Combining Oracle, Tuxedo and Powerbuilder
Thomas G. Walker
Powerbuilder at the front end, Tuxedo as a transaction processor and
Oracle as the back end database. We have yet to find any person or group
who has used this combination of products, or even any two of these
products together.
I'm looking for information regarding the effort needed and
potential hardships ahead as we continue with this project. We have
significant Oracle, Pro*C and C experience and some Powerbuilder
experience in our group. Does anyone know the difficulties in getting
the three products (or any two of them) working together and the learning
curves for interfacing among them? Or if anyone has used Tuxedo with
Oracle or Powerbuilder before, I'd be interested in hearing about your
experiences.
Thanks,
Mark Haley
Tom,
I believe that these these three projects work very well together. We
are currently using Powerbuilder and Oracle but we did a prototype of
all three products which also required another component from a
company called Tangent. I think the product was called DCI and
sits between Powerbuilder and Tuxedo. You may want to get out your
pencil and paper and really determine if a three tierd architecture
is really needed and what are the pros and cons.
Good luck.
Mark Haley
gl...@magna.com
> In my group we are looking to start a project that uses
> Powerbuilder at the front end, Tuxedo as a transaction processor and
> Oracle as the back end database. We have yet to find any person or group
> who has used this combination of products, or even any two of these
> products together.
They work together. We have done it and I know many other sites have as
well. It is a nice combination.
> I'm looking for information regarding the effort needed and
> potential hardships ahead as we continue with this project. We have
> significant Oracle, Pro*C and C experience and some Powerbuilder
> experience in our group. Does anyone know the difficulties in getting
> the three products (or any two of them) working together and the learning
> curves for interfacing among them? Or if anyone has used Tuxedo with
> Oracle or Powerbuilder before, I'd be interested in hearing about your
> experiences.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tom Walker
> twa...@drystone.attmail.com
> (908) 457-5610
>
No particular problems. Other than getting it right! :-)
On the server, getting the XA interface between the Tuxedo server and Oracle
is a little tricky. But follow the examples and you should be okay. Expect
to spend some integration time though.
On the PC, PowerBuilder needs to talk with Tuxedo "/WS" option. The main
hangup is that the /WS code is C-oriented with dynamic storage allocation,
pointers, etc. Foreign territory for most PB developers.
You probably want to write (or purchase) a C DLL to make it easy for the PB
programmers. There are many other convenience features that can be done as
well to better integrate the PB data fields and data types with the TP
services. It helps a lot if this is done thru using the Data Window.
The TP Monitor vendor and/or PowerSoft can help you find a pre-coded DLL and
other aids. Or, you can consider an Application Generator such as MAGNA X
that works across all three tiers and integrates / uses Power Builder for the
first tier.
Hope this helps.
-- Gary
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Long gl...@magna.com
Vice President, Product Development
Magna Software Corporation Phone: 703/222-3500
12450 Fair Lakes Circle Fax: 703/222-8433
Fairfax, Virginia 22033
Technical data on "MAGNA X" CS/TP Application Generator in...@magna.com
art...@ibm.net
>Powerbuilder at the front end, Tuxedo as a transaction processor and
>Oracle as the back end database. We have yet to find any person or group
>who has used this combination of products, or even any two of these
>products together.
You've just described the environment of my current client's application (under
Solaris 2.4). I wish I could tell you it's a great combination, but unfortunately,
these guys don't work and play well together for my client.
Most of my client's problems stem from an incredibly poor design, but other
problems are with the tools themselves, to wit:
Tuxedo's "safe store" queues have a nasty habit of allowing apps to insert
messages that can't be dequeued. There's no way to peek inside, so you
really have to work to recover missing messages. (to be fair, though the
vendor claims they have a fix and are sending an update to us this week).
Our Powerbuilder (sorry, don't remember which version) goes through a locally-written
custom server to Tuxedo and then to Oracle. This isn't too bad, except unsolicited
messages don't work, and data can't be larger than 64K (even with the 32 bit
Tuxedo buffers).
Oracle's XA interface seems relatively new and has several small (but annoying)
bugs. One major problem for my end is that I can't cache SQL under Tuxedo
(the second and subsequent calls to the cache generate errors). Also, I find the
documentation for Pro*C and OCI calls under transaction managers extremely
skimpy.
If you have the opportunity, you may wish to look at a CORBA compliant object
broker (which seem to be able to do everything Tux does, but in a more modern
fashion. Harkey and Orfali have a nice discussion on this in the latest OS/2
Developer (or was it OS/2 Magazine?) ). Other transaction managers are also
available (for example CICS and Encina): you may wish to look at them.
Depending on your requirements, you may be able to drop the TM entirely in favor
of IPC implemented thru operating system features or Oracle pipes.
I don't want to frighten you needlessly, but my client has had a _lot_ of problems
with precisely this environment. If you must go ahead with this combination, take
your time and get excellent designers & developers.
Good Luck
Kurt Arthur
Cooperative Technical Services
art...@ibm.net