As a repository for business intelligence, the BPM Process Store database maintains two types of information stored as two sets of tables— Event tables and Process tables. Business Process Server uses these tables as part of its event driven architecture to manage the information flow. The Event tables include BizEvent, BPM Process StoreEventCounter, and BPM EventsEventCounter. For example, BP Server can generate events and they are stored in the BPM Events table (for more information, see Schema for event tables). The Process tables consist of the process template, ProcessXML, process instance, Workstep, work item, and additional tables for metