Introducing the Easysoft Oracle® Driver into your SOA Environment

The Easysoft Oracle® Driver

How do you introduce Oracle® ODBC drivers into new organisations? Easysoft are here to help those companies who either have made or will make a decision to adopt the Easysoft Oracle® ODBC driver as a solution for their connectivity problems. A company looking to introduce Easysoft as their chosen driver supplier will have probably done a lot of research on the technology and have a good idea how the new driver will connect data sources in their environment. These companies may have some projects in the pipeline that they are planning to utilise with the new drivers from Easysoft. The question is though: how do you take full advantage of a product like this to achieve your goal faster?

Having chosen the Easysoft Oracle® driver, you most likely understand the benefits of using a tried and trusted approach. Even if you do not have a particular project or set of deliverables in mind, you should still think about how to ensure you get the most out of Easysoft's connectivity drivers.

It is important to understand that Easysoft want you to utilise their products to their full potential. They do this by offering full support on new drivers. Easysoft support is set up to help you get up and running fast and to keep you that way.

Where do you Start?

Let's explore a few areas where you might help your company get up and running even faster when installing new drivers. It sounds very much like advice you may have heard before but... RTM (Read the Manual). It might be surprising but the amount of highly educated database admins who have not read the manual but then skim through a couple of pages and all becomes clear to them.

Many organisations develop or adopt a let's see if this works attitude before embarking on a particular project in the hope that they may stumble upon all the answers without any of the preparatory reading. Basic checks such as checking whether the firewall is letting the driver have full access need to be carried out.

A Reference Architecture is a collection of documents and code samples that outline standards, recommendations, approaches and examples for achieving various outcomes. The purpose of the Reference Architecture is to achieve common approaches and standards throughout the organisation. The advantages of adopting and enforcing compliance to a Reference Architecture is obvious to many large organisations with multiple internal and external IT/development groups, applications and lines of businesses involved in IT projects. It is however, equally important for smaller organisations to have a Reference Architecture, as external consultants and/or partners may be involved in projects and you need to establish standards and governance.

What is a Reference Architecture?

You need a Reference Architecture to cover various areas of your business, and it is up to you to define which areas are important. Common areas seen in Reference Architectures are process, service definition, security, monitoring, management, content management, portals, user interfaces, data models, build/release management, and so on...You probably already have some rules, documentation, and knowledge in place for some or even all of these areas.

Comprehensive Reference Architecture

Comprehensive Reference Architecture usually includes the Theoretical Layer, which gives high level architectural guidance or patterns, the Descriptive Layer, which gives more detail about each pattern, the Prescriptive Layer, which tells you exactly what tools and methods to use to implement various patterns such as a service to use. For example, the Oracle® service bus, which is a service that looks up for instance a price for a product from E-Business Suite. Finally the Reference Layer, which provides fully worked examples for each pattern.

In addition, I.T. governance has to be complied with for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) to achieve the policies, framework and practices you need.

Good luck with your new Oracle® driver from Easysoft and your framework, don't forget Free Trials are available with drivers from Easysoft and you will receive full support.

By Jason Ewen, Marketing Manager, Easysoft Limited