Introduction

Last week, during a travel in the Benelux, I met a nice guy name Roger (of course it is not a real name). In a bus, we had a friendly chat and after a while, he told me that he was an IT consultant and works as DBA for a famous insurance company in the country.

For the ones who complain of their software editors, I would like to report the Kafkaesque story that Roger told me.

The context

Roger works for a company that uses for years an ERP (let’s name it “J”). The ERP J has been bought by a very famous editor (let’s name it O) that has already in its portfolio another ERP (let’s name it “OA”). Roger manages and monitors the version 9 of the database O used by the ERP J. During many months the EPR and the database worked perfectly together.

First act

Two months ago, for the first time, the database crashed. As Roger is a good DBA, he was able to restore quickly the database. But unfortunately, after few hours the database crashed again. Roger found out a viscous bug in the database and in order to find a solution, he called the O support who was not surprised since the bug was well known. An O consultant told Roger to change a parameter from the value X to Y. “Perfect solution”. The database worked well without crashing. End of the first act.

Second act

After a while the ERP users realizes that the ERP performances decreased and were divided by 10 to 100. Quickly the company found out that the bottleneck came from database. Another O consultant stepped in to optimize the database and diagnosed the problem. THE SOLUTION was quickly found out: The parameter set at the value Y must be set to X. Immediately, Roger reacted and replied that the value X crashed the database.

The solution

The editor admitted the problem and by way of solution proposed to migrate the database from the version 9 to the version 10. Indeed, the new version solved this problem.

Unfortunately at present, the ERP J does not support the version 10 of the O database even if the ERP and the database belong to the same editor. As final solution, O proposed to simply drop the ERP J and rebuild the company organization on the other ERP OA. Of course, O would assist the company during its migration. (What a pitiful solution!!!).

I hope you enjoyed the depressing story of Roger and his database.

A good new never arrives alone.

This month Pymma is pleased to announce two very good news.

KBC bank and Pymma consulting Partnership

After few months of partnership, we are pleased to announce our collaboration with the Belgium bank KBC on one of the most important Java CAPS projects in Europe. Pymma has been chosen by KBC as external Open ESB/Java CAPS expert to train its teams, to advice them about Java CAPS good practice and to propose technical solutions on the new technologies brought along with JBI and Java CAPS. We hope this partnership will be fruitful and successful for the two partners.

Pymma Open ESB community Partner

The second good news has been published last week by Sun Microsystems: Pymma consulting is officially Open ESB community Partner. We are proud to be the first company selected not on our ability to develop JBI components but on our expertise on Open-ESB consulting and training. This agreement results from lot of work from our part but also from the part of the Open-ESB team in London. I would like to thank Mike http://blogs.sun.com/mikesblog/) and particularly Louis http://blogs.sun.com/polyblog that support us during the last months.

Is SOA is dead (the debate)?

In that time where services and SOA architectures are denigrated, we would like to remind you that four years ago, the same company (http://www.burtongroup.com/) predicted the end of the J2EE platform and the same fate for .Net . Nonetheless, the polemic on Internet on this topic is important and expresses a trouble in the IT community with SOA. I hope I’ll have time in a next post, to comment this situation and break down the reasons for this trouble. However, at Pymma, we think that architectures relying on essential concepts like intermediation (contract of service and bus) have a promising future. The open ESB family (Open ESB, Glassfish ESB and Java CAPS) allows us to design and develop this type of architecture. It's for this reason that our customers decide to invest with us in these technologies.

See you soon