Database Reference
In-Depth Information
The commercial value of all these products is out of the question. In 2001, Larry Ellison
announced the following:
Oracle saved $1 billion by implementing and using its own business applications.
Apparently, that was before SOA, and the whole stack was not that massive in scale. With
more and more applications in the portfolio, seamless product integration becomes quite
challenging, not only within an individual enterprise, but also within the cross-enterprise.
Note
Today, Oracle's application stack (
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/over-
view/index.html
)
consists of more than 200 hot-pluggable applications; this is probably
the biggest commercial application farm.
Shifting from the client-server to the multitier infrastructure was quite evident with the
dedication of the middleware tier as an integration medium. Oracle proactively worked on
the accommodation of the middleware strategy before introducing SOA as a methodolo-
gical approach.
Advanced queuing
(
AQ
) was implemented as a reliable message delivery
mechanism and embedding JVM into DB opened the door for more interoperability op-
tions. New JEE middleware products were launched in order to improve interoperability,
such as the following:
•
Oracle Application Server
(
OAS
): This was not the best application server at
the time or fully compliant with many J2EE standards, and it suffered from
memory leaks and poor performance. This was followed with
Oracle Integration
Server
(
OIS
), but it didn't improve the situation much.
•
Oracle InterConnect
: This was the predecessor of the first Oracle Service Bus.
Even this was not considered a total success, but it shaped the whole concept of
ESB (of course, for Oracle) and demonstrated the necessity of the adapter layer
(Interconnect Technology Adapters).
Soon it became quite obvious that the main problem with integration is integration itself.
With a considerable number of disparate components, each establishing interoperability,
putting all efforts into a single integration layer was similar to the search for the philo-
sopher's stone. Hot-pluggability cannot be contracted by means of super glue. Some ef-
forts should be put into the applications (services), such as Infrastructure, Methodology,
and Governance, in order to make seamless interoperability more effortless, and needless
to say that all these efforts must adhere to the already discussed principles and standards
to make the effect profound.
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