Tuesday, 4 September 2018

Create OIC Integration unit tests and Regression Testing

After a long time blogging. Now working on Cloud products. If you are interested to know how to perform automatic regression testing with Oracle Integration Cloud then this article by Muthu Palanisamy from Oracle Integration will guide you the steps.

Please refer to article: How to use Litmus to create OIC Integration unit tests automatically and run them to catch regressions

Have a Great Integration.

Cheers.

Wednesday, 22 June 2016

Oracle SOA DB Poller Error Caused by BINDING.JCA-11608

Hi All,

Just wanted to highlight a common mistake most developer and most testing teams do. When a need arises to change any setting including connection factory or connection pool setting in Oracle Weblogic Server

The Mistake:
  1. Make changes to the weblogic server data source / Connection factory.
  2. Which leads to a DB adaptor redeploy.
  3. Once the DB adaptor is redeployed all the pollers using that DB adaptor incidences will fail with the following error:
Query name: [xxxxxxxxxxxxxx], Descriptor name: [xxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxxxxxx]. Polling the database for events failed on this iteration.
Caused by BINDING.JCA-11608
Connection Already Closed Exception.
This [javax.resource.cci.Connection] is already closed.
This should not happen when running within a packaged application like BPEL or ESB but may occur when the adapter is used standalone.
..
.
  This exception is considered not retriable, likely due to a modelling mistake.  This polling process will shut down, unless the fault is related to processing a particular row, in which case polling will continue but the row will be rejected (faulted).

       at oracle.tip.adapter.db.exceptions.DBResourceException.createNonRetriableException(DBResourceException.java:690)
       at oracle.tip.adapter.db.exceptions.DBResourceException.createEISException(DBResourceException.java:656)
       at oracle.tip.adapter.db.exceptions.DBResourceException.inboundReadException(DBResourceException.java:491)
       at oracle.tip.adapter.db.InboundWork.handleException(InboundWork.java:1001)
       at oracle.tip.adapter.db.InboundWork.runOnce(InboundWork.java:896)
       at oracle.tip.adapter.db.InboundWork.run(InboundWork.java:627)
       at oracle.tip.adapter.db.inbound.InboundWorkWrapper.run(InboundWorkWrapper.java:43)
       at oracle.integration.platform.blocks.executor.WorkManagerExecutor$1.run(WorkManagerExecutor.java:184)
       at weblogic.work.j2ee.J2EEWorkManager$WorkWithListener.run(J2EEWorkManager.java:184)
       at weblogic.work.DaemonWorkThread.run(DaemonWorkThread.java:30)
Caused by: BINDING.JCA-11608
Connection Already Closed Exception.
This [javax.resource.cci.Connection] is already closed.


Note: When the above error occurs, the Poller state is still active, which deadly in a production environment. 

The Corrective Measure:
  1. Retire all DB Pollers which have encountered this error.
  2. Activate all DB  Pollers.
  3. The issue will be fixed.

The Best Practice:
  1. Retire all DB Pollers. (No Polling will happen during this time).
  2. Make changes to the weblogic server data source / Connection factory.
  3. Which leads to a DB adaptor redeploy / Restart.
  4. Once the DB adaptor is redeployed / Restarted.
  5. Activate all DB Pollers.



Wednesday, 4 May 2016

SOA SUITE 12c Data Base Schema Dehydration Store States

Hi All,

As me, you might be stumbling to find out what, similar to List of all states from COMPOSITE_INSTANCE, CUBE_INSTANCE, DLV_MESSAGE  in 11g, the important tables would be for SOA Suite 12c and relevant states.

Basically this is described very well in the Oracle Support Document 2065869.1: 12c SOA composite <schema> States

For the benefit of every one, I have also copy pasted the content from the obove Oracle Note to here (copy right of the below details are with Oracle Support):

==========================================================================

Details

Based on 11g:
Tables COMPOSITE_INSTANCE and MEDIATOR_INSTANCE does not apply to 12c.
Tables CUBE_INSTANCE, DLV_MESSAGE and DLV_TYPE did not have any change.
The FLOW_INSTANCE is available only in 12c.

