Oracle is the only technology provider with a complete suite of integrated cloud applications and a cloud infrastructure platform. The Oracle Cloud offers all the services you need to migrate, build, and run your IT, from existing enterprise workloads to new cloud-native applications and data platforms.
Oracle Database is an RDBMS. An RDBMS that implements object-oriented features such as user-defined types, inheritance, and polymorphism is called an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS).
SAP ERP is complex software and used in both large and small companies to integrate business activities, while Oracle is ORDBMS, used only large enterprise companies. One needs to have complete SAP education to use its complexity.
Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) is a complete integration solution for orchestrating agile, user-centric business processes across enterprise applications. AIA offers prebuilt solutions at the data, process, and user interface levels, delivering a complete process solution to business end users.
There is no particular recommendation. If you have implemented your services properly and independently (see https://blogs.oracle.com/aia/2010/11/aia_11g_best_practices_for_dec.html), you can deploy them in any order and it does not really matter if you have one or multiple DPs as everything gets deployed.
A set of activities and tasks accomplished in a particular business area are treated as a business process. Examples include Sales Management, Inventory Management, and so on. In themselves, they do not deliver business value. Coordination of business processes from different business areas creates business value.
A Business Activity is a coordinated set of Tasks. A Business Activity is equivalent to a subprocess. Examples include Process Payment, Ship Goods, and so on. One application or a combination provides business activity functionality.
A Task is an elementary activity or atomic process capable of handling a unit of work. It cannot be split further without a loss of business meaning. It can be implemented by one or more providers. Examples include Create Customer, Query Payment, and so on.
A Composite Business Flow is a set of coordinated tasks and activities, involving both human and system interactions across one or more business areas, which leads to accomplishing a set of specific organizational goals.
Characteristics of Composite Business Flows include the following:
A Service Consumer is the initiator of a business process, business activity, or task in an enterprise. It has knowledge of the available AIA Conceptual Services and can present requests accordingly.
AIA Conceptual Services are developed using Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies. They constitute the service portfolio for the SOA implementation and enable the following:
Reuse, granularity, modularity, composeability, componentization, and interoperability Standards-compliance (both common and industry-specific) Service identification and categorization, provisioning and delivery, and monitoring and tracking AIA Conceptual Services are categorized into Process Services, Activity Services, Data Services, Connector Services, and Infrastructure Services.
Various applications acquired for their best-of-breed functionalities and any legacy applications built in-house are Provider Applications and Resources. Each of these applications exposes business functions, such as APIs, and can be accessed using different modes of connectivity.
A Process Service is the implementation of major business events that have a significant impact on running the enterprise. It involves work being accomplished with the help of multiple resources.Process Services automate business processes, orchestrate a series of human and automated steps, and normally span multiple information systems. They are analogous to Business Processes in AIA Reference Process Models.
Process Services in AIA define and automate business processes that are external to and independent of the specific back-end systems used in the organization. This shields business processes from back-end system changes. Similarly, applications are isolated from business process changes. Loose coupling between business processes and applications simplifies changes and maintenance for both.
An Activity Service represents an atomic business unit of work and has a set of steps involving system-to-system interactions. Activity Services may also warrant orchestration. In some cases, there may be matching application capabilities. These are exposed as mediator services on the service bus. Activity Services can act upon multiple canonical messages and be consumed by participating applications and process services. The structure of the message is either canonical or a user-defined format.
A Data Service provides an aggregated, real-time view of enterprise data. Data consumers interact with enterprise data using Data Services. Data Services are primarily create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations that act upon canonical or user-defined messages. They are exposed on the service bus as mediator services.
Data Services eliminate point-to-point links at the data level and direct dependency on the data models of data sources. Data Services can be consumed by participating applications, process services, and activity services.
A Utility Service provides error handling, diagnostic, and logging facilities across AIA implementations.
A Composite Business Process (CBP) is a set of coordinated tasks and activities involving both human and system interactions. It is an implementation of the AIA Reference Process Model Business Process and is a Process Service.
In AIA, CBPs are implemented, managed, and monitored as a single SOA composite using SOA BPEL along with SOA Mediator, SOA Human Workflow, and SOA Business Rules components. The BPEL components drive the flow.
An Application Business Connector Service (ABCS) implements the EBS interface by exposing the business functions provided by the participating application.
There is nothing really wrong with hand-crafting the DP except that you lose the overall stream of information from start to end in your development lifecycle. But some customers actually decided to do it this way, though.
This file is absolutely key at runtime as services read certain properties (e.g. the actual endpoint of the services that are called) from that file. I would assume your services will fail if you don’t have a valid file on your test environment, i.e. having a section for each of your services.
And yes, the AID takes care of maintaining it. Every service you created with Service Constructor should have a file called AIAServiceConfigurationProperies.xml. When running AID to deploy such a service, it first adjusts the values in that file to match the current environment, then merges the content into AIAConfigurationProperties.xml and finally uploads it to MDS.