Retrieve Subset of Qualifying Tasks Paging

16-8 Oracle Fusion Middleware Performance and Tuning Guide routing criteria such as round robin or most productive. Thus rules can help significantly reduce workflow waiting time, which results in faster workflow completion.

16.4.4 Use Task Views to Prioritize Work

A users inbox can contain tasks of various types with various due dates. The user has to manually sift through the tasks or sort them to find out which one he or she should work on next. Instead, by creating task views where tasks are filtered based on due dates or priority, users can get their work prioritized automatically so they can focus on completing their tasks instead of wasting their time on deciding which tasks to work on. This also results in faster completion of workflows.

16.5 Tuning Identity Provider

The workflow service uses information from the identity provider in constructing the SQL query to determine the tasks qualifying for a user based on his or her rolegroup membership. The identity provider is also queried for determining role information to determine privileges of a user when fetching the details of a task and determining what actions can the user perform on a task. There are a few ways to speed up requests made to the identity provider. ■ Set the search base in the identity configuration file to nodes as specific as possible. Ideally you should populate workflow-related groups under a single node to minimize traversal for search and lookup. This is not always possible; for example, you may need to use existing groups and grant membership to groups located in other nodes. If it is possible to specify filters that can narrow down the nodes to be searched, then you should specify them in the identity configuration file. ■ Index all critical attributes such as dn and cn in the identity provider. This ensures that when a search or a lookup is done, only a subset of the nodes are traversed instead of a full tree traversal. ■ Use an identity provider that supports caching. Not all LDAP providers support caching but Oracle Internet Directory supports caching which can make lookup and search queries faster.

16.6 Tuning the Database

The Human Workflow schema is shipped with several indexes defined on the most important columns for all the tables. Based on the type of request, different SQL queries are generated to fetch the task list for a user. The database optimizer evaluates the cost of different plan alternatives for example, full table scan, access table by index and decides on a plan that is lower in cost. For the optimizer to work correctly, the index statistics should be current at all times. As with any database usage, it is important to make sure the database statistics are updated at regular intervals and other tunable parameters such as memory, table space, and partitions are used effectively to get maximum performance. For more information on tuning the database, see Section 2.6, Tune Database Parameters .