Friday, December 28, 2012

Oracle Service Bus (OSB) Performance Tuning tips

          Once you are comfortable with developing and deploying applications in OSB, the next thing that comes for you will be how fast you can run your applications and what are the standard procedures that need to be followed up in order to achieve that. 

          Based on my experience, I have come up with few points which will help you fine tune your applications and get good response times. The fine tuning of any application should start from the design phase. The design can be high level design, deployment design, low level design and finally the standard way of implementing these things.

High level design
  One should follow the most suitable and efficient design pattern in-order to achieve good result. Considering different solutions for the same problem will be handy.

Deployment design & Server Configuration
  OSB applications runs on Weblogic Server, a J2EE application server. So you should be very careful while selecting the JVM parameters like heap memory, gc algorithm, nursery size and other Java options. 
  Deep level analysis need to be done in order to understand whether the application that you are building is CPU intensive or memory intensive.

Low level design
  This is nothing but the proper work flow pattern design. You should analyse which work flow pattern will be more efficient in terms of number of threads it creates, the memory utilization and CPU utilization. Also how much of static data need to be handled and how it should be cached and so on.

Best practices for developing highly efficient OSB applications.

1. Cache the static data that need to be configured in your application. You need to consider the below points
    a. how much of data need to be cached
    b. Which caching api to use.
    
         There are two popular caching api's available - Java Caching System (JCS) and Oracle Coherence caching which Oracle recommends.


 Java Caching System (JCS)

       This is a simple caching scheme where the static data will be cached per server. This can be easily integrated to OSB application and the complexity is very less. But this is not suitable for caching very large amount of data. The caching mechanism may fail under heavy load and the cached data over 50 rows from a table.

Oracle Coherence Caching
       This is the Oracle recommended caching mechanism. We need to configure the coherence cluster in the Weblogic server level in order to use this. This is very robust and stable cache mechanism which can handle heavy load and large amount of data. The cached data will be available through out the cluster. There are different methods available for clearing the Coherence cache.

2. Disable all tracing
    For high end performance , you need to disable all kinds of tracing. This can be easily done in sbconsole.
  sbconsole -> smart search
  If you are using coherence caching, make sure that you enable caching for the business   service used for that.

3. Datasources
   If you are using datasouce for select or query operations, then use non-XA driver. 

4.  XQuery tuning

  a. Avoid using '//' anywhere in the xquery
  b. use indexes for faster xquery parsing.
  c. Use FLOWR expressions instead of 'if' conditions for checking the existence of any tag.
  d. If you want to use any intermediate xpath continuously , then assign that to a variable         
      and use it rather than querying it multiple times.
  e. Using indexes for xqueries, if you are not sure that it will return multiple rows
  f. If you use multiple 'let' statements, group it under one 'let'
  g. Avoid declaring the namespaces above xquery, it will lead to different namespace
     prefixes during runtime. Instead put it inline with xquery xml tags.
  h. Avoid using of '*' to the maximum extend
  i. Split large sized dbquery xmls to multiple parts so that xquery parsing will be easy.
        Design the dbentries in such a way that you would be easily able to split with  
        respect to some parameters.
  j. Reduce the number of parameters passing to the XQuery. Instead you can pass a single
      xml which will have all the parameters mapped



Xquery Performance testing guidelines

1. Test with huge payloads
2. Testing with values inside payload in different order (better reverse the order in the payload and test) 

For any queries , please drop a mail to
sajurrk@gmail.com or saju_rrk@yahoo.com












   
    






Sunday, March 25, 2012

Attachment Handling using Oracle Service Bus (OSB)

1. Introduction

                             Oracle Fusion 11g is an enterprise ready family of integration products from Oracle.  Oracle Service Bus (OSB) 11g  is one of the components in Fusion middleware product.  OSB can do routing, transformation and orchestration of messages. Messages can be of xml or non xml.  Here we are concerned about sending files as attachments along with the messages.  We will discuss how OSB handles attachments and the configurations done for the same and the results of one sample performance testing done in virtual data center (VDC) Linux environment.


2. Introduction to Attachment handling

            You might be remembering that in your company if you face any issues in your system, you might be asked to upload any screenshot of the problem or any documents relevant to that. Did you ever think that how these files are processed in the background.
If you analyse closely, the files you upload will be first taken by some front end application and it will be passed on to the integration middleware component and there it will be uploaded into some file server or vendor specific share point.
            In this document, we are concerned only about the integration middleware component, OSB 11g and how it handles attachment.

3. Types of Attachment handling


            Attachment handling can be of two types.
a.       Inline attachment handling
b.      MIME attachment handling

a.       Inline attachment handling
Here the attachment file will be encoded into some format, say base64 format and send it as part of the main xml message

b.      MIME attachment handling
Here the attachment will be send as part of attachment headers along wth the normal xml message. The attachments can be received in multiple formats by OSB, but one of the common format is base64 encoded binary format.

4. Configuring OSB 11g for inline attachment handling

     Open OSB eclipse and create one Oracle Service bus project.




Create one proxy service inside AttachmentHandlingTest OSB project




Go to the message handling tab and select the following
a.       XOP/MTOM
b.       page attachments to disk




Now go to the MessageFlow tab and add some pipeline pair.




Deploy the application to the server





Testing the application.

Request document to test. The attachment (embedded in the attachment tag)  is encoded as base64.

<createSRRequest>
    <request>
      <messageId>test</messageId>
     <attachment>
0M8R4KGxGuEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPgADAP7/CQAGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAAAAUAAAAAAAAAAAEAAAUgAAAAEAAAD+////AAAAAE8AAAD///AUAA
     </attachment>
    </request>
</createSRRequest>









5.Configuring OSB 11g for MIME attachment handling

  
    MIME attachments are the attachments send as headers. Here the client used for posting is soapUI. We should not use the sbconsole test window to test MIME attachment applications.

If we post via soapUI, OSB receives it as binary and we can see only some java reference for this object. Inorder to access this attachment there are  two ways.

1. Using Proxy service
2. Using Java code


1. Using Proxy Service - 

    Here you will receive the headers in the $attachments variable and there you can see the attachment as header. Now create a proxy service which takes request as binary and response as text and pass the attachment binary reference to this proxy service and get back the response as text.

Please find below the screenshots.

This is the sample proxy service


Assigning the binary-content from the $attachments variable for passing it to the proxy which converts binary to text



This is the proxy which converts binary to text. See the configuration in the "Messaging" tab.


In the binary to text proxy. we will give only empty proxy. See below



Calling the converter proxy from the main proxy. The text output will be saved in the response variable as shown below


Testing Using SOAPUI


  We have to post the MIME attachment using some 3rd party tool like SOAPUI. You require one wsdl for this.There are options to add attachments with different properties. Please find below the screenshot for the same.


2. Using Java Code - <<will update soon>>


For any queries , please drop a mail to
sajurrk@gmail.com or saju_rrk@yahoo.com