CUBE_INSTANCE States

StateDescription
0 STATE_INITIATED
1 STATE_OPEN_RUNNING
2 STATE_OPEN_SUSPENDED
3 STATE_OPEN_FAULTED
4 STATE_CLOSED_PENDING_CANCEL
5 STATE_CLOSED_COMPLETED
6 STATE_CLOSED_FAULTED
7 STATE_CLOSED_CANCELLED
8 STATE_CLOSED_ABORTED
9 STATE_CLOSED_STALE
10 STATE_CLOSED_ROLLED_BACK


DLV_MESSAGE States

StateDescription
0 STATE_UNRESOLVED
1 STATE_RESOLVED
2 STATE_HANDLED
3 STATE_CANCELLED
4 STATE_MAX_RECOVERED


DLV_TYPE States

StateDescription
1 Invoke Message
2 DLV Message
MEDIATOR States

Mediator state is now derived from SCA_ASYNC_CPNT_STATE table. The state column can take one of the following values:
StateDescription
1 RUNNING
2 COMPLETED
3 FAULTED
4 ABORTED
5 STALE


FLOW_INSTANCE States
StateDescription
-1 NOT_SET
1 SUSPENDED
2 TERMINATED
3 STALE
  
The Flow State is derived from the Flow Instance table using the following columns:
  • Active_Component_Instances
  • Unhandled_Faults
  • Recoverable_Faults
  • Admin_State
Completed Flow  
0 Active_Component_Instances

Completed Faulted Flow
0 Active_Component_Instances
1 or more Unhandled_Faults

Recoverable Flows
1 or more Active_Component_Instances
1 or more Recoverable_Faults

Completed Successfully
0 Active_Component_Instances
0 Unhandled_Faults
0 Recoverable_Faults
  
======================================================================

Further to the above Info, I also found a very useful blog that provides more knowledge / usage to the above table. 


Hope this was helpful to you.
 

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

Understanding Cloud - Difference between On Premises, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS

Hi All,

Understanding Cloud - Difference between On Premises, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS  in a much simpler and funny way.

I recently saw this table and I thought some body has gone a long way to simplifying a lot of the techie talk about cloud and its various forms.


I thought this would be great to share it with you all.




 

Copy Right: No way I take credit for the creation of the below table. The creator of this table owns the copy right. Happy to remove if need be.

Monday, 17 November 2014

BPM Auditing Demystified

Very Informative Blog Written by A-TEAM - Mark Foster. This blog is about Audit Level for BPM and its effect on Audit ability and Performance.


BPM Auditing Demystified

Enjoy the reading.

Recomendation: Which JDK best suites SUN Java or JRockit

I have always come across this dialama, which JDK between SUN Java (Hotspot) and JRockit  to use when we are installing Oracle Integration Products, i.e, SOA BPEL, BPM, BAM etc.

Here are some of my findings and recomendations:

First we will need to understand What is the difference between the Sun JVM and JRockit JVM?
 
The most well know JVM is the implementation from Sun. The Sun JVM is called HotSpot. The Sun JVM is shipped in the Java Developer's Kit (JDK) and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) from Sun.

The JRockit JVM from is optimized for reliability and performance for server side applications. To achieve this, JRockit JVM uses technologies such as code generation, hot spot detection, code optimization, advanced garbage.

To know more about the differences or futures of JRockit refer Oracle JRockit Frequently Asked Questions
 
Also as JRockit has been the propitiatoryJDK for BEA, I would use JRockit in Production or similar environment.

For developer environment I believe we should be OK to use either or. If you plan to debug or examine your code with Java Mission Control or want extended futures from Flight recorder than undoubtedly JRockit is your JDK.

If you have more to add please comment below.

Chaw.

Thursday, 3 July 2014

Setting Persistence or other Transport Headers for MQ Transport in OSB (Oracle Service Bus)

Setting Persistence For MQ Transport in OSB



This blog applies to Oracle Service Bus only.

Have you been trying to make your MQ messages persist on the MQ server. Than you have landed in the right blog. Follow the steps below to set up MQ Transport to persist the MQ messages on the MQ server.

