Seminar: SOA for Database Professionals (April 3rd, The Netherlands)

On Friday April 3rd, I will be presenting a seminar titled “SOA for Database Professionals” – in De Meern, The Netherlands. For more details and registration, go to this link. This seminar explains the concepts of SOA and their relevance to Oracle Database professionals – both DBA and Developer – as well as main benefits database professionals can derive from SOA concepts and SOA technology. The seminar will host a lot of demos – introducing special SOA, XML and service related functions in the Oracle Database as well as the key components in the Oracle SOA Suite.

The main objectives are:

• Understand what the relationship between SOA and the Oracle Database is or can be.
• See what BPEL can do for you and also what you can do for BPEL.
• Start to regard SOA (BPEL & ESB) as an opportunity to benefit from rather than a threat.
• Get started in working with WebServices BPEL and ESB (where to begin).

SOA is a hot topic and Oracle is pushing the BPEL Process Manager and in its wake the Enterprise Service Bus so forcefully that probably something is going on. However, many Oracle Database professionals are not really clear about what it is or what it means to them. Is BPEL a world apart from plain old PL/SQL programming? Is SOA irrelevant to database administrators, database designers and SQL programmers? Or should they care?

This seminar explains in a high level overview what the key SOA concepts are. It introduces WebServices and the key XML mechanisms, such as XSD, SOAP, WSDL and a touch of XPath and XSLT. It describes the respective roles of BPEL PM and the Enterprise Service Bus. It will then demonstrate how from PL/SQL programs – and even from SQL queries – SOA Services offered in BPEL or ESB can (and sometime meaningfully should) be leveraged, for example to perform operations across databases or even heterogeneous data stores.

We walk through a case of defining and publishing a service in a hospital that makes patient data available from the database to the SOA environment. All steps from defining the Service to actually publishing it and calling it from a BPEL process are discussed and demonstrated.

The seminar will spend quite some time on the ways the Oracle SOA Suite – both ESB and BPEL PM – can work with the Oracle Database through the Database Adapter. The session discusses some of the ways in which the database can contribute to the SOA. It also explains what can be gained from the SOA infrastructure: how services can be leveraged from the database. Even if there is not yet a SOA Suite implementation – some of the key SOA concepts can be applied for ‘normal’ database design and development, and we will discuss those in detail.

The seminar will have a large number of demonstrations – SQL and PL/SQL in SQL*Plus as well as JDeveloper and the runtime BPEL and ESB consoles.
Topics include:

• WebService fundamentals (some XML, XSD, WSDL and SOAP foundation)
• Accessing the Oracle Database from the SOA world
• SOA concepts applied to the world of Database Application development
• Implementing Services in the Database (inlcuding Native 11g WebServices)
• Leverage the world: Calling services from within the database
  • Benefit from Java/JEE facilities
  • Integrate with the world of SOA
  • Access internet resources and services
  • Chatting from the database