By: Marcos Cubric, Senior Consultant Published: January 2007, www.2dev.com Oracle's Application Server for DBA's Series Introduction If it still didn't happen to you, it will. It happened to me more or less five years ago. Being a DBA for quite some time and feeling very comfortable, I was told it was time to begin learning the Application Server. A whole new world was about to unfold and the long forgotten, uncomfortable sensation of being a newbie was back. It was a long, painful process made even worst with the realization that application servers are way more complicated than databases. The goal of this series of articles is to help DBA's having a basic understanding of Oracle's Application Server. Some Very Basic Concepts . The Application Server is not really a product but a bundle of many products. . Most clients don't use all the products available through the application server. . There are many different ways the Application Server can be deployed. . Most deployments involve many servers and many installations of the Application Server. . Oracle's Application Server is J2EE compliant. . J2EE is an application development model for building enterprise class multi-tier applications. J2EE simplifies enterprise applications by basing them on standardized, modular components, by providing a complete set of services to those components, and by handling many details of application behavior automatically without complex programming. . Oracle's implementation of the J2EE model is called OC4j. . At the highest level, Oracle's Application Server can be divided into two main 'products' or installation types: . Oracle Application Server also known as the 'Oracle Application Server Middle Tier' which provides components used for application deployment. . Oracle Application Server Infrastructure which provides Identity Management services and a Metadata Repository. . Each installation must have its own Oracle Home. They can be done on the same server but most frequently are done on different servers. . Some deployments of the Application Server don't use the Infrastructure.
1 . Considering the classical Internet-Firewall-DMZ-Firewall-Intranet, both the Application Server Middle Tier and Application Server Infrastructure are deployed in the DMZ.
. The Metadata Repository associated with the Application Server Infrastructure is a pre-configured Oracle database used to store critical metadata. It must be backed up and recovered if required. . The following is the most common deployment of the Application Server:
In later documents I will discuss some of the important components that it was introduced in this article.
2 About the author Marcos Cubric is a Senior Consultant and a regular contributor to 2Dev.com. Marcos has over 20 years of experience in Information Technology and specializes in Oracle Server Technologies. His focused areas of expertise are Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Identity Management, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Data Guard, SQL Tuning, Server Architecture & Design and Project Management. Marcos has been in his current role since 2002 as a Senior Consultant at very highly regarded Oracle Consulting firm in Toronto, Canada, he also teaches many related course for Oracle University all over North America.
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