Monday, August 27, 2012

Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook released

After many months of hard work, our book, Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook, has officially been released!

This was written by myself and Arun Pareek. We both spent a huge amount of effort trying to share as much of our knowledge and expertise as we could, and feel that this is truly the definitive guide to administering Oracle SOA Suite 11g. Aimed primarily at mid-level administrators, I can guarantee that you'll learn something.

There is a tremendous amount of information, and I'm particularly happy with many of the topics that we covered. This is not a regurgitation of the Oracle documentation. We explain concepts, we clearly lay out what to do in various scenarios, and we provide many step-by-step examples. Make sure to download the scripts and extra chapter when you purchase the book!

If you work with Oracle SOA Suite 11g, check it out. Whether you're happy or disappointed with the book, I'd love to hear from you.

 ~Ahmed Aboulnaga


Available here:
Paperback and eBook versions:
http://www.packtpub.com/oracle-soa-suite-11g-administrators-handbook/book

Kindle version:
http://www.amazon.com/Oracle-Suite-Administrators-Handbook-ebook/dp/B0092JYZXI/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?qid=1346074747

Chapters:

Chapter 1, SOA Infrastructure Management: What You Need to Know, introduces Oracle SOA Suite 11g, a complete, best-of-breed, and hot-pluggable product set that helps to deliver robust, agile, and reliable SOA solutions. This chapter introduces the capabilities of Oracle SOA Suite 11g and provides a snapshot of several important aspects surrounding its administration and how it can be leveraged to effectively manage and monitor the SOA infrastructure.

Chapter 2, Management of SOA Composite Applications, focuses on the management of composites, describing composite lifecycles, revisions and states, leveraging ant for automated build and deployments, using configuration plans for code promotion, and defining partitions to logically separate composites. It also describes ways to optimally save instance data, explaining the relation between database usages with respect to various audit levels that can be set.

Chapter 3, Monitoring Oracle SOA Suite 11g, emphasizes monitoring of the service engines and instances, understanding their states as well as obtaining performance metrics of composite instances running on the Oracle SOA Suite 11g infrastructure. This chapter also describes other areas that include a detailed explanation of sensors, ECID, Oracle WebLogic Server infrastructure monitoring, and the break down of the log files in an easy to understand format.

Chapter 4, Tuning Oracle SOA Suite 11g for Optimum Performance, is one of the more important chapters, as it provides guidelines and recommendations on how to drastically improve the performance of your Oracle SOA Suite 11g infrastructure, covering areas of Oracle WebLogic Server, service engines, code considerations, Oracle Database, and operating system tuning recommendations.

Chapter 5, Configuring and Administering Oracle SOA Suite 11g, is quite a long chapter, as it details the numerous administrative areas around BPEL, Mediator, UMS, BAM, and Human Workflow components in varying detail. Other topics such as startup and shutdown of the infrastructure, administration of DVMs and XREFs, configuration of log rotation, setting up UMS, and the creation of read-only MDS accounts for developers are also described.

Chapter 6, Troubleshooting the Oracle SOA Suite 11g Infrastructure, unlike other troubleshooting guides which simply list out solutions to common errors, presents a comprehensive troubleshooting methodology, which, when coupled with the foundational knowledge of the previous chapters, provides you with a better ability to solve most issues related to the infrastructure.

Chapter 7, Configuring Security Policies, introduces Oracle Web Services Manager, a central policy framework for service oriented applications used by Oracle SOA Suite 11g to implement service-level security. This chapter explains the OWSM security semantics such as policy assertions, templates, keystores, and credential stores. It also covers how they can be used to apply security to components within a composite along with the configurations required at the infrastructure. The chapter also covers administration topics that range from logging, exporting, importing, and versioning the various policies by using a combination of WLST and console approaches.

Chapter 8, Managing the Metadata Services Repository and Dehydration Store, discusses operational aspects of the metadata services layer including deploying applications to use an MDS repository, exporting and importing metadata across environments, and database growth management activities, such as tuning and purging. It also discusses partitioning surrounding the Dehydration Store.

Chapter 9, Backup and Recovery, identifies exactly what components need to be backed up (such as the Middleware Home, JDK, Windows registry keys, and runtime artifacts), what would need to be restored in the event of a failure, and to what point in time a recovery would be needed. The chapter provides the necessary approach to recover your environment from the backup point and also explains ways to leverage cloning to backup and restore a middleware installation and domain from one environment to another.

Chapter 10, Advanced Administration Topics, covers several advanced, disjoined topics that most Oracle SOA Suite 11g administrators will be engaged in, namely, patching Oracle SOA Suite components, upgrading from Oracle SOA Suite 10g, installing a highly available clustered setup of the infrastructure, and performing silent installations.



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