If you were familiar with weblogic JMS messaging, it is very easy to make a JMS message persist on the weblogic JMS server using OSB as the producer. You can do this by checking the Persistence check box in the business service. But it is not the case if you would want to perform the same  for an MQ message on MQ server using OSB MQ transport.

Steps to make your MQ message persist on MQ server using OSB MQ transport:

Assumption: 
a. You are using publish action to publish your MQ messages.
b. The below steps are performed on the OSB console.

1. Open your Proxy or Local Proxy Service
2. Navigate and Edit the Stage where Publish action exist.


3. Navigate to the Request action of Publish
4. Right Click --> Add an Action --> Communication -->  Transport Headers.


5.  Set "SET TRANSPORT HEADERS for" to "Outbound Request" and Click "Add Header"

6. Click drop down for "SOAPAction" and select Persistence.

7. Click Expression and set the value to be set.  

Note: you can repeat steps 5 to 7 to set various other MQ transport headers values. For the entire list of MQ transport headers and their description please visit the blow mentioned Oracle Document:

Document: Oracle® Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle Service Bus
11g Release 1 (11.1.1.4.0)

Sunday, 16 June 2013

How to Create XSD and WSDL from Scratch using Jdeveloper.

I wanted to find out if there was already documentation on "How to Create XSD and WSDL from Scratch using Jdeveloper".

And guess what, found one at FUSION Blog : Creating a WSDL File From XSD File

Great Article and the author has illustrated the steps clearly and Thoroughly.

Thanks to the Author.

Happy Coding. :)

Wednesday, 29 May 2013

Oracle ODI - Unable to View Data from Models - Logical Schema not set for current context

Today I stumbled to view data from a ODI Model.

The Problem Statement:

I had created a Model from simple Employee schema with a context name called Development. FYI: I used Oracle Technology.

After performing ODI reverse engineering, I wanted to view the data from one of the tables within the model that I created. You can view the data from the model by 

Right click the Table under the Model --> View Data

On performing the above steps you will get this Error:

"Logical Schema not set for current context"

or

"ODI-17523: There is no connection for this logical schema / context pair: lg1 / GLOBAL."


The Solution:

After doing a bit of reading found that this was a know Design issue.

Document Reference: 
Oracle® Fusion Middleware Release Notes 11g Release 1 (11.1.1) for Linux x86-64
Part Number E14770-44

<Document Snippet>

40.2.1 For File Datastores, the View Data operation always looks for global context

Within ODI Studio, when viewing data from within a data store, there must be a global context defined for the datastore.
com.sunopsis.core.SnpsInexistantSchemaException: ODI-17523: There is no connection for this logical schema / context pair: lg1 / GLOBAL.
As a workaround, define a global context for the datastore.

<Document Snippet>

After reading the above, it clearly makes sense why I was getting the error. The view Data command always referred to the "Global" context which I had not set to any thing.

Please perform the following steps to rectify the problem:

1. Go to the Topology Tab in ODI studio.
2. Select the Logical Schema to which the Model is associated to.
3. Under the Definition tab of the Logical Schema assign the same physical schema, as same as the development context (In my case I used Development Context during Reverse engineering of the Model), to the Global Context.
4. Save all.
5. Now try viewing the data and this will work.


Hope it helped you. Happy Code -ing .... :)

Thursday, 9 May 2013

How To secure your OSB services (Propagate SAML Token)

To day I would like to share my knowledge, Reading and Finding about

How To Secure a OSB service using SAML Token or What are the Steps to Secure a OSB service using a SAML Token (Also the below steps can be used for SAML token Propagation) :

Now in order to find how to secure OSB  there is a sites / videos that can help us:



  • Watch this video for easy understand of how to secure OSB service. This an oracle produced Video. The link provided here is only part 1 out of 3 Parts. As always, youtube provides the links to the relevant videos once you watch the first part. 
  • The same can be found in this slide pack.


Before reading this blog further please view / review the above reference artefacts so that you have the basic Knowledge / context.

In order to achieve our goal there are few bits missing in the above referenced artefacts.

In order to secure a OSB service, you will need two product / parts:

1. OWSM  policies. -- this is clearly articulated in the referenced artefacts above.
2. Configuration of the Weblogic Server (For the identity Provider) - This is missed out in the above reference artefact.

