There are many situations when building composite SOA services where we need to invoke several backend services in parallel for performance reasons.  Your first thought may be to use a flow activity in your BPEL process and this is correct, although to have the services truly invoked in parallel there are a few more steps that must be done.  A BPEL process is executed using a single thread, even when a flow is reached.  Each branch of the flow will then be executed sequentially.  The solution to this is to enable the nonBlockingInvoke property on your partner links.

Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is Oracle's data integration platform engineered to provide fast and easy data transformation and data integration processes, through E-LT (Extract - Load Transform) mechanism, between different technologies.  For example, using ODI's transformation mechanism I can create daily snapshots of my data residing in an Oracle DB and store these snapshots in a XML format.  These XML snapshot files can serve as XML payloads for an external web-service to consume this data.

When working with Oracle BPM 11g you may find that there is an overwhelming amount of functionality that is available.  Learning every trick and every secret is a constant effort that will never end due to new patches, patch sets, and product releases coming down the pipe.  In any case, I have a nice little trick of exposing the existing Identity Service XPath functions within the BPM Expression Builder editor for JDeveloper version 11g 11.1.1.4.0 (PS3).  The Identity Service XPath functions are not automatically exposed in this version of JDeveloper.  I believe that in

During a recent project at a customer I was designing and building several stateful and possibly long running BPEL processes that all interacted with each other in SOA Suite 11g.  These processes would be required to read and write data to many different DB tables as well as integrate into 6+ web services and 1-2 MQ services.  We decided that separating out the DB data access and service integration into different composites from the processes would provide several benefits such as: