I receive a lot of questions about how to setup a Highly Available (HA) EDI Accelerator 2004. Here’s a link to a document that describes how to set that up: Configuring the Covast EDI Accelerator for BizTalk Server 2004 for High Availability (1063k pdf file).
Note: This is for the 2004 version only!! The 2006 version (see previous entry in my BizTalk Blog) has a more natural failover capability, that does not need extra configuration.
I’m thrilled to inform you that today we have released the brand new white paper for the upcoming release of the EDI Accelerator.
You can download Covast EDI Accelerator for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 White Paper here.
As it looks right now, the product will be released in March 2006. Keep a close watch on this blog for more information in the future.
As always, feel free to ask me questions about it or give me other sorts of feedback.
A bit late (wow, I think I spent 5 days in my homeland Holland the entire month of October…), but here’s my notes on the BPI conference in Redmond, 4-7 Oct:
First of all, I really liked how it was setup and it was amazing to see how many more people came to this event, compared to the BizTalk 2004 Airlift in Seattle, Oct. 2003.
I was invited to present as well (Tuesday lunch session on B2B) and got tremendous feedback. I also “visited” a couple of presentations (BAM - great job JB & Zach, K2 Workflow - that guy has more WPM (words per minute) than Scott Woodgate, good stuff though).
Covast were platinum sponsor and we had a booth that was visited really wel. We even ended up with a couple of great leads!
The funniest thing was an equivalent to Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi - the Heineken Beer Nazi (a “lady” that served beers from behind the bar, but didn’t really want to give more than 2 or 3 at a time…). We found out in the end that we indeed needed to use a certain protocol, before you got your beers!
Great event!!
You probably all know that XML messages are a bit more “verbose” than EDI messages. Since BizTalk only handles XML messages natively, every message coming into BizTalk first has to be converted to XML. Also on the way out, every XML message has to be converted to the target format (if not XML).
Basically, this means that incoming EDI messages will increase in size by about a factor 10 on average: 1Mb EDI will become 10Mb XML.
The EDI Accelerator has as way of decreasing the size of these XML’s significantly: by unchecking the option “Include description” in the XML Tag Options group box in the Covast EDI Schema Generator, the system will generate XML schemas from the EDI document definitions in the repository using the EDI segment tags and element tags (instead of the long names) as the XML element and attribute names, thereby significantly reducing the “tag overhead” at runtime.
