Whew. My 9th and final article for TopXML.com on integrating BizTalk Server and WCF is now published. This one looks at the BizTalk Adapter Pack and how to consume the Oracle adapter from inside BizTalk Server. I demonstrated how to insert multiple records at once, call stored procedures, build a database polling solution, and how to call the Adapter Pack from an orchestration using code.
20,500+ words and 178 screenshots later, I definitely learned a lot about WCF (and Oracle) by writing this series of articles. I found the security and attachment topics to be challenging, the transaction topics to be quite interesting, and the BizTalk Adapter Pack to be quite compelling. The WCF integration in BizTalk Server 2006 R2, while not as rich as it could be, is actually pretty darn well built and thought out.
When I started out on this series, I figured that writing about BizTalk/WCF and then the BizTalk Adapter Pack would be somewhat “niche” for the majority of developers, but, hopefully this helps people down the line as they begin to really investigate and evaluate these technologies together.

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Richard,
Excellent series, the community has certainly benefited from the hardwork!
Cheers, Nick.
Richard, great series of articles!
On your Order and Order Items insert scenario, how would you insert an order id generated by Oracle into the items table (like the order to order items scenario in SQL Server updategram where we use at-identity).
Also, can you select multiple tables you want it to generate the metadata for or do you have to select one at at time?
Thanks,
Thiago Almeida
Hey Thiago,
You mean that the “order id” column is a generated column? Haven’t tried that yet.
As for multiple tables, YES, you can actually choose operations from many tables at once.
Hi Richard,
Yes, I was wondering how it would be possible to insert an order and its order items using only one call to the LOB adapter (in the same transaction) and having the auto generated column be the link between the two tables.
I’ll have to start playing around with these adapters soon!
Thanks, Thiago Almeida