Twenty Year Exit from the Oracle Ecosystem

The Oracle Ecosystem instance that I inheritted was designed from 2000 and went live in 2004. Its centre piece Oracle Workflow went end of life that year but had new versions through to 2007. In its own way it was a pinnacle of a certain view of software, the software vendor as a one stop shop, in the same way as DEC and IBM had previously sold their systems.

A whole set of components which were guaranteed to work together, with technical support. I probably would have made the same choice, even as late as 2000. This system was the largest system (by disk storage used) in Europe for a while. Housed in a purpose built computer room. Then came AWS S3 cloud storage.

The 'replacement' system migrated eighty percent of the files out of the database, seemingly unaware of the eighty-twenty rule, and duplicated the data and the dataflows. The replacement system was a 'microservice architecture' joined by a single datastore. The users now had two systems to use and were stuck with a 2000 vintage user interface. The next step was to stop using the Oracle Forms and introduce a modern three tier web application, choosing the new, shiny AngularJS as the front end, Hibernate on java as the middleware.

This was understandabley a big job, the UI was now on AWS but the data was in a data centre (a commercial one by now). The need to quit the data centre motivated the removal of CMSDK (Content Management Software Development Kit) from inside the database to separate, external, email and SFTP handling systems, to reduce database size and enable security in the cloud.

The remaining steps are to finish the migration of files (who knew this would be the difficult bit) and to migrate from Oracle AQ (Advanced Queues (software naming error 101: avoid hubristic adjectives)) to AWS SQS (Simple Queueing Service (software naming error 102: avoid indexical adjectives)). Note that we have to upgrade AngularJS to Angular just to stay still, and pop things into Kubernetes, just because.

This is clean, recogisable, manageable and stable. We could rest here for a while; but all that pain motivates completion:

The elephant is in the room. The final step is then to replace Oracle Workflow with Camunda.