The much awaited Oracle Fusion
Applications release is finally out (in the later half of 2011) and with this
the Oracle Enterprise Scheduling Services (ESS) application enters the Oracle
marketplace. So, what is Oracle ESS - a batch processing application? The
official Oracle documentation describes ESS as an enterprise application that
provides time and schedule based callbacks to other applications to run their
jobs. In simple technical terminology, ESS is primarily a J2EE application that
is deployed to the Oracle Weblogic Server providing scheduling services for
distributed job request processing across a grid of application servers.
Oracle Fusion Applications is a deployment
of applications product offerings built on the Oracle Fusion Middleware
technology stack and the Oracle Database. Oracle ESS is not currently shipped
as a separate product offering, but is generally available with the Fusion
Applications product offerings. All the Fusion Applications product families
(for e.g. Fusion - HCM, CRM, Financials, Projects) heavily use the ESS
functionality to offload larger business transactions processing to run at a
future defined schedule and monitoring of job requests.
In the Oracle e-Business suite,
“Concurrent Manager” served several important administrative, batch processing
and report generation functions to ensure that the Oracle Applications are not
overwhelmed with job requests. Similarly, in the context of Oracle Fusion
Apps, “ESS” complements the functionality of ‘Concurrent Processing’ and is a
key component for the Fusion Applications, performing important transaction
processing, monitoring and notification functions.
Oracle ESS provides the ability to
run different job types, including: Java, PL/SQL and spawned jobs. For now, I will leave you with a high level snapshot of the
possible ESS execution methods commonly used in Fusion Apps: