Upgrade to SOA Suite 11g, will I go for that quickly?

Hiii there,

It has been an opportunity for me now to start writing again in my blog with SOA Suite 11g release.

I have already installed SOA Suite 11g successfully and created few processes on that, but that gave me a thought that why I should upgrade from 10.1.3.4 to 11g quickly ?

I think it is not wise to make hurry and move to 11g platform. Few reasons for that may be,

• Moving to 11g platform can require substantial change or upgrade to your current 10.1.3.x infrastructure.
• It was certainly easy to migrate from 10.1.3 to 10.1.3.1 to 10.1.3.3 (many would have faced lot of isses mvoing to 10133) to 10.1.3.4, but 11g is a change of application server, and Java Container. JRockit(i.e. BEA's JDK) and weblogic server (server container) had certainly been the best available in the market in BEA era, and they must be understand well before we really go for upgrade. There are more logging options and more then that a lot more configuration files (a bunch of .xml) to be understood with weblogic server domains(like instance in SOA Suite).
• Fusion Middleware 11g Platform can bring substantial benefits if understood properly and implemented in right direction. So, it is not suggestable that just in order to upgrade SOA Suite, we upgrade our production servers. FMW 11g platform can bring your web applications, integration components, portal and document control components together in unified Developer studio. A good upgrade policy can save lots of bucks but still gives organization a bunch of new dimensions to do the business. Like, today organizations wants to close their multiple E-Business Suite instances just to have one single unique E-Business 12 version(preferably on-demand) and get a new life in their business, similarly platform FMW 11g can add new life in the organization if implemented with thoughtful design.
• We still can go for only SOA Suite Upgrade. But remember SOA Suite 11g has many new good features like composite application concept, Entity creation concepts in BPEL projects, Business Rules component as a part of your composite application project, send notification activity, Oralce ESB as new component Median. So, you may want to plan and upgarde your current SOA Suite processes with some exciting new features before you deploy them to your SOA Suite 11g production server.

How about having Devlopment SOA Suite 11g server in parallel to your current 1013 SOA Suite development server. That would be really a good idea as it will help to understand the new functionality easily and will give us a chance to test new version for stability, performance and deployment perspective.

If you want to upgrade, please remember that

• Upgarde can be carried out on all the SOA Suite Release 10.1.3.x release.
• For current SOA Suite 10.1.2, we first need to upgrade to 10.1.3 and then to upgrade to 11g.

More details on 11g Upgrade is available at OTN, find supported upgrade points here and find here the details how to upgrade.

Have a Happy Upgrade,

Cheers,

Nirav

"Activities" tab in BPEL PM 10133 shows exceptions

I agree that working with SOA Suite 10133 with Basic installation and configuration based on Olite keeps you busy searching for solutions to the issues you face.

On my Vista Enterprise I installed 10131 basic installation and applied the patch for 10133. Also completed the post-installation task. When I opened my BPEL Console, as I expected I could not see the flow in the instances. But the problem which annoyed me a lot was with the "Activities" tab.

I assured that all my BPEL and ESB processes were still working fine. But when I clicked on "Activities" tab after installation I got the screen with the exception message as below

Oracle BPEL Process Manager Full Cycle

An unexpected error has occurred while executing your request. This is most likely related to a defect in the Oracle BPEL Process Manager product. We apologize you can post the error to the OTN forum and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Attachments:

Build Information:

*****************************************************************************

Oracle BPEL Server version 10.1.3.3.0

Build: 0

Build time: Fri Jun 15 06:05:31 PDT 2007

Build type: release

Source tag: PCBPEL_10.1.3.3.0_GENERIC_070615.0525

Exception Message:
http://javax.servlet.ServletException
Cannot find work items.
An attempt to fetch the work items using the where condition "" from the datastore has failed. The exception reported is: ODBC S1002 invalid column number
Please check that the machine hosting the datasource is physically connected to the network. Otherwise, check that the datasource connection parameters (user/password) is currently valid.
sql statement: SELECT * FROM admin_list_wi WHERE ci_domain_ref = 0

Exception Trace:

javax.servlet.ServletException: Cannot find work items.
An attempt to fetch the work items using the where condition "" from the datastore has failed. The exception reported is: ODBC S1002 invalid column number
Please check that the machine hosting the datasource is physically connected to the network. Otherwise, check that the datasource connection parameters (user/password) is currently valid.
sql statement: SELECT * FROM admin_list_wi WHERE ci_domain_ref = 0

...


The solution I got was to re-run the scripts to the post-installation of 10133 patch. I could find that wi-fault table and three other views were missing from the database though they were there in the scripts.

Thanks Sash for pointing this out. You can find more information @ http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=837295&tstart=0.

Cheers

Nirav