openworld07 – “Stateless systems scale because they don’t do anything”

Today was the best day so far at open world. At the demo grounds, I talked to Steve Button about scripting deployment and other administration tasks with groovy, I talked to Roman Dobrik about the new SCA stuff in Oracle 11g, and to Shaun Smith about EclipseLink and the database webservice they plan to put in. Apart from all that, I saw a couple of pretty cool sessions. First of all, Cameron Purdy talked about Coherence. The presentation he gave was similar to the one on Oracle Develop. I did not mind hearing it again. One of the interesting thoughts in the presentation was that middle tiers scale because they don’t have state (“they don’t do anything”). State is stored in the database and this pretty soon becomes a bottleneck. The solution is moving the data closer to the operations in a scalable and reliable way. That’s where Coherence comes in. This fits perfectly with what David Chapell is saying about the SOA grid. It is great to see that the cool ideas from an acquisition make their way into the other product groups. The last session I visited today was titled “Oracle Solutions for SOA Governance”. This session gave a good overview of Oracle’s view on governance and SOA maturity. The second part of the presentation was about the tools in the SOA suite stack that are available right now (Oracle Web Service Manager, Registry) and the new stuff that will be there in Oracle 11g. One of the interesting concepts is that of a Unified Repository. In this repository you can store artifacts like WSDLs, XSDs and other stuff. This way you can do a impact analysis on your assets in a SOA architecture. This is very important, considering that everything in a SOA is loosely coupled (or is supposed to be) and it becomes harder and harder to do configuration management and other ITIL processes. Apart from that, it is a nice place to store your canonical datamodel (XSD’s). The day ended with the party in the Cowpalace. A perfect ending for a perfect day.