Apps To Fusion

In this article you will learn about the main tables used by the BPEL Server/Engine. For these tables, you will also see the corresponding tables in good old Oracle Workflow. The reason I write this article is because I believe in next 5 Years time , many of the current Oracle Workflow Consultants will be working on Oracle BPEL Instead.

A higher level that this table are tables PROCESS, PROCESS_DEFAULT & PROCESS_DESCRIPTOR. These table contain the BPEL Process name and their revision information. Revision information can be quickly looked up from the table or from BPEL Console, specially useful in Clustered [multi-server] environment, as BPEL Processes need to be deployed into each load balanced server in that case.

CUBE_INSTANCE [ Similar to wf_items in Oracle Workflows ]
For each BPEL process instance an entry gets created in this table.
This will tell you the data on which this instance started, and the last updated date of the instance.
To purge records from this table, you can use collaxa.delete_ci, using primary key value from cikey.
State 5 or more means that the process instance is complete. If state is less than 5, then it means that process instance is ongoing.

INVOKE_MESSAGE
Stores the information regarding the message that invoke a BPEL Process. For example a Business Event can invoke a BPEL Process via WebService, as shown in image below. Of course this table will also tell you the timestamp at which the BPEL process was invoked.

WORK_ITEM [ Similar to WF_ACTIVITIES in Oracle Workflow ]
This table contains the activities against the BPEL Process Instance.

DOCUMENT
If a variable with XML document has size bigger than 5MB[configurable], then variables XML data gets stored into this table.

AUDIT_TRAIL
This is the table that gets used to display the audit flow from BPEL Console. This has a column named LOG which is a Large Object RAW Column, each step in BPEL process gets logged into LOG Column in XML zipped form.