Seamless synchronisation of Oracle Retail batch, Rib/File based integration, program unit and API flows.
Our elfCafé visualisation platform provides rich actionable information highlighting either solution and production stability and performance, and where the bottlenecks for either reside.
The Oracle Retail batch is often complex, and relying on third party orchestration tools to manage the batch can delay project delivery and contribute unnecessarily to project costs.
We use batch orchestration templates to generate batch chains for execution via broadly available automation tools.
Batch performance is tracked in elfCafé execution reporting along with performance and stability trends over time or between environments. Performance bottlenecks are readily identifiable at chain or module level and can be readily resolved through parallel executions or performance tuning.
Our process orchestration definitions provide rich capabilities to flexibly define:
• process groups / chains
• dependencies
• synchronous/asynchronous execution
• fatal/non-fatal error handling for fault tolerance
As with all elfware toolsets once an orchestration is defined by an analyst it is persisted as code for execution purposes. Any automatons or orchestration chains referenced are also persisted as code in a powerful tree-based generation process.
Orchestration execution is then tracked in elfCafé execution reporting for trending and stability analysis.
When an orchestration is executed it has a variety of inputs and can generate a large number and variety of outputs.
The elfCafé Visualisation platform has been built to support the persistence of these inputs and outputs. It models an execution against a number of dimensions such as application, project, environment and activity and facilitates the aggregation of a rich set of inputs and outputs for analysis and self-service, such as:
• Execution Information – represented in graph and tabular formats
• Quality Information – volumes and functional area comparison of validations/tests executed, and/or the errors arising. Drill down to error details.
• Reconciliation – Matrix and tabular comparison of datasets for completeness and correctness
• Reports – ingestion and file system classification of CSV and other reports for online review or download
As execution datasets are ingested across environments, project states or over multiple days in a production scenario they can be compared and contrasted to identify performance and quality trends, as well as to compare reports uploaded from the various runs.
Fundamental to Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery are ubiquitous automated tests and the orchestration of these into the release process.
For third party ERP systems the sheer complexity means it can be a monumental effort to implement these – so the effort is seldom justified for implementation projects or maintenance phases beyond a small number of key flows.
At elfware we start with a substantial base set of orchestrated validations and tests for Oracle Retail, then it’s a virtual point and click approach to identify additional modules and add scenarios and verifications for each – using either static data for fixed scenarios and boundary testing or dynamic data selected from production to represent undocumented or unexpected states.