs. The Oracle supplied PIP's provide an Oracle supported jump-start to integrating Oracle suites and providing end-to-end business process flows.

Extending Oracle ERP using AIA

The Oracle AIA offering fundamentally changes the manner in which functionality within the Oracle ERP Suites (Oracle EBS/PeopleSoft/JD Edwards) can be extended. It also provides a new mechanism for integrating with these ERP Suites.

Traditionally any extensions built to an Oracle ERP Suite, to support non-standard functionality were tagged as bespoke customizations. These were clearly not supported by Oracle and required the creating organization and/or vendor to support the customization. Upgrades to the core ERP got particularly complex in environments having extensive customizations, since these customizations had to be retrofitted for the new version of the ERP. Organizations did not proceed down the path out of choice. Their unique business processes gave them little choice other than to customize the "canned" functionality.

The Oracle AIA offering provides an Oracle supported platform to build extensions to the core Oracle ERP. AIA provides a framework that is supported and enhanced by Oracle. Using this framework and the defined design principles; extensions can be built to the core ERP to support unique business processes. These unique extensions would continue to be functional across upgrades and future releases of the core ERP. Essentially Oracle would continue to support the extension framework, and extensions built on this framework would in-turn be supported without requiring extensive rework.

With the AIA platform Oracle has created an "application" for integration and extensions.

The AIA platform also opens up a new ecosystem for ISV's and SI's to build extensions to core ERP. These can be industry specific or could fill out niche gaps in the core ERP. The fact that they are built on AIA implies inherent standardization and reusability. A hosted model for more complex functionality is also possible.

The AIA based development model allows Oracle to significantly enhance the development of highly niche functionality by farming out development to a new channel of developers. This arrangement helps Oracle by creating an ecosystem that produces highly specific vertical functionality which Oracle does not have the bandwidth to build, and provides Oracle partners the ability to create industry specific differentiated verticals.

Old AIA new AIA

The buzz around AIA has ben around since Oracle Open World (OOW) 2007. In fact during OOW 2007 there were about 10 PIP's that were announced. These were primarily built to integrate process flows within Siebel with other main line Oracle products such as Oracle E-Business Suite. However all of these "PIP's" were built using BPEL and had extensive installtion and configuration steps. They did not leverage the AIA Foundation pack which was essentailly still under development.

With the release of the AIA foundation pack in mid-March 2008, the ensuing PIP's are built on the using the true AIA framework. It is important to take this into account when deploying PIP's since the older generation PIP's are more complex to install and maintain.

The newer generation PIP's are extensible by leveraging the existing EBO's and EBS services.

BI or Portal front end to SOA applications

The benefits of SOA based component applications has been widely discussed. Having built these applications using reusable web-services, the next iteration is presenting this functionality via a user-friendly front end.

There are two choices to this from an Oracle perspective. A portal based front end, or an OBIEE based dashboard that presents a graphical version of the raw data. It could also be a combination of both.

In either case an SOA implementation requires a presentation layer to provide a UI to the functionality and integration that has been created. The right choice of front end is crucial to end user acceptance. BI based dashboards, where applicable, are the most intuitive for end users. Portal functionality is useful when multiple data sources are being brought together.

With Web 2.0 functionality providing yet another choice, this area of discussion will continue to be an area of healthy debate

Web 2.0 and AIA

Via multiple channels Oracle appears to have embraced Web 2.0. The integration of Web 2.0 functionality with core ERP suites and through a wider framework using AIA will be interesting to watch.

Oracle already seems to have taken a step towards integrating Oracle CRM (part of Oracle E-business Suite) with social networking sites, as well as with the Blackberry RIM platform. It would be very useful to have RSS feeds from an ERP transactional system that would create a "push" mechanism to traditional ERP systems.

There is mixed opinion about this release (as is the case with most software releases). In summary this is an exciting development with a lot of promise. Something to keep a close watch on. It has the potential to create an entire ecosystem of wedge applications.

Business Process Modeling Diagramming Options

There are various business modeling diagramming options. The choice of the modeling notification depends on the level at which the modeling is being. Each notification model has its benefits and drawbacks.

The Value Added Chain Diagram (VACD) is best suited for level 0 and level 1 diagrams. The Business Process Modeling Notification (BPMN) and the Event Driven Process Chain (EPC) modeling is more suited for level 2 and lower diagrams, which are generally more inclined towards implementation code.

Oracle's BPA suite supports all 3 modeling options. The BPMN and EPC models are both interpreted by the BPA server and can be converted to the BPEL blueprint and eventually to the BPEL process flows.

IDS-Scheer is inherently geared towards EPC modeling, however the newer BPMN standard is recommended if you are using the Oracle BPA suite, especially if the final intent is to create executable BPEL code.

BPEL domains and OC4J

The Oracle BPEL_PM is a java application that can be deployed in any J2EE container. In the case of Oracle Application server it is deployed in Oracle's OC4J (Oracle Container for Java) container.

The OC4J container is hosted on an Application server. It is similar to an instance of a database. It should be managed and administered as a physical object. Property settings for the OC4J container affect all applications deployed within that container.

The BPEL domain is a logical partition. BPEL domains are created for logically separating different business process flows. Domains could be used to delineate dev and test environments in a stable production environment. They could also be used to delineate along functional or business areas. Domain settings affect all process flows that are deployed within that domain.

There can be multiple domains within a BPEL_PM instance running in an OC4J container.

NFS settings for RAC

Setting up RAC requires a shared disk architecture. Most of the documentation provided by Oracle provides a good sequence of steps to be followed to set up RAC and then to set up TAF (Transparent Application Failover). One of the issues that most first time implementers of RAC face is that the RAC instance does not start in spite of all the settings being correct.

This issue is not due to incorrect configuration of the RAC, but can usually be traced to missing settings in the shared disk mount point. One of the most common errors in NFS based shared systems is that not all the parameters have been correctly specified when the mount point is created. The NFS mount point must have the following parameters in a RAC environment:

cio,rw,bg,hard,nointr,proto=tcp,vers=3,noac,rsize=32768,
wsize=32768,timeo=600

Ensure that these settings are in place for a successful RAC implementation.

Hardware sizing for Oracle EBS

Sizing hardware is always a challenge. The issue here is that production sized hardware usually needs to be procured even before the project has started. This is usually the case with organizations where Oracle and Oracle EBS is being installed for the first time. There is no prior version of the application, to benchmark against.

Most of the hardware vendors provide sizing spreadsheets that can be filled out, and a rough estimate of the computing power needed can be reached. This exercise usually helps in clarifying the SAN and disaster recovery architecture, but does not get to the specifics of the production hardware.

Each organization has unique access patterns and transaction patterns, and hence it is genuinely difficult to extrapolate hardware sizing between different organizations. The best approach is to procure the production database server (since this can usually be sized with a fair degree of accuracy) or the post-production development server. These can be used to start the implementation process, and once a certain level of organization specific configuration has bene completed, then production benchmarking can be accomplished.

There is some assistance available in the for of white papers and benchmarking for typical transaction loads. This link has a list of white papers on sizing for IBM, HP and Sun machines. This link provides detailed performance information for representative transaction loads.

When it comes to estimating the network bandwidth requirements the information is very scattered. There are no bench marks and thumb rules need to be applied. A usual CRM/imodule would have the same bandwidth requirements as a normal internet user. HOwever, power users, especially in the demand planning and forecasting space will require a higher bandwidth

Oracle AIA update

The AIA framework should be available for general use in the next couple of weeks. In the interim the Communication pack is the most recent preview of an implemented PIP based on the AIA framework. Some of the existing PIP's such as the Siebel to Order Management PIP is mostly BPEL based and does not really leverage the AIA framework.

Install Oracle with your nose

To counter claims by IBM that Oracle database is hard to install and takes over 50 hours, this inspired individual installed the Oracle database in 2 hours, using only his NOSE.

I would recommend seeing only the first and last minute of the video.

PeopleSoft CRM integration with Customer Hub

Interesting announcement by Oracle about a BPEL based integration between PeopleSoft CRM 9.0 and Customer Data Hub. This makes PeopleSoft an attractive option for existing PeopleSoft customers who are considering CRM options. How this will play out w.r.t to Siebel CRM is to be seen. The article can be viewed here.

It would not be surprising if an AIA based integration between Siebel and PeopleSoft were to be announced soon.