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Overview of Oracle Integration Server

This chapter provides an overview of Oracle Integration Server (OIS). OIS is a complete suite of software that addresses the e-business requirements for integrating different components. It has the breadth of functionality, the robustness, and the tools to address the most demanding and complex integration scenarios.

This chapter includes the following topics:

• Introduction to OIS

• Oracle Integration Server Design Objectives

• Functions of OIS

• Key Objectives for OIS

• Product Development Life-Cycles

Introduction to OIS

OIS addresses a wide range of integration problems ranging from simple front-office to back-office integration within a company, to creation of a strategic IT integration infrastructure within a company, and finally to business-to-business integration. The functionality provided by the Oracle Integration Server includes:

• Data Integration

• Replication

• Application Integration

• Business Process Intelligence

• Data Transformation

• Application Adapters

• Business Process Modeling and Execution

• Systems Management

Figure 3-1 Oracle Integration Server facilities

Data Integration

Oracle Data Access Gateways enable applications to access and manage data from heterogeneous data sources

• Procedural Gateways provide procedural access to non-Oracle transactional systems such as CICS, IMS/TM, IDMS-DC, and so on.

• Transparent Gateways provide SQL access to over thirty non-Oracle databases such as Sybase, Informix, SQL Server, and DB2.

Replication

The Oracle Integration Server includes Advanced Replication, which provides powerful and flexible replication capabilities for synchronization of data across multiple distributed databases. The key features include:

• Replication of tables and related objects for each application as a single group

• Full and subset table replication

• Automatic conflict detection and resolution, with user-selected conflict resolution rules

• Synchronous and asynchronous replication, with user-definable replication intervals at replication group level

• Automatic parallel data propagation for improved performance

Advanced Replication is centrally managed, configured, and maintained with the Oracle Replication Manager.

Application Integration

Synchronous Communication

The Oracle Integration Server supports synchronous-communication-based integration with a built-in Java-based CORBA 2.0 compliant Object Request Broker (ORB) and an Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) server.

Additional CORBA facilities in the Oracle Integration Server include:

• Transactions: Provides a Java Transaction Service (JTS) and CORBA Object Transaction Service (OTS) for development of transactional CORBA applications.

• Directory naming: Provides standard Java Naming Directory Interfaces (JNDI) and COSNaming interface to the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), the industry-standard directory service

• Object Adapter: Implements an Object Adapter for persistent CORBA objects, which provides two important functions. Firstly, it serves as a directory of CORBA Objects. Secondly, it helps to locate and load CORBA objects upon initial activation by CORBA clients.

• Java and CORBA services: Provides a number of features that make it easy for Java programmers to develop CORBA services. Caffeine is a direct Java-to-IIOP mapping tool that eliminates the need for IDL. Other tools such as java2iiop, idl2java, and java2idl simplify application development.

• Security: Features include encryption through Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) over IIOP, authentication using a username and password, and access control using roles and privileges.

The Oracle JDeveloper is the development tool used for developing EJB components. Caffeine is the Java-to-IDL compiler. Oracle Integration Server can interoperate with the Microsoft Com+ component model through third party bridges.

Asynchronous Communication

Oracle Integration Server provides support for asynchronous integration of application through its Advanced Queuing feature. Advanced Queuing is a full-service messaging queuing system. Some of the key features include:

• Guaranteed, exactly once delivery: Advanced Queuing guarantees that each message is delivered to its destination exactly once within the specified time interval, despite possible network, system, and application failures.

• Subject-based and content-based publish and subscribe: Publish-and-subscribe is a communication model that enables loose coupling of applications. The two well-known publish-and-subscribe models are subject- based and content-based. Advanced Queuing supports both.

• Propagation: Applications can enqueue messages to a local queue and specify the remote queue destination for the message. The Advanced Queuing propagator transparently moves messages between local queues and remote queues, enabling communication between distributed applications.

• Java Messaging Service: Advanced Queuing is one of the first message queuing systems to implement the industry-standard Java Messaging Service (JMS). Along with JMS, you can access Advanced Queuing functionality through PL/SQL, C, C++, and Visual Basic.

• Message Management: This unique feature of Advanced Queuing, derived from its fundamental ability to retain messages, is discussed in the next section in the context of Business Process Intelligence.

Business Process Intelligence

The Oracle Integration Server, along with related tools, provides enterprises with the ability to analyze and gather intelligence about their business processes.

The Advanced Queuing feature of the Oracle Integration Server automatically retains and tracks every message that flows through its queues. It tracks all relevant details of the message: enqueue times, dequeue times, destinations visited, identification of transactions that processed the message, and the relationship between the message and exception conditions. It retains this information in queryable queues that are accessible through standard query and reporting tools. You can exploit this information to improve business processes in two ways:

• Analysis of live or in-process transactions: You can determine the complete history and current state of any transaction from information retained in the queue. For example, you learn how it arrived at a particular state and determine the next processing step. In exception situations or stalled processes, the administrator can ascertain the exact cause of the problem and obtain hints on rectifying it and restarting the process. This information can be combined with statistics provided by Advanced Queuing to improve performance of the business process in real time.

• Message warehousing and analysis: The tracking information can be retained and accumulated over an extended period of time to create a message warehouse from which you can query messages using standard SQL. The information can be extracted, transformed, and loaded into an Oracle data warehouse for analysis and mining. Since all the information required to completely reconstruct every business process is available, you can determine exactly how the system performs under a variety of changing conditions.

Figure 3-2 Business Process Intelligence to Improve Process Efficiency

The warehouse can answer such questions as:

• What time elapsed between the placing of a customer order through the Web site and the delivery of the product to the customer?

• How did this elapsed time vary over each of the last twelve months?

• How did this elapsed time vary over the course of a day?

• Over the last six months, on the average, which step in the process took the longest to execute?

• Where is the best place to deploy additional resources?

• Rated by response time, who is your best supplier?

• How does this supplier rate on a per-component basis?

Oracle can create extremely large message warehouses and perform complex analytical queries on them with fast response times. Oracle tools to help you in information analysis include Oracle Report, Oracle Express and Oracle Discoverer. Business process analysis provides business managers with the information they need to make intelligent decisions about their business, streamline processes, deploy resources more effectively, and increase overall efficiency.

Data Transformation

Oracle Integration Server connects heterogeneous applications and smooths the flow of data, messages, business objects, and business events between applications. Each application has its own definitions of business objects, schema, and message formats. To enable applications to communicate, the Oracle Integration Server provides transformation services that convert the output format of one application into the input format of another.

Figure 3-3 Encapsulation of Messages from Source to Destination

OIS offers a design-time visual tool for definition of datatypes and transformation between different types of data. Transformations that can be defined using the visual tool include string operations, mathematical operations, date formatting, and shape changes. You can provide your own transformation routines through call-out mechanisms. The tool can import type definitions from the repositories of Oracle and SAP applications. It also can import XML Document Type Definition (DTD) for transformation of XML messages. Future releases of the Integration Server will also support XSL-T-based transformation of XML messages.

The data types and the transformation between types are design-time activities. The results are stored in the server repository. The runtime transformation engine in the Oracle Integration Server uses this information to transform data as it flows between applications. The Oracle Integration Server defines an open API that enables you to use any other compatible transformation instead.

Application Adapters

Oracle Integration Server is a non-intrusive integration solution. This implies that it requires no reengineering of existing applications, or only minimal reengineering. Because most applications were not designed to be integrated, they have no simple way of communicating with the Oracle Integration Server. Thus, adapters are required to bridge between applications and the Integration Server.

Functionality:

Adapters interface with applications to do the following:

• Submit and extract well-defined business objects to and from the application, using the native interface of the application

• Detect business events occurring in the applications (such as creation of a new purchase order) and publish this information for other applications

Figure 3-4 Overview of the Architecture of an Adapter

• Optionally translate the business objects and events into an XML-formatted message

• Perform validation and error checking as required

• Transmit the information to the Integration Server using one of the standard interfaces such as JMS

Deployment:

The architecture of adapters varies depending on the application with which they interface. Typically they run on a computer in close proximity to the application. In some cases, they run in the execution environment of the application itself, such as in the Oracle Application/Database Server. They can also be deployed in the execution environment of the database, especially if they are implemented in Java or PL/SQL. In all cases, the goal of Oracle Corporation is to provide a centrally managed environment for hosting and executing adapters.

Adapter SDK:

Oracle will partner with a number of vendors to provide adapters to packaged and industry-specific applications. Oracle will also provide an Adapter SDK to simplify the development of adapters for custom and legacy applications. The Adapter SDK will provide libraries to deploy triggers, parse XML messages, and use JMS.

Business Process Modeling and Execution

Oracle Integration Server includes a graphical, visual process modeling tool. You can use the tool in scenarios like these:

• A business analyst describes the business process graphically using the industry-standard Universal Modeling Language (UML) activity diagrams. At this stage, the applications involved in the process are identified and the flow of the process is detailed. The model is generated persistently into the server repository.

• A technical analyst maps the high-level model to the underlying integration infrastructure. The details of the application interfaces, business events, transformations, and messages are filled in. The completed model is again stored in the repository.

• The model is validated and made ready for execution by the runtime execution engine.

• Either the business analyst or the technical analyst can modify the runtime process using the tool. The Business Process Coordinator supports multiple models simultaneously.

• The tool provides a holistic view of the business process by enabling you to visualize and understand the overall functionality.

Figure 3-5 Modeling Steps

Figure 3-6 Workflow and its interaction with other components

Execution Engine:

The validation model is executed by a runtime engine called the Business Process Coordinator. The Oracle Business Process Coordinator maintains the transition state information for all the processes it is executing. It uses all the other functional components to complete its task. The Oracle Business Process Coordinator is unique in that it can automate processes that require human intervention (traditional workflow) as well as those that do not (system-to-system processes).

Systems Management

The Oracle Integration Server is managed and monitored by the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM). The OEM is a systems management tool that can also monitor Oracle applications and instances of the Oracle Databases/Application Servers. It enables an administrator to manage a distributed environment from a single, central console. It has been enhanced to manage all the moving pieces of an integrated environment. Enterprise Manager manages system objects at three levels of granularity:

• Queues, messages, queue propagation: start, stop, schedule propagation, view statistics

• Individual business processes: start, stop, resume, query

• System processes: Integration Server, Message Broker, adapters, applications and databases

Oracle Integration Server Design Objectives

The previous sections provided a high-level functional overview of the Oracle Integration Server. This section describes the design objectives of the Integration Server to help you better use and benefit from it. This section contains:

• Strategic Infrastructure, Not Tactical Point Solution

• Choose And Use As You Go

• Mission-Critical, Enterprise-Wide Integration

• Leveraging Your Investment

Strategic Infrastructure, Not Tactical Point Solution

Most integration products on the market are aimed at solving a specific integration problem, for instance, connecting a particular front-office application to a particular back-office ERP application. Their value is the quick integration of two applications to solve an immediate business problem. Some products are even more limited: they just specialize in integrating a specific transaction between two applications.

Although the Oracle Integration Server can solve specific problems, it is designed to go beyond point solutions and to encourage enterprises to view integration as a strategic component of the IT infrastructure.

Oracle Corporation believes that enterprises should begin with an integration architecture designed independently of any specific application. They should choose a product that meets both their current and their future needs. The Oracle Integration Server is designed to be the integration backbone for the entire enterprise. It has all the characteristics expected of enterprise-quality software: robustness, scalability, open architecture, adherence to industry standards, and management and development tools.

Choose And Use As You Go

The Oracle Integration Server is a comprehensive solution that offers a number of technologies to help you solve different integration problems. The Server offers great breadth of functionality within each of these technologies.

Oracle Corporation does not restrict you to the use of any particular technology: you can choose the technology that exactly solves your problem. All the technologies are seamlessly integrated. However, you can use Oracle technologies independently of each other, thus avoiding useless complexity when you choose a particular technology. For example, you can use the Advanced Queuing feature for asynchronous communication without knowing anything about the synchronous ORB-based communication infrastructure or about Advanced Replication.

This is possible because the Oracle Integration Server has been designed from the ground up to offer you a full spectrum of technologies. Most integration solutions on the market originated in niche technologies such as message-oriented middleware, publish-subscribe engines, data transformation, and workflow. The functionality of these products outside of each one's core competency tends to be weak. These products compensate for their weakness by loosely integrating with partner products. The result is a product that forces you to address every type of problem by using the same technology.

Mission-Critical, Enterprise-Wide Integration

The Oracle Integration Server is designed for mission-critical enterprise-wide business implementations. Towards this end, it offers two major features:

• High reliability, availability, scalability (RAS)

• Enterprise-wide management.

RAS Capabilities

The Oracle Integration Server is based on the proven process architecture and runtime environment of the Oracle8i platform and transparently inherits all the RAS characteristics from it. Oracle8i is proven in large-scale online transaction processing applications (OLTP) that support thousands of concurrent users and extremely high transaction volumes. It scales linearly in a both symmetric multi processor (SMP) architecture as well as in clustered architectures. Oracle8i has a number of high reliability solutions including hot stand-by servers, transparent application failover, and fast recovery from failures.

Management

Oracle Corporation recommends a distributed hub-and-spoke deployment model to simplify integration management. We believes that, as with database servers, it is preferable to consolidate all integration logic into a few large servers, rather than to distribute it over many small servers. The Oracle Integration Server supports such an architecture with the high RAS capabilities described in the previous section.

Many products try to compensate for their limited RAS capabilities by recommending a highly distributed bus architecture. It has been repeatedly proven that such an architecture leads to extreme complexity in management and is therefore not suitable for mission-critical environments. However, note that the architecture of the Oracle Integration Server does not preclude deployment in a distributed bus topology.

Leveraging Your Investment

Most enterprises have invested in developing skills and expertise in Oracle database technology. Oracle Integration Server leverages and protects your investment in these skills. It uses tools with which you are already familiar: Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Designer, Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Report, and Oracle Discoverer. You can access Integration Server functionality through standard languages like Java, C, C++, as well as PL/SQL. You can use existing database administration skills to manage and administer the Oracle Integration Server.

