Using Oracle 8i DB in SOA suite 11g

Question

Hi All,
Good Morning.. Hope all are doing good.
I need a permanent solution or some work around for my below issue:
We were on SOA suite 10.1.3.4 and now we are migrating to SOA suite 11.1.1.5
We have legacy system which has Oracle 8i DB.
For some of our interfaces we are using this 8i DB for intergration.
But 11g SOA suite doenst support Oracle 8i DB.
But is there any option or any sort of work around so that we can use this?
Any option, suggestion, work around are most welcome.
Hope I will have some options to try with, and resolve this issue.
Thanks all for your valuable time spent on my issue.
Cheers,
Chandru

Answer 1

Hi Chandru
1. Yes, what you want is very much possible. I would like to clarify few things hopefully if you are not already aware of this.
2. Earlier SOA 10g is on top of Oracle's OAS/OC4J. Now SOA 11.5 is on top of the Weblogic Server app server which is from BEA. When you create SOA 11.5 (or any soa 11.x domain), to store all meta-data you need atleast 2 minimum schemas in some Oracle Database like SOA_INFRA, MDS. These schemas are created using a giant utilty sql script(s) called RCU (Repository Creation Utility). Now this RCU can work only with Oracle 10g and 11g databases and NOT oracle 8i DB. But remember this is only to store all the Process/Task information in Meta-Data tables which you hardly change or modify.
3. So go ahead and upgrade to SOA 11.5 and use latest Oracle 11g or 10g database for RCU. Now comes your old legacy usecase, which needs some data from Oracle 8i db. This means it is a custom application or custom usecase that connects to Oracle 8i. From Weblogic Admin Console, you can create something called Data Source (having a connection pool) and give DB Host, port, sid, username/password of your 8i db. And choose Oracle 10 g thin drivers. If I am not wrong, Oracle 10g drivers should support oracle 8i db also. Using this DataSource JNDI name, you can do pretty much everything either from Java Code, EBJ code or from the Workflow application.
4. As other users mentiones, you can always use DB Adapter to connect to this 8i DB. Worst case, I am not a DB Expert. But in Oracle 11g or 10 g database, I wonder if you can create like a DB Link to connect to your old 8i Database. DB experts can help here.
5. Finally if none of the above solutions work, you can always write a simple JAVA/EJB code to connect to your database in very primitive way directly giving db host, port, sid, username, plain text password and if required add 8i DB oc4j jar in classpath. Then use java embedded or ejb adapter to pull this data into your bpel process. Hopefully you may not end up here.
In conclusion, yes it should be possible to access your data from 8i database but SOA Domain should point to ORacle 10g/11g DB only though for its meta-data etc.
Here is a post for similar case but for OBIEE 11g that wants to create Reports from 8i DB:
Re: Regarding OBIEE compatibility with Oracle Database version 8i
Thanks
Ravi Jegga