AQ-MQ Gateway

Recently while working on an EAI project for a telecom client, we came across a requirement where we had to integrate IBM MQ and Oracle’s AQ. There are many products that facilitate such a communication, both from the Oracle as well as from the IBM stable. We zeroed in on the Oracle messaging gateway because first of all it comes with the database installation and hence no extra costs incurred for the client and secondly because of its proven track record. Above all it provides you many features like transformation of messages etc.I would start with a brief introduction about the Oracle Messaging Gateway followed with a brief overview of the actual client requirement and then summary of steps that need to be executed in order to configure the gateway.


Introduction:-

Messaging Gateway, an Oracle9i Advanced Queuing feature, enables communication between applications based on non-Oracle messaging systems and Oracle's Advanced Queuing (AQ) feature. Advanced Queuing provides the propagation between two AQ queues to enable e-business. Messaging Gateway extends that propagation to legacy applications based on non-Oracle messaging systems (Websphere MQ in our case).
Because Messaging Gateway is integrated with Advanced Queuing and Oracle9i, it offers fully transactional and secure message delivery. Messaging Gateway guarantees that messages are delivered once and only once between AQ and non-Oracle messaging systems that support persistence.











Business Requirement:-

The Clients existing system required CRM to communicate with the billing and customer support system.
The CRM, an Oracle Database 9.0.1.3 (in the Production Environment) with Oracle Messaging Gateway installed on it had to send data to the billing system which would require the data to enter the EAI domain implemented using IBM product stack and then after some business transformation to be sent to the corresponding billing system. The entry point for the EAI layer was an MQ queue, so obviously we had to think about something that could facilitate the movement of data between these two components. After eveluating many solutions we decided to go with an AQ-MQ communication using Oracle Messaging Gateway.


Configuring the Messaging Gateway:-

Messaging Gateway Configuration requires following steps to be followed:-
1. Configuring AQ on the Oracle database installation:-
- Setting up of environment (Messaging gateway connection etc),
- Creation of appropriate users with designated roles and responsibilities,
- Creation of AQ tables and queues
- Configuring MQ Link with appropriate MQ-Queue details

2. Creating Propagation jobs:- (for communication between source to destination queue)
- Propagation Subscribers with appropriate transformations
- Propagation Schedules to actually propagate the messages on a specified time