IBM BAW (Business Automation Workflow) is a powerful platform for process orchestration and workflow automation. After working with many BAW customers over the years, we have run into a couple of recurring issues:
- Performance is highly dependent on good housekeeping practices, and cleaning out completed process instance data can really improve the end user experience.
- Migrating in-flight process instance data is not supported if you are moving to a new database vendor or from a traditional installation to a containerized installation.
Apex Process Hub is an application we have developed to address these two problems. It runs a sync process to capture process instance data and store it an external database for future reference, allowing the run-time BAW databases to be cleaned up frequently. It can be used to meet data retention policies while keeping the BAW database lean for optimal performance.
Apex Process Hub also provides a capability to migrate instances from one BAW environment to another. Many BAW customers have long-running process instances that take weeks or months to complete. There is no official migration path to move these in-flight instances between BAW environments. The most common reasons for needing to do this include:
- To switch the underlying database (e.g. Oracle to DB2)
- To move from an on-prem installation to SaaS
- To move from a traditional BAW installation to one running on containers / OpenShift (either as part of CP4BA or standalone)
This video gives a quick overview of the migration functionality. Instance data is extracted from the source environment and recreated in the same state in the target environment. When migration is complete, the source instances are suspended to prevent further activity in the source.
Apex Process Hub In Action
You can read more about Apex's approach to instance migration, or schedule a demonstration here.
