Introduction

In this chapter, we'll look at the aspects of SOA Suite that can be tuned when interacting with the backing database. Recipes for tuning the database itself can be found in Chapter 8, BPEL and BPMN Engine Tuning.

As we scale SOA Suite to cope with application load, it is likely that the underlying database will become a performance bottleneck. SOA Suite makes heavy use of the database, storing both the metadata for process instances as well as their payloads. Much of the tuning for the BPEL, BPMN, Mediator, and other components, which we discuss in later recipes, is based around reducing the amount of database I/O that happens. The primary use of the database by SOA Suite is for its "Dehydration Store," which is a phrase used to describe how process instances can be persisted to the database in order to be loaded at a later time. This can be done for a number of reasons: it allows process instances to persist across restarts of the server, and can allow long-running processes...