Tuesday, August 07, 2012

SOA Suite partitioning

For a customer I am busy to develop a SOA Suite purging strategy. As we expect the system to have a high number of instances we will have to keep the dehydration store and the MDS clean. The last is also essential as the end customer is under some budget constraints, which leads to the fact that the database (and especially the size of the disks) is nothing that will be allowed to grow limitless.

Now - one of the important features of the database when it comes to space management is partitioning. Partitioning a table gives you more management capabilities and tools to keep your DB size manageble.

There are a number of pointers in the documentation that describe how the database partinioning can be used for the SOA Suite - with one essential part missing: how to set it up.
There is a remark that the creation of partitions is a task for a skilled DBA (true) and a second remark that states that the admin guide will not describe it.

So when you want to use partitioning for your SOA Suite MDS you are on your own.
The RCU won't help you, the admin guide is vague and Google seems to point to SOA Suite partinioning in a different sense (the old BPEL domains).

There is only one thing that can help: an Oracle ACE willing to make it work, document it and spread the word.
So stay tuned as I will post my findings here in the next couple of days/weeks.