Imminent adoption of SOA for the Travel & Hospitality Industry

Service Oriented Architecture or SOA as it is popularly known is a logical evolution of component based architecture and distributed computing, both of which were prevalent in the 1990s. Today SOA is on the threshold of maturing into a design technique that helps align business with IT initiatives and leverage this alignment to get various benefits.

The travel industry, particularly airlines, has always been on the leading edge of adopting IT into core business. The likelihood of Travel Industry being an early adopter of SOA appears very high.

What makes it imminent for the travel and hospitality industry to adopt SOA?

Traditionally, the travel industry is heavily dependent on mature, relatively expensive core systems such as the CRS and the GDS. The industry has a requirement for a large number of complex integrations with relatively disparate systems. At the same time, the numerous entities involved within the travel industry – airlines, hotels, car rental companies, intermediaries, increase the need for increased interoperability. SOA facilitates reusability and interoperability both of which are critical in the travel industry. Let’s take the example of the booking process for an airline. Very broadly, this process consists of the following – getting the availability, pricing the selected itinerary and completing the reservation. If these three sub functions were built as services, these could be plugged in from various sources such as the airline website, the airline’s internal reservations application, a partner site such as a hotel that can access the airlines inventory, a travel agency with access to the airline’s inventory or even a corporate that has an agreement with the airline. This ensures consistency across the booking process while allowing flexibility by changing parameters depending on the entity accessing the service.

SOA, if used appropriately and in conjunction with standardization (such as the initiative by the Open Travel Alliance), can help alleviate some of the industry’s challenges with respect to integration and interoperability.

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Tuning Data Conversion AE during PeopleSoft Upgrade – I

In this post I will share a tuning tip that I used to improve the performance of the PeopleSoft Upgrade data conversion AE.

Data Conversion AE was truncating the temporary table -> Inserting 35 million rows into temporary table from transaction table -> Updating stats

The above steps combined took around 6hrs to complete. It ran in 30mins after the below changes to AE.

e dropped the index on temporary table

NSERT was modified to use APPEND hint

Recreated the index using NOLOGGING

Summary: PeopleSoft does not necessarily ship optimal code. We have to keep our eyes open to identify and modify the problem code to improve conversion performance

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Application Service Provider Vs Software As A Service (ASP Vs SAAS)

The traditional Application Service Provider – ASP Model is overrun by the upcoming Software as a service SaaS Model. Whether it is a deployment, upgrade or maintenence project – the onshore offshore model present in leading indian software companies were growing with a lot of money inflow as a result of ASP model. But In the present scenario, the companies like salesforce, workday are providing the software on demand services with client specific customizations based on the SAAS model also. In SaaS the customer pays for the services offered by the company/vendor and the cost involved in maintaining the application in their inhouse is not necessary.
Eventhough there is a cost reduction for customers who go for software as a service model, the rise of open source components that are available in the market makes this tough. And moreover for customers who require a lot of customizations, the ASP model is still leading the chart.
Whatever the changes are,.. It seems that in the near future the world leaders in software industry will be the ones who are operating based on the demands,..based on the software as a service model.

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How to build an efficient interface using AE or SQR?

While building an Inbound/Outbound interface, most of the time we may be in dilemma whether to use Application Engine (AE) or SQR. Here are the tips to build an efficient interface using either AE or SQR.

If we use Application Engine, below points are to be taken into account

• If the interface is INBOUND, its better to go for Application Engine
• If the program fails, we can make use of Restart Control to restart the program from the position where it abends
• PeopleSoft – Business Process related Validation will be taken care automatically when we go for AE/CI.
• Parallel Processing can be easily achieved using AE. This can be done by using Temporary Tables and State Records.
• Reusability of SQLs is very much easy when we go for AE.
• Bulk Insertion of data and Set Processing of data can be easily done in an AE
• COMMIT levels can be maintained either at SECTION or STEP levels
• Generation of Reports using File Layout, Workflow related batch interface can be easily developed using an AE
• XML related processing is quiet easy when we go for AE
• When we go for Upgrade of the Current PS System, Retrofitting of AE is done by easily identifying the impacted objects.

If we are going to use SQR, below points can be taken into account to build an interface

• Formatting of Reports is very much easy in SQR using Begin-Header, Begin-Footer and Begin-Setup commands.
• If we are going to consider the Performance of the Interface Program, its better to go for SQR.
• Better Performance can be achieved by using Load-Lookup Arrays and Dynamic SQL
• Reusability of SQLs can be achieved by creating either generic Procedures or SQCs

Load Lookup Arrays in SQR

How to improve the performance of the SQR using Load Lookup Arrays?

For Simple database related validation, we will fire a SQL to check the sanity of data. If this data validation is to be fired for each and every row of data, then it is better to go for Load-Lookup Arrays. This is like Prompt table validation in the case of Online Pages.

In this way, we can reduce the database hits and thereby increasing the Performance of the SQR Program.

