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| A MQSI project |
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| zhaobin |
 Posted: Sat Dec 28, 2002 4:29 am Post subject: A MQSI project |
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Novice
Joined: 29 Oct 2002
Posts: 20
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Hi,
Our company is planning to use MQSI to integrate ERP systems and Warehouse systems. I cannot disclose much detailed information. Generally speaking, there are five ERP systems and five Warehouse systems. Now each ERP system is integrated with a Warehouse system via MQ Series. This is considered as a point-to-point integration. The company plans to move forward to integrate all ERP systems and Warehouse system using MQSI.
As this is the first MQSI project in the company, we don't really have a clear idea what a MQSI project will be like. I would like people having done MQSI projects share their experience. I am particularly interested in the following questions:
1. Given the scenario (five ERP and five Warehouse systems), how big can the project be in term of man-months?
2. How will roughly the project be carried out? Start with defining a common message format? Then define the message flow?
3. If the company decides to out-source the project, how to judge if a vendor is able to implement it well? Which aspects we need to pay attention to in their proposals?
Any experience and advise is well appreciated. |
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| zhaobin |
| Posted: Sat Dec 28, 2002 11:20 pm Post subject: |
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Novice
Joined: 29 Oct 2002
Posts: 20
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Gauss, thank for you valuable comments. It gets us thinking more carefully about our requirements. Currently, we are doing requirement scoping. So I cannot answer all of your questions. This is what I know so far:
1. It is a batch update. The ERP sends orders to Warehouse and the Warehouse sends back the pick confirmation.
2. It is not request-reply. But we would like to consider that because without request-reply mechanism, we don't know for sure if the order has reached the Warehouse system.
3. The data element in the messages can be 100+.
4. What kind of business validations MQSI can do? Can MQSI validate the data type and data format?
5. Currently, each of the five EPRs is integrated with each of the Warehouse using MQ Seriese. So orders can only be sent between a ERP/Warehouse pair. The goal is to integrate all of them together, so any ERP can send order to any Warehouse. The business scenario is same for all ERP/Warehouse.
6. The Warehouse is a packaged application.
I know the above is still far from detailed enough to have a good estimation. But any comments, suggestion or advises are appreciated. Could anyone has done a MQSI project share his experience?
Happy New Year to everyone in this forum.
thanks. |
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| jbacskai |
| Posted: Mon Dec 30, 2002 5:33 pm Post subject: Some ideas about this topic. |
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Apprentice
Joined: 30 Dec 2002
Posts: 26
Location: Hungary
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Hi
1. If it is a batch update done at night, it could be a performance bottleneck for MQSI.
2. Message delivery guarantied by MQ. Why do you need REQ/REP modell if the reply only contains the confirmation of delivery. (If you need this it can be done by MQ)
3. What kind of messages do you have? XML or CWF
4. The MQSI parses the message and can validate both data type and format.
5. Where will be the routing placed? WMQI or the packaged application's task will it be?
6. The warehouses and the ERP's are still connected with MQ, becouse this you don't need adaptors to WMQI, only the standard messages (e.g. SAP) if they released would help you.
Finally you could try to consult with an expert of this area or at the first level of the project's tender just let the "software companies" write down their problem solving ideas about this configuration and after it you could make easier the right decisions.
I hope I could help a bit. |
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| zhaobin |
| Posted: Mon Dec 30, 2002 7:04 pm Post subject: |
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Novice
Joined: 29 Oct 2002
Posts: 20
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Jbacskai, Happy New Year.
1. Each order consisits of 1000+ transaction records. Each record is sent as a message. We need to preserve the integrity of each order, so we are using transactional send and transactional receive. There is some performance penalty for the transactional send/receive, but it is the easiest way to perserve the integrity. Any other good ideas to achieve this?
2. Message delivery is guaranteed, but if any error happens beyond the transportation layer (e.g. unable to update the data into the Warehouse systems), then the ERP system needs some notification. Currently, we use a email mechanism to alert. But it still requires manual intervention to resend the data. That's why we are thinking of using request-reply mechansim, so the data can be resent automatically.
3. The message is in XML format.
4. We are thinking of putting the routing in the WMQI, so WMQI is able to hook up multiple ERP and Warehouse systems and route accordingly.
Jbacskai, have you done any WMQI project? This is my first WMQI project, so I will appreciate it much if you can share some experience (e.g. how the proejct goes? how long it takes).
thanks. |
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| kirani |
| Posted: Mon Dec 30, 2002 8:10 pm Post subject: |
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Jedi Knight
Joined: 05 Sep 2001
Posts: 3779
Location: Torrance, CA, USA
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Hi zhaobin,
Most your questions are addressed by gaussspg and zhaobin.
Here is my $0.02 ..
It's hard to give any estimate about the project without knowing the requirements. Integration Project duration depends on many factors,
a. Number of interfaces.
b. Complexity of each interface.
c. How much documentation is available for each interface.
d. Is the business process completely defined?
e. Any new Interfaces
etc.
I hear "batch processing" in above posts 
In a typical batch processing you should consider following points,
1. How to indicate start/end of batch?
2. What should be done if a batch process fails (Error Handling)?
3. WMQI is stateless and hence it does not provide many features for batch processing, like starting/stopping a message flow, etc. You will have to consider these when laying down the architecture.
4. Typically batch job involves sorting, merging, compression of files, etc. It's difficult to handle this kind of logic in WMQI.
5. How much volume are we talking about? 1,2, or 3 million records? Try to reduce your network traffic by "packaging" multiple records into single MQ message. This will lead to higher throughput. It's very important that you know the volume before you decide on hardware configuration. How many brokers are you planning on having?
6. Are you anticipating any DB updates within WMQI? If so, you should evaluate whether or not to use 2-phase commit.
7. Is there any online interface?
8. Message ordering/ multiple instances.
Try to keep your interfaces as simple as you can. ESQL is not flexible enough to implement business logic. Consider writing heavy business logic out of MQSI. Try to keep your MQSI for transformation, routing and minor business logic only. When designing your message flow, try to create common sub-flows that can be used by all developers, for example, Error handler, audit logging, etc.
Are you,
1. planning on clustering all these queue manager?
2. Any pub/sub feature?
I hope this helps.
_________________
Kiran
IBM Cert. Solution Designer & System Administrator - WBIMB V5
IBM Cert. Solutions Expert - WMQI
IBM Cert. Specialist - WMQI, MQSeries
IBM Cert. Developer - MQSeries
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| jbacskai |
| Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2002 7:21 am Post subject: |
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Apprentice
Joined: 30 Dec 2002
Posts: 26
Location: Hungary
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Zhaboin,
1-2. Now I see. This problem could be solved with the warehouse's MQ interface ( e.g. the warehouse doesn't commit the message while the message's data not in the database... ), but the REQ/REPL model is good too.
4. Pub-sub architecture could be a good idea for this as kirani mentioned.
Yes for your question we had WMQI projects. You will find it on our homepege under the referencies link, but that is not a right place for advertising. 
I would help you but send your questions first. (email!?)
Bye,
JBacskai |
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| zhaobin |
| Posted: Wed Jan 01, 2003 5:10 pm Post subject: |
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Novice
Joined: 29 Oct 2002
Posts: 20
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Thank everyone for the help.
Jbacskai, thank you for your kind offer. I will email you questions if I have any.
With everyone's help, I believe I have a good start for the MQSI project. |
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