Oracle Application Container: a Swiss Use case

Here we want to start a business in Switzerland in 3 different areas and make it easy to start a new market area as soon as required by that business. We are going to use the Application Container feature in order to:

• Have a dedicated PDB for each marker with shared and local metadata and data
• Roll out frequently data model and code to add features in a central manner with one command

We have first to create an master application container, you can have many master application containers within a CDB. We will also create a seed PDB from that master application container. Not mandatory, its role will be to keep a sync copy of the master and improves speed provisioning for new pluggable database creation within the master container.

I will now create an application from zero. An application is a set of command executed in the master application container and on which a version tag is applied. In other words, Oracle will record what happens in the master container and applied a version flag on those commands to replay them in future PDBs.

We can now synchronize the application tables of our application B2C_WEB_APP from the MASTER to the SEED in order to increase the next pluggable database creations speed

Then, go to the master and create your pluggable database for each market with the latest B2C_WEB_APP application release which is currently 1.0

We open and save state to make them opened at the next CDB restart

Let’s generate some business activity on each pluggable database corresponding to different Swiss markets

Now we can check from the master container if data are well located according to their market

We have different products for each of our markets. Now, we would like to Upgrade the data model and add some code (a procedure) to add a basic feature: add a customer

Let push in production the release 1.1 one market after each other

Some business activity happens and new customer are going to appears with the new feature we deployed at the release 1.1 of our B2C_WEB_APP application

Now, have a look on the new customer data from the master master container

As we don’t like the email format because it’s ugly in the web interface, we now are going to release a “data” patch on top of the release 1.1 in order to format customer’s emails in a proper manner

As we know have a patch ready to cleanup the email format we are ready to deploy it on each market

Let’s check if the data patch has been applied successfully and the email format is now OK for all markets

A new feature has now been claimed from the business. We need an upgrade of the application to add a parameters table that should contains USR_B2C_WEB application’s parameters which must be shared on all PDB applications. Also each market want be able to add its own parameters without impacting existing one or others markets.
We are going to use the attribute “SHARING” set to “EXTENDED DATA” for that table to make possible a mix of shared data in the master and PDB local data in the same table (deeper explanation and others sharing modes here).

Upgrade 1.2 for all market and addition of a local parameter “market_name” for each market

Now we check if shared parameters are available for all markets and each one of them has a dedicated “market_name” value

Looks all good.

Now the business need to extend the startup activity to a new market area of Switzerland. We are so going to add a new pluggable database for that marker. This market will benefit immediately of the latest application release.

Let’s check with the parameter table if all data have been synchronized

I wish this post will help to understand how to implement Container Application in real life and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or require further information.