For Eg: If we want to validate the Earnings Codes present in the file, we can use these arrays to validate the Earning Code data.

Generally we will use the below SQL to validate the ERNCD data

SELECT PET.ERNCD, PET.EFFECT_ON_FLSA, PET.ADD_GROSS
FROM PS_EARNINGS_TBL PET
WHERE PET.EFFDT= (SELECT MAX (EFFDT) FROM PS_EARNINGS_TBL
WHERE PET.ERNCD = ERNCD
AND EFFDT <=(SYSDATE)

AND PET.EFF_STATUS =”A”

AND PET.ERNCD = $Erncd
In order to avoid these database hits for each and every row of data, we can the below code to load all the valid Earning Codes at once from the Database to Load Lookup Array Name EARN and then use the array to validate the input ERNCD data.

! Lookup array for EARNINGS CODES

Let $where = ‘PET.EFFDT = (SELECT MAX (EFFDT) ‘||

‘FROM PS_EARNINGS_TBL ‘||

‘WHERE PET.ERNCD = ERNCD ‘||

‘AND EFFDT <=SYSDATE) ‘||

‘AND EFF_STATUS =”A”’

LOAD-LOOKUP

NAME = EARN

TABLE = ‘PS_EARNINGS_TBL PET’

KEY = ERNCD

RETURN_VALUE = ERNCD||’-'||EFFECT_ON_FLSA||’-'||ADD_GROSS

WHERE = $where

QUIET

In this case, KEY (This is nothing but Input Data value) is ERNCD and RETURN_VALUE (Output data value) is Combination of ERNCD, EFFECT_ON_FLSA and ADD_GROSS database field’s value.

! Checking Load lookup array for data validation

Lookup EARN $input_data $output_data

Note: It is good to initialize these Load Lookup Arrays in the SETUP Section related procedures.

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How to Monitor PeopleSoft Messages/Subscription/Publication Contracts?

One of the hallmarks of a good administrator is that they are already troubleshooting the problem before the users complain!

The key to ensuring that the system does not spring surprises is to automate monitoring (without impacting the system performance). In my previous posts, I have provided steps to monitor the process scheduler and application server. This post will provide insights into monitoring the integration broker messages, publication and subscription contracts.

Use the below SQLs for monitoring.

SUBSCRIPTION

SELECT A.CHNLNAME,

DECODE(A.SUBCONSTATUS,0,’ERROR’,1,’NEW’,4,’DONE’,A.SUBCONSTATUS) STATUS, COUNT(*)

FROM PSAPMSGSUBCON A

WHERE

– not older than 99 days

A.LASTUPDDTTM >= sysdate – 99

– in error or timeout status

AND (A.SUBCONSTATUS IN (0, 6)

– in NEW status but was last updated 30 mins agao.

OR (A.SUBCONSTATUS = 1 AND A.LASTUPDDTTM < SYSDATE – 1/48))

GROUP BY A.CHNLNAME, DECODE(A.SUBCONSTATUS,0,’ERROR’,1,’NEW’,4,’DONE’,A.SUBCONSTATUS)

/

MESSAGE

SELECT A.CHNLNAME, DECODE(A.PUBSTATUS,0,’ERROR’,1,’NEW’,4,’DONE’,A.PUBSTATUS) STATUS, COUNT(*)

FROM PSAPMSGPUBHDR A

WHERE

– not older than 99 days

A.LASTUPDDTTM >= sysdate – 99

– in error or timeout status

AND (A.PUBSTATUS IN (0, 6)

– in NEW status but was last updated 30 mins agao.

OR (A.PUBSTATUS = 1 AND A.LASTUPDDTTM < SYSDATE – 1/48))

GROUP BY A.CHNLNAME, DECODE(A.PUBSTATUS,0,’ERROR’,1,’NEW’,4,’DONE’,A.PUBSTATUS)

/

PUBLICATION

SELECT A.CHNLNAME, DECODE(A.PUBCONSTATUS,0,’ERROR’,1,’NEW’,4,’DONE’,A.PUBCONSTATUS) STATUS, COUNT(*)

FROM PSAPMSGPUBCON A

WHERE

– not older than 99 days

A.LASTUPDDTTM >= sysdate – 99

– in error or timeout status

AND (A.PUBCONSTATUS IN (0, 6)

– in NEW status but was last updated 30 mins agao.

OR (A.PUBCONSTATUS = 1 AND A.LASTUPDDTTM < SYSDATE – 1/48))

GROUP BY A.CHNLNAME, DECODE(A.PUBCONSTATUS,0,’ERROR’,1,’NEW’,4,’DONE’,A.PUBCONSTATUS)

/

Value	Status
0	ERROR
1	NEW
2	STARTED
3	WORKING
4	DONE
5	RETRY
6	TIMEOUT
7	EDITED
8	CANCELED
9	HOLD

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