Oracle Lite and SOA Suite

The Oracle SOA Suite bundles a number of Oracle products (BPEL Process Manager, ESB, Oracle Business Rules and Web Services Manager) to provide complete set of service infrastructure components for building, deploying, and managing SOAs. For the windows platform it also comes with slimmed down version of Oracle Lite, and embedded database.

Why Oracle Lite?
Oracle Lite has a lot of great features including data synchronisation, device management, as well as support for SQL92 and ACID transactions amongst other things. It is the embedded relational database features that are used for the 'basic' installation of SOA Suite on windows. Antony Reynolds recently posted a great article on basic and advanced installation options which really puts an emphasis on the fact that Oracle Lite is intend to get you developing fast and not for production environments.

In the development environment the SOA Suite will use Oracle Lite under the hood and generally you don't need to access this database. Of course, there are always the odd occasions when you do, such as tracing an error, or doing an upgrade.

Connecting to Oracle Lite
Over the summer a patch set was released to upgrade Oracle Application Server 10.1.3.1 (SOA Suite) to 10.1.3.3. The patch (#6148874) is available on metalink. The post installation steps involve running a database script. Since the SOA Suite is distributed with a slimmed down Oracle Lite there is no Mobile Client Workspace, i.e. webtogo web app, to manage the database, so the Mobile SQL Client is your easiest option.

Mobile SQL Client ($ORACLE_HOME\Mobile\Sdk\BIN\msql.exe) is used to connect to an Oracle Lite version 9 and upwards database. For earlier versions SQLPlus can be used. The version distributed with SOA Suite is 10.2.0.2. The usage is quite like SQLPlus:

msql system/manager@jdbc:polite:

For the SOA Suite there are three databases: orabpel, oraesb, orawsm. Connecting to the database used by Oracle BPEL Process Manager looks like this:

D:\msql system/manager@jdbc:polite:orabpel

Oracle Lite MSQL Version 10.2.0.2.0
Copyright (c) 1997, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.

Connected to: Oracle Lite ORDBMS
Database Name: ORABPEL (Read Write)
Database Version: 10.2.0.2.0
Auto Commit: off
Driver Name: oracle.lite.poljdbc.POLJDBCDriver (OLite 4.0)

SQL>

Alternatives
Another option to using Mobile SQL Client is to use Oracle SQL Developer a free graphical tool for database development. Just use the same JDBC connection properties that you can find in the Enterprise Manager, and ensure the olite*.jar files (in Mobile/SDK/bin) are in the classpath.

Summary
Oracle Lite is OK for a small SOA Suite development environment and even the slimmed down version that is distributed provides access to the databases via the Mobile SQL Client.