Functions of OIS

Oracle Integration Server (OIS) comprises a number of products used together to enable applications to communicate. OIS is designed to handle complex integration scenarios.

Oracle Integration Server provides these functions:

• Message queuing that enables asynchronous communication between applications

• Tools to transform business objects as they move among multiple applications

• Modeling, generation, and automatic execution of complex business processes

• Data integration through data access gateways

• Data synchronization through replication

• Standard request and reply protocols that enable synchronous communication between applications

• Business intelligence tools to refine, improve, and implement business processes

• System management that enables you to manage and monitor the entire environment from a single console

Oracle Integration Server uses the Oracle8i database:

• For data storage and message storage through Advanced Queuing

• For transactional integrity by using the commit model

• As a repository for business processing and transformation rules

Oracle Integration Server includes:

• Oracle Workflow for business process control

• Oracle Message Broker (OMB) for interoperability with other messaging technologies

• Workflow Builder with graphical tools for the definition of automated process flows

These products support messaging and e-business standards such as Java Messaging Services (JMS) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML).

Key Objectives for OIS

Security

Oracle Integration Server takes full responsibility for the secure transit of communications from the point of creation to the point or points of receipt. It ensures the integrity of the communication between the points.

OIS stores a secure copy of the communication on a persistent medium to protect against loss in the event of a system failure and to provide an audit trail of the communication. It ensures that a communication exists only as part of a transaction so that it does not get lost in transit or recorded incorrectly. It maintains an accurate record of the receipt of the communication.

This section contains:

• Security

• Extensibility

• Encapsulation

• Component-Based Architectures

• New Messaging Technologies

Product Development Life-Cycles

OIS supports the integration of Internet applications, transport layers, protocols, and the languages of legacy applications. It provides versioning capabilities and an interface for performing configuration, development, and management, in both development and production environments.

Figure 3-7 Product Development Life-cycles

Extensibility

You can develop and extend OIS over time without the necessity for extensive modification of the original components. This feature is called extensibility and it makes it easier for you to:

• Add new applications to the solution

• Extend the interfaces of existing applications

• Add new integration components

• Manage integration component upgrades

• Speed exploitation of new channels to market

• Support new standards for protocols and messages

• Support new regulatory controls

Encapsulation

Encapsulation makes the object self-contained by limiting communication with that object to a defined interface. All the products that make up OIS can be encapsulated.

Encapsulation enables you to replace an component without making an impact on any of the components with which it communicates. The new component can be successfully encapsulated if it communicates through the same defined interface or if it provides the equivalent or better integration services.

Encapsulation simplifies your analysis of the impact of replacing a component, it minimizes redesign of the interface of the component, and it minimize the impact on the code and interface of other components.

Component-Based Architectures

Component-based architecture follows logically from the concepts of extensibility and encapsulation. Its objective is to design the architecture as a set of parts, each of which provides a logically grouped set of services and functionality. The removal or replacement of any of the individual parts has only a limited impact on functionality. The basic architecture remains valid and appropriate.

Even if the requirement for a particular component changes significantly, the impact of changes on the other components is minimized. To achieve this, the components must be loosely coupled with one another and must communicate using standard protocol and communication transport.

To loosely couple the software and hardware, the software must be easily portable and able to communicate across different hardware platforms.

New Messaging Technologies

Oracle Corporation has developed messaging technologies that incorporate new features important to the development of an asynchronous messaging infrastructure for enterprise-wide application integration. The most significant of these include:

• Auditing and Tracking

• Business Process Coordination

• Business Intelligence

Auditing and Tracking

Electronic business must incorporate the same rigorous accounting practices that are required of traditional business. It must be possible to capture and reproduce an audit trail of business-event-driven electronic interactions. By incorporating persistent storage of messages in the database and ability to retain messages even after they have been processed, Oracle Advanced Queuing provides a strong audit trail.

Persistent storage also enables you to track business events while they are in progress, so that you can quickly see evaluate the current state of business transactions.

Business Process Coordination

Business process coordination is essential to the effective management of an integration environment. Business process coordination software is a logical extension of the concept governing workflow engines. Workflow engines manage the flow of documents in business processes that include manual steps performed by users.

The principle is the same for business process coordination except that it manages an automated rather than a manual business process. Business process coordination manages the flow of messages between automated processes and also manages the state of the message flows. It lets you manage the state of long-running business transactions independently of the technology used to manage the transaction.

We have extended the Oracle Workflow product to interface with Advanced Queuing in order to provide business process coordination.

Business Intelligence

The Oracle Advanced Queuing technology creates close coupling between the database and the messaging function. This close coupling enables you to use Oracle Business Intelligence software to analyze business events and to identify trends and patterns. You can also monitor the service levels and response times that are provided by process steps called from within the Integration Server.