Oracle Advanced Queues have been around for a while. It was part of Oracle DBMS since 8.1.5. Now as part of Oracle Streams it provides database-integrated message queuing functionality. You get persistent or non-persistent queuing model, local or remote propagation and all operational benefits of high availability, scalability, and reliability of the underlying database.

We have installed various versions of Oracle BRM on multiple platforms countless times. The installation process is mostly free of pain now, still it is a time consuming task. Imagine you have to replicate it across a dozen development, test and integration instances and eventually into production. Suddenly managing configuration files and port numbers manually becomes a mission impossible.

FLIST or field list is an Oracle BRM data structure that is used for all internal and external communications. It is a field value data type. It supports C primary data types, a BRM internal object ID type and a sparse array type, which can be nested to any level.

Ex: FLIST text representation for a NAMEINFO array containing address information.

Enterprise application integration has always been a challenge for businesses of all sizes. The approach of integrating 'best-of-breed' products definitely has its share of success stories, but for each successful implementation I am aware of, there are many more projects without a happy ending. The sheer scope and size of those integration projects make it difficult to get them to a successful completion within a given time frame and budget.In the past few years, Oracle has gone on an acquisition spree.