I think that 2012 will be the year of Oracle BPM, and the good news is that there are excellent resources available to prepare for it. There are webcasts, books and a certification that will help you to be successful in your Oracle BPM project. Announced at Oracle Open World was Process Accellerators. They are prebuilt processes that can serve as Best Practices-implementations and actual runnable implementations. All that now is available makes me think that there is no excuse anymore - the red carpet to Oracle BPM is laid out for us.

The topics covered in this post are the following:

• Bookreview of the new BPM Suite 11g Handbook
• Links to Oracle BPM resources
• Process Accellerators
• What is IT Strategies from Oracle?
• What is the next book to read on BPMN?

The most significant announcement at Oracle Open World was the Cloud, and it will be exciting to see that the Cloud will provide for BPM.

A couple of challenges you might run into when upgrading SOA Suite PS4 on Windows.

The issues has not been a consistent in all environments, but if it happens this blog post might help you.

Error on startup:

I/O error while reading domain directory and

Connection refused. Could not connect to NodeManager.

In this case the host was shut down without shuting down the weblogic domain first. When the host came back up again there are some files that must to be removed.
Remove/rename the state-files under:

$MW_HOME\user_projects\domains\base_domain\servers\adminserver\data\nodemanager
$MW_HOME\user_projects\domains\base_domain\servers\managedserver1\data\nodemanager

We got a quick response from Jacco H. Landlust:

I think you might be fixing a symptom in stead of the real issue. It
seems you have created the domain with config.sh and for production
mode. This sets the username and password in
$DOMAIN_HOME/config/nodemanager/nm_password.properties . You should
check (and correct) the username and password for nodemanager by
clicking on environment --> security --> advanced (in /console). After
that you should remove the boot.properties from
$DOMAIN_HOME/servers/$SERVER_NAME/data/nodemanager/boot.properties.
Only then this error will be fixed more perminently.

I helped my friend Jan van Zoggel to fix this too, see:
http://jvzoggel.wordpress.com/2011/08/19/oracle-weblogic-nodemanager-bea-300033/

By the way, it's a best practice to move your domain files out of the
$MW_HOME :)

Cheers,

Jacco

Open World 2011 was a great success with 45.000 people. I will in this posting share some of my experiences and thoughts.  You can have a short look at the announcements made at OOW here (I will only get in detail on some of them).

What Oracle-people can tell us depends very much of what is already announced, so at OOW the news are being portioned out during the week. We can get a sense of what will happen during the week (reading session titles/descriptions), but one is not sure before it is announced. The biggest thing this year is the Cloud – and I see how this has been a focus at Oracle for a long time now. I believe Cloud will be even bigger the next years. They will provide a Cloud that is a service comparable to what is available on Amazon AWS today, but the Cloud-support will also be available in all layers in the software. This is the reason why next version of Fusion Middleware will be named 12c – for cloud. First available 12c-product is Grid Control 12c – released at OOW.

While setting up my test environment with Oracle Linux 6 u1 64bit in VirtualBox, I just couldn't get the Guest Additions to install properly. Installation using Oracle Linux "Basic Server" setup would stop due to missing X Windows and OpenGL. Installation on the "Desktop" setup would complain about missing OpenGL, and although the installation otherwise seemed to complete successfully, the end result was the same: no Guest Additions.

This is the workaround I used to get the the Guest Additions working.

If you have a DB adapter where you select from a view or table that does not have a primary key, you may get duplicate rows returned. This may surprise you.

From the documentation : OTN doc- chapter 9.2.6

"Note that Oracle Database Adapter only supports tables where there is a primary key defined. If primary key constraints have not been defined on a table explicitly, then you must provide one at design time while defining the Oracle Database Adapter by using the Adapter Configuration Wizard. If you do not provide a valid primary key, then the unique constraint is not guaranteed, and this could result in possible loss of messages at run time. That is, rows with duplicate primary key values are likely to be lost. "

A solution may be to select a column that is unique as the primary key, or you may have to add a virtual column to the view so that it is unique (for instance a random number that is big enough).

What we have noticed is that the Weblogic managed server goes down whenever an admin user logs into Windows server using remote desktop in console mode (e.g. mstsc /console) and then logs off. If the administrator logs into the server in regular mode (e.g. mstsc) and then logs off, this problem is not simulated.
To resolve this problem, you can pass -Xnohup parameter to JVM.

We found the solution on Oracle Forum.

Set Java Option this way -

JAVA_OPTION="$JAVA_OPTION -Xnohup"
export JAVA_OPTION