Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook: This book will quickly become your constant companion in achieving the reliability and security you want in your day to day administration of Oracle SOA Suite 11g. Covers both broad concepts and real-world implementation.

Every composite has a state, mode, and associated metadata. The state can be up (started) or down (shut down). The mode can either be active or retired. Metadata is stored in the Metadata Store (MDS), which is a database-based repository used by Oracle SOA Suite 11g, and consists of information that includes default revision number, last modification date, deployment and redeployment times, and instance statistics. Before walking through how to manage the state and mode of composites, we will begin by describing composite revisions.

Prior to Oracle SOA Suite 11g PS2 (11.1.1.3), as hundreds of composites were deployed to the SOA server, they were all listed in alphabetical order on the console, which made it a burden to manage and was not very structured. Oracle recognized the lack of structure and, therefore, introduced the concept of partitions to help better organize where to deploy your composites. However, partitions are just logical separations to group your composites together. Domain libraries, extension modules, server Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI), and infrastructure properties are shared across all partitions.

Partitions do not have their own configuration or logging. They serve no purpose other than grouping composites into separate categories. Thus, for example, code for your Human Resources integrations can reside in a partition separate from your EBS integrations, offering better structuring and organization. There are a few bulk lifecycle...

All component management tasks that can be performed manually through the web-based Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control console can also be executed with a script through the command-line utility ant. In this section, we describe how to use ant to start up, shut down, activate, and retire composites, as well as package and deploy them. Oracle SOA Suite 11g ships all necessary ant scripts to perform these tasks, and they are quite easy to use.

Promoting code refers to the activity of taking code from one environment, such as the development environment, and deploying it to the next one, such as the test environment. A typical software development promotion lifecycle sees code moving from development to test to QA (quality assurance) to production. As code is successfully tested in one environment, it is deployed to the next.

Setting the level of auditing tells the SOA Infrastructure how much information you want logged in order to assist in the monitoring and troubleshooting of instances. For example, if the audit level is completely off, the administrator will have no visibility into any composite instance. No instance data is logged and it is impossible to tell anything at that point (although instances are actually created and requests are serviced just fine). On the other hand, if the audit level is set to development, not only is the instance data logged, but the payload is also logged at every operation, giving the administrator complete visibility into the step-by-step execution of every instance!

Although setting the audit level to development may appear tempting, it has both performance and storage implications. Audit data is stored in the database, and if you have a large number of transactions, the database growth can be huge. One large customer...

The focus of this chapter was to walk through key activities that enable the Oracle SOA Suite 11g administrator to perform various composite application functions, including basic management to deployment to auditing. Specifically, we focused on the following: