Co-author - Mohammed Asif Kundgol
Oracle Database is a reliable object-relational database that offers effective and efficient solutions for database users such as delivering high performance, safeguarding users from unauthorized access, and facilitating quick failure recovery. You can use IBM AppConnect to build flows that integrate with Oracle Database and other applications.
Connecting to Oracle Database
To create an integration flow that passes key data between your database server and other applications, you must connect App Connect to each application in the flow. You can add an account to connect to the database either from the App Connect Catalog page, or when you add an Oracle Database action to a flow in the flow editor.
For more information on connection fields, see How to use IBM App Connect with Oracle Database.
Once you have connected to the Oracle Database, you can discover tables available on the database endpoint and perform CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete) operations ( Views are also supported but for the Retrieve operation only) as well as custom Select operation on them.
Figure 1 - Example of a list of available tables and views when connected to the Oracle Database
Using Oracle Database with App Connect
The following scenarios demonstrate how you can use Oracle Database in App Connect to perform automation tasks.
Use case scenario - Store the lead details in Oracle Database when a new Salesforce lead gets created
A company wants to build a lead management system to handle leads coming in from various channels with varying levels of interest in their products. The company's marketing team then wants to launch tailored marketing campaigns and nurture programs based on the leads’ category generated via various touchpoints. The leads can be generated via the company's website visitors, showroom walk-ins, social media campaigns, business partner-driven leads, and corporate partnership leads, and so on. Due to the wide-ranging touchpoints, the details and structure of the data captured about leads can vary significantly. The leads need to be processed and classified into different buckets based on the marketing criteria and this information needs to be stored in the company's leads database.
The company has adopted Salesforce as its CRM to capture the leads and Oracle database is the back-end database where the final leads reside after classification. It is this leads data that will be used by marketing and sales teams for nurturing the leads to further stages of lead conversion.
To achieve this use case, the company adopts IBM AppConnect to integrate the applications they use which are Salesforce and Oracle database. Leads generated from Salesforce and other sources are synced to Oracle Database based on the source of the leads and the details captured. In the breakdown below we see how the company architect designs an event-driven flow to seamlessly integrate Salesforce with Oracle Database.
Figure 2 displays an event-driven flow called Store the lead details in Oracle Database when a new Salesforce lead gets created. This flow uses a Salesforce New lead trigger node and an Oracle Database Create Leads Record action node. This flow syncs leads to Oracle Database. So every time a new lead is found, the leads’ details are stored in the Oracle Database.
Figure 2 - Event-driven flow to capture new leads.
Figure 3 displays the creation of the lead from the Salesforce website that will trigger the event flow on App Connect.
Figure 3 - Lead creation from Salesforce website
Figure 4 displays the leads table in Oracle Database with the data adhering to the new lead details and ready to be used by the marketing and sales teams.
Figure 4 - Updated Oracle Database table with lead details
This scenario demonstrates how you can use App Connect to automatically capture leads information and add it to the Oracle Database to update relevant teams as soon as the information has been retrieved.
For more information about other supported connectors, see Connectors .
Resources
Try out our templates
You can view the following use cases in the Templates gallery in your App Connect Designer instance.
You must enable the Designer AI features in your containerized environment in order to access the App Connect templates. For more information, see The preloaded IBM App Connect templates.
You can also import these use cases directly into your App Connect Designer. These templates are added to a public GitHub repository at https://github.com/ot4i/app-connect-templates/tree/cp4i-templates/resources. For more information about the supported connectors, see App Connect Connectors.