Dec 29, 2007

Bitmap to vector

I found a nice page, where you can convert your bitmaps to vector graphics.
Take a look here.
Vectormagic can convert the following files:
Input: JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF
Output: EPS, SVG, PNG

They have some very nice samples online.
Yes i know, there are some program you can buy to do this, but if you only use this feature rarely, than an online conversion is very helpful....

Dec 28, 2007

Oracle SOA Suite 11g: Documentation

Just a small posting for all, who want to start with 11g and do not find the documentation:
Take a look at this link
(But it is only for the SOA 11g technology preview)

This Technology Preview release of Oracle SOA Suite 11g showcases the support for the Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard in Oracle SOA Suite through the new composite assembly editor in JDeveloper as well as a unified service engine foundation for the full set of SOA Suite components.

Dec 27, 2007

A first look at BPEL & SOA with jdeveloper 11g

Jdeveloper 11g beta 3 is ready for download...
What is new? It is the first preview with included BPEL modeler.
I was told that 11g everthing is based on SCA (service component architecture).
This changes the design process for BPELs, because now you can add more than one BPEL process to a project. Here the first screenshots:

First you have to add a SOA project

Then you can choose several composites (emtpy, with BPEL, with HumanTask..)

Then you get a BPEL process like you know it from jdeveloper 10g:

The only changes are some graphic enhancements for the drag and drop..
Now to the composite view:

This shows the like SCA requires the structure of a composite with services, references and properties...

Now you can add another BPEL into this composite:

and the your composite looks like


Now you could model the relationship between the BPEL with drag and drop, but this is senseless for this example.
So i hope this was enough for a short impression to jdeveloper 11g ...

Update: Here a posting covering the production version of SOA Suite 11g!

Dec 20, 2007

UMPC: Belinea s.book 1

Belinea announced its umpc s.book 1. Is this a real competitor to the ASUS EEE?
But its price is 800 Euros... (ok this is not fair, because you get 1GB RAM and a 80 GB HDD).
Really cool is the following thing:
Touch-Screen

Perhaps it has some built-in enhancements like the iPhone or iPod touch (look here)
It is amazing that this s.book 1 looks like the FIC CE260 (take a look at this blog entry).

Dec 17, 2007

SOA: Oracle Best Practices

After the prerelease (my posting a few days ago) now the official best practice guide from Oracle for the SOA Suite including BPEL, ESB and OWSM is out.
You can download it via:
otn.oracle.com

Dec 12, 2007

Official Oracle Wiki: Helpful?!?

Oracle started some weeks ago their official wiki.
But is this wiki really helpful? Who should contribute to this web 2.0 thing?

For example read a blog entry about the OWB wiki pages (Oracle Warehouse Builder).

Wikis-- especially corporate wikis-- are a tricky business. On the one hand, users and corporate staff can share information and let the wisdom of crowds emerge. On the other hand, a company can pitch up a wiki, call that their support strategy, and in essence tell their customers "Our product documents and supports itself. Isn't Web 2.0 fun?"


If you look there you will find many threads, which should be in forums.oracle.com.
Really helpful information? Not yet....

But web 2.0 applications need their time to find their scope. So let's wait or better contribute to make the wiki successful!

Dec 9, 2007

Partitioning & Transportable Tablespaces

Here an example how to use in an Oracle database partitioning together with transportable tablespaces:

Create Tablespaces

To create tablespaces, put the following lines into a file createTablespace.sql

CREATE SMALLFILE TABLESPACE "&1" DATAFILE '/opt/oracle/oradata/XYNADB/datafile/&1.dbf'
SIZE 100M AUTOEXTEND ON NEXT 1M MAXSIZE UNLIMITED LOGGING
EXTENT MANAGEMENT LOCAL SEGMENT SPACE MANAGEMENT AUTO ;
exit;

and start the script via sqlplus with sqlplus system/pwd @ createTablespace.sql TTS01.
It will create a tablespace named TTS01. Repeat this step with TTS00 and TTS02.

Create Table

To create a partitioned table enter the follwing lines:

create table parttest (
id number, name varchar2(40), payload varchar2(40))
partition by range (id)
(partition part00 values less than (100) tablespace tts00,
partition part01 values less than (1000) tablespace tts01,
partition part02 values less than (10000) tablespace tts02);
exit;

Insert Data

Now put into the table parttest any data you want (the id has to be lower than 10000).
Just to verify, that the partitioning is working, use the following command:

select * from parttest partition (part01);

Adding new Partitions

To add new partitions, you have to create a new tablespace (s. abouve) and then enter the following command:

alter table parttest add partition part03 values less than (20000) tablespace tts03;

Drop an old partition

To drop an old partition, use the follwing command:

alter table parttest drop partition part00;

But with issueing this command your data in this partition is gone and there is no rollback!

Anything new?

Now we have a table partitioned over several tablespaces. We can add partitions and drop them.
The advantage is, that performance is better than with one unpartitioned table because the optimizer uses the partitioning to get faster access to the data.
But if you could move the partitions without dropping them, that would be a real enhancement.
Here the commands how you can:

Moving the data

First you have to create a table with the same structure as your paritioned table (but without the partitions) on the same tablespace where your data resides, which you want to move.
After that you can exchange the data of your partitioned table with the data of the new table.

alter table parttest exchange partition part01 with table parttestnew;

After that you can drop the partition on the original table parttest without loosing your data, which is still there in the table parttestnew. And if you want to can move the partition with the transportable tablespace feature from Oracle to another instance…

At GIP these features are used in the Xyna Service Warehouse (take a look at my guest post there!).

Dec 6, 2007

Prerelease: Oracle SOA Best Practices

Clemens has released the SOA best practice guide.
It is a collection of solutions which where used at different customers like Toll Collect, TurkCell and others...
Now you can skip the searching in google and first take a look at this collection. You can find performance tuning, ERD informations, login timeouts, etc there...

Thanks!

Dec 2, 2007

Lego-MP3player: Cool!!

I found a nice article in the web. A MP3 player which looks like a lego brick.
Very nice!!

They say (look here):
The core unit houses an OLED screen, 4-way directional toggle, and 50GB of memory. Should you need more, just snap on another memory module. Wanna share music with friends? No problem - just connect two BLOCS together and get your sync on.

This sounds cool!
But: It is only a concept....

Recursive BPEL

I found a nice article about recursive BPEL.
At first sight you think: no problem... but as the article says
Here the deployment fails with an error that it is unable to validate the WSDL for the Partner Link. The issue here is that as part of the deployment process we are “over-writing” the old stub version of the process, with a new version.

I think for business processes you should not use recursive BPEL, but it's like working with EXCEL. After the first macros you start developing a flight simulator ;-)