Note: This blog is not to pinpoint any documentation defects in the reference artefacts, please consider this blog as an additional reference material.

In order to configure the security provider or authentication provider in weblogic server, please follow this documentation:


Document: Oracle® Fusion Middleware Securing Oracle WebLogic Server 11g Release 1 (10.3.6)
Section Relevant to us would be: Configuring LDAP Authentication Providers

And one last thing that would vary for us from the reference artefacts is that the following OWSM policies need to be used instead of the policies stated in the above referenced artefacts:


oracle/wss10_saml_token_service_policy – Proxy Service
oracle/wss10_saml_token_client_policy – Business Service.

Hope all the above references were of help. Please feel free to leave you comments.




Tuesday, 30 April 2013

Software Testing Life Cycle - STLC and Different Types of Software Testing


In this blog I would like to cover the different phases of a Testing within SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle)

We are all mostly aware of the SDLC. Within this SDLC Testing is one phase and Testing by itself has its own cycle. I have tried to portray the software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) below:


Software Testing Life Cycle - STLC

-->1. Requirements Analysis
---->2. Test Planning
------>3. Test Case Development
-------->4. Environment Steps
---------->5. Environment Set-up
------------>6. Test Execution
------------->7. Defect Tracking and Bug Fixing
--------------->8. Review and Audit
----------------->9. Acceptance and Baseline
------------------->10. Test Case Closure / Loop back to step 1.                                              


Now within these STLC, Many types of testing can be performed. Below are the different types of testing that I have tried to find for my self.                                              
                                               
Source for this below section is: Soft Ware Testing Help                                               
                                               
Software Testing Types:

Black box testing – Internal system design is not considered in this type of testing. Tests are based on requirements and functionality.

White box testing – This testing is based on knowledge of the internal logic of an application’s code. Also known as Glass box Testing. Internal software and code working should be known for this type of testing. Tests are based on coverage of code statements, branches, paths, conditions.

Unit testing – Testing of individual software components or modules. Typically done by the programmer and not by testers, as it requires detailed knowledge of the internal program design and code. may require developing test driver modules or test harnesses.

Incremental integration testing – Bottom up approach for testing i.e continuous testing of an application as new functionality is added; Application functionality and modules should be independent enough to test separately. done by programmers or by testers.

Integration testing – Testing of integrated modules to verify combined functionality after integration. Modules are typically code modules, individual applications, client and server applications on a network, etc. This type of testing is especially relevant to client/server and distributed systems.

Functional testing – This type of testing ignores the internal parts and focus on the output is as per requirement or not. Black-box type testing geared to functional requirements of an application.

System testing – Entire system is tested as per the requirements. Black-box type testing that is based on overall requirements specifications, covers all combined parts of a system.

End-to-end testing – Similar to system testing, involves testing of a complete application environment in a situation that mimics real-world use, such as interacting with a database, using network communications, or interacting with other hardware, applications, or systems if appropriate.

Sanity testing - Testing to determine if a new software version is performing well enough to accept it for a major testing effort. If application is crashing for initial use then system is not stable enough for further testing and build or application is assigned to fix.

Regression testing – Testing the application as a whole for the modification in any module or functionality. Difficult to cover all the system in regression testing so typically automation tools are used for these testing types.

Acceptance testing -Normally this type of testing is done to verify if system meets the customer specified requirements. User or customer do this testing to determine whether to accept application.

Load testing – Its a performance testing to check system behaviour under load. Testing an application under heavy loads, such as testing of a web site under a range of loads to determine at what point the system’s response time degrades or fails.

Stress testing – System is stressed beyond its specifications to check how and when it fails. Performed under heavy load like putting large number beyond storage capacity, complex database queries, continuous input to system or database load.

Performance testing – Term often used interchangeably with ‘stress’ and ‘load’ testing. To check whether system meets performance requirements. Used different performance and load tools to do this.                                          
                                               
You can also find more information in wikipedia.org --> Software_testing                                               
                                               
                                                Happy Testing.... ;)
                                               
                                               
                                               
                                               

Thursday, 13 December 2012

Moving Oracle BPM Human Workflow Data from One Environment to Another

I was hunting to find out how to migrate runtim rules and routing policies from one Oracle BPM work flow environment to Another for example from Test to Dev and found this document from Oracle web site.

<Snapshot from the document>
You can migrate Human Workflow user metadata, such as views, mapped attribute (previously known as flex field) mappings, and vacation rules, from a test environment to a production environment using the Human Workflow User Config Data Migrator. The Data Migrator is available as an ant target that can be executed at the command line.

To know more read from the document itself:

Oracle® Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite
11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5.0)


Section: 21.6 Moving Human Workflow Data from a Test to a Production Environment

Hope fully it was worth a read.

Monday, 3 December 2012

SOA Thinker

Today found this interesting SOA blogs by one of the Oracle Rep Jeff Davies

Very informative.

SOA Thinker A site for SOA thought and discussion.

Very interesting and very informative.

Regards,
Arun.

Tuesday, 14 August 2012

How To Configure Role based Access for OSB Console

I have been asked This questions multiple Times.

Can we limit / restrict the access of an user for OSB Console?

The answer is YES.

Please refer to Oracle Documentation:

Document NAme: Oracle® Fusion Middleware Developer's Guide for Oracle Service Bus 11g Release 1 (11.1.1.5.0)
Part Number E15866-03
Section: 48 Configuring Administrative Security
Link to Document: admin_security.htm

Oracle provides some predefined Integration roles which we can use. Also there are options to create customized roles.

If you are keen in learning more about creating users  and customizing roles read further in this section 48.3 Configuring Administrative Security: Main Steps

Have a good one. :)

Monday, 21 May 2012

When to use Oracle BPEL and OSB?

Often for the newbies of (Oracle) SOA Technologies, this question pops in mind stating when to use BPEL and OSB.

Fundamentally if you read the docs, you will see that both the now Oracle products have similar orchestration capabilities. This blog is written in the intention to clarify the question.

I will cover the one line answer and provide some references I found in the web.

One Liner:

Use of BPEL: State-full, high involvement of Data Manipulation.
Use of OSB: Stateless, Low involvement of Data Manipulation.

For a briefer differentiation, I found another blog in the web space which made my job easier. I have copied the content across to this blog.

Note: the copyright of the below content belongs to the author of the blog page.

Use OSB for:

  • Endpoint routing (providing location transparency) so that we do not care about the physical location of the endpoint.
  • Endpoint abstraction (interface transparency) so that we do not care about the exact data formats required by the endpoint because the OSB will take care of transformations.
  • Load balancing so that we do not care about which of multiple service implementations will actually service a request. 
  • Throttling so that we do not care about how use of services is restricted.  
  • Enrichment so that we do not care about how additional data is provided to the request to match the expected request and response formats.
  • Simple synchronous composition so that we do not care if our abstract service call is actually made up of two or more physical service calls.
  • Protocol conversion so that we do not care what physical transports are being used.
  • Sync/async abstraction so that we can treat services as fire and forget or query response according to the needs of the client.

Use BPEL for:
  • Complex composition of parallel flows that involve more than a couple of services.
  • Long running compositions that may run for minutes, hours or days.
  • Asynchronous compositions that require correlation of requests and responses.
  • Process abstraction that enables us to track processes and their interactions with multiple services.
  • Human workflow

Thursday, 17 May 2012

Enterprise Integration EAI vs SOA vs ESB

Hi All,

Had some time to browse the net and to brush up on the basics. Came across this interesting paper presentation in the site

ggatz Consulting

Though the site was basic with not much information, I continued reading the paper presented by an author: Anurag Goel.I could not find out the age of the paper as could not find the Source location or date of the article.

I found the article from this link:

I have also made the paper available here.

Note: The copyright of the article belongs to the Author.

This paper takes us through the comparison of EAI, SOA and ESB and their current/future role in the IT integration Industry. Also explains the relevance between EAI Patterns and current so called SOA Integration Patterns.
 

I like the summary section, as follows (on page 6):

6 TAKEAWAYS SUMMARY
1. SOA brings cost effective, reusable and low lead time solutions to an organization
but EAI and SOA are both going to coexist.
2. SOA is more then web services, in fact web services alone can not handle the
complex, secure and SLA based applications of an enterprise.
3. Enterprise service bus would enable low cost integration and would be used by
companies with limited IT resources
4. Packaged EAI solutions in future would have SOA as basic tenet and would continue
to be the prime choice for large scale integration.
 


Happy Reading.

Monday, 9 April 2012

How to achieve dynamic binding by manipulating endpoint references at runtime - BPEL

Web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) allow business processes to be easily extended through interaction with other business processes and applications. BPEL processes define this interaction through partner links, which define the interface (messages and operations), transport protocol, and most important, the location of each service to be used.
In most basic process designs, partner links are static; they refer to a single external process selected by the developer at design time. This approach is appropriate for highly targeted or constrained systems. However, in larger systems business processes are more complex. They interact with multiple external services and define multiple partner links, and some of these partner links might not be known at design time. As a result, all potential callouts and logic for deciding which partner links to use must be built inside the business process itself—unnecessarily complicating that process. Furthermore, as additional partner links are added, the resulting process grows more and more unwieldy, as any changes to the partner links require modification of the entire business process.
Fortunately, the BPEL language supports the concept of dynamic binding of partner links

To read more on this topic and to know how: please read further in  SOA Best Practices: The BPEL Cookbook Making BPEL Processes Dynamic

Sunday, 21 August 2011

What is the default username and password for Oracle Enterprise Repository 11g

The default username and password for Oracle Enterprise Repository 11g is:

User: admin

Password: admin

This is valid only for the fresh install. After the first login you will be forced to change the password for the admin user.

The admin user is the default administrative account installed with Oracle Enterprise Repository.






Monday, 27 June 2011

Oracle WebLogic Server Basic Concepts - Domain, Admin server, Managed Server

I found this great resource to answer the following questions:

1. What is a weblogic Domain?
2. What is a Weblogic Admin Server?
3. What is a Managed Server?
4. What is a Weblogic Cluster

and many more basic conscepts of weblogic Server.

Please go to this link: Oracle WebLogic Server Basic Concepts

This will be an eye opener presentation, if you are new to Weblogic Server.

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

nohup: Execute Commands After You Exit From a Shell Prompt


Most of the time you login into remote server via ssh. If you start a shell script or command and you exit (abort remote connection), the process / command will get killed. Sometime job or command takes a long time. If you are not sure when the job will finish, then it is better to leave job running in background. However, if you logout the system, the job will be stopped. What do you do?

nohup command

Answer is simple, use nohup utility which allows to run command./process or shell script that can continue running in the background after you log out from a shell:

nohup Syntax:

nohup command-name &
Where,
  • command-name : is name of shell script or command name. You can pass argument to command or a shell script.
  • & : nohup does not automatically put the command it runs in the background; you must do that explicitly, by ending the command line with an & symbol.

nohup command examples

1) Login to remote server
$ ssh user@remote.server.com
2) Execute script called pullftp.sh
# nohup pullftp.sh &
Type exit or press CTRL + D exit from remote server.
# exit
3) Find all programs and scripts with setuid bit set on, enter:
# nohup find / -xdev -type f -perm +u=s -print > out.txt &
Type exit or press CTRL + D exit from remote server.
# exit
Please note that nohup does not change the scheduling priority of COMMAND; use nice for that:
# nohup nice -n -5 ls / > out.txt &
As you can see nohup keep processes running after you exit from a shell. Read man page of nohup and nice command for more information. Please note that nohup is almost available on Solaris/BSD/Linux/UNIX variant.
Update:
# 1: As pointed out by Jason you can use at command to queue a job for later execution. For example, you can run pullftp.sh script to queue (one minute) later execution
$ echo "pullftp.sh" | at now + 1 minute
# 2: You can also use screen command for same. Brock pointed out disown shell internal command for same purpose. Here is how you can try it out:
$ pullftp.sh &
$ disown -h
$ exit

This is a complete copy from the source. 


Aditional Info: less Nohup.out

Provides you with the output of the <command&>. This is some thing similar to tail -f on a live log file.