Introduction to Oracle Enterprise Scheduling Services (ESS)

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: