SOA 12c – Entity Variables- delegating operations to data provider services

SOA 12c provides the capability to perform the BPEL data operations using the data provider services through the usage of entity variables. The data provider services perform the data operations behind the scenes and thus eliminates the usage of Database Adapter in the BPEL Process Service, enhancing the SOA runtime performance.
The common example of using entity variables with the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) which provides Business Component provider service using SDO based data to connect to the Data Store.
SDO is the specification provided to streamline the execution of SOA data from heterogeneous systems in the form of XML document, relational databases and web service being the source of information.

Entity variables using data provider service overcomes the below given issues:
1) Earlier the unsupported XML data source (Native Data) was required to be converted into XML Format before it can be processed using the SOA components.
2) The large payloads during the data conversion also leads to performance issue
3) In the previous release of SOA, the DOM form data was retrieved using the Database Adapter and was getting stored in the dehydrated data store. The stored data was not in sync with the target data store and thus might provide the stale data details.

The current SOA 12c Release overcomes this issue by providing the entity variables which retrieves the data using the data provider services (ADF –BC). Instead of storing the data in the dehydrated store, key is persisted (done using the BindEntity Activity in the BPEL Process).
Every time, this key will be referred to retrieve the data from the target data store using the data provider services, eliminating redundant data / stale data issue.

S. No 10.1.x Release 11g and 12c Release (Entity Variables)
1 Usage of Database Adapters for retrieving / saving the data Retrieving / saving of data is performed using data provider services ( ADF-BC)
2 Storage of data in the dehydrated store using the Oracle BPEL Process Manager Key is persisted for the transaction
3 Data variables are in the DOM( Document Object Model) Form Data variables are in the SDO ( Service Data Objects) Form

SOA 12c Outbound Integrations with SDO Binding Components

SOA 12c Inbound Integrations with SDO Binding Components