#294 Oracle SOA Governance 11g Implementation

The Book

At last over the holiday period I have gotten the opportunity to delve into this worthy tome. This book is excellent in it's coverage of design- and runtime governance. The example business case used for the book's case study is easy to follow. The authors begin by conducting a SOA Maturity Assessment for the fictional company and detail an appropriate reference architecture for them.

Chapter 3 covers Oracle Enterprise Repository - Oracle's flagship product for design time governance. This chapter gives an indepth account of OER architecture. This chapter also covers value-adds such as the solution packs available for OER.

Chapter 4 covers configuring OER for our case study - Service Discovery and Cataloging etc.

Chapter 5 discusses the harvester which allows one to bootstrap OER with existing assets, for example - there is a excellent section covering the OSB harvester. Once harvested - OER then allows us to visualize asset relationships - for me one of the most important features of the product.

Chapter 6 deals with Asset Lifecycle and Workflow - this part contains a valuable section on implementing architecture blueprints - thus defining expected deliverables and enforcing compliance.

Chapter 7 covers Oracle Service Registry (OSR) - Oracle's UDDI implementation. This section also covers the relationship between OSR and OER. OER - desgin time - OSR - runtime. It also covers the OER exchange utility which enables OER / OSR synchronisation. The chapter discusses the usual UDDI concepts in the context of OSR - UDDI Taxanomies, tModel etc. A good refresher!

Chapter 8 covers Design Time Service Promotion and Discovery - essentially applying what we learned in the previous chapter to our use case. This chapter discusses such technical details as automatic workflows for publishing to OSR etc. Again a great feature of this book - the right mix of WHY and HOW.

Chapter 9 brings us to runtime governance - including how to use Oracle Web Services Manager (WSM) to implement security policies as well as monitoring via Enterprise Manager.

Chapter 10 discusses extending runtime governance via EM and BTM (Business Transaction Management)- for infrastructure monitoring. BTM is not a core part of SOA Suite, however it fits very nicely into the mix here as the authors mention.

Chapter 11 covers extending governance with AIA foundation pack - especially interesting in the realm of MDM.

All in all, the book itself is a great asset - with the right mix of answers to to the What, Why and How of SOA Governance. Chapeau Luis and Andrew!

Again the Book