New features for SWIFT Alliance v7

Few interesting v7 related things.

  • Access installation will no longer create random Oracle instance names – very nice for cluster installations, at least on Windows platform. Previously when you installed separately on both cluster nodes, you ended up having different instance names on both nodes – which did not really work out.
  • Access should (finally) really run as a service on Windows. No need to have the user logged on all the time.
  • In future FileAct will also go via Access. FTA/FTI with SAG will still continue to work, but there won’t be support for RMA.
  • Message archive backup format is changing – no longer as clear text as it was before. Somebody mentioned they would be encrypted, somebody said that the Oracle datapump format is used.
  • MQ can be used to also send the actual content of the files for FileAct (MQHA, Access). Since MQ has smaller max message size than FileAct, bigger files need to split into multiple messages which are then grouped into a message group
  • Output channels make it possible to acquire the same queues on multiple places. This may be useful for load balancing or for providing resilience (for example two Access systems are configured to receive files from the same queue, if one falls down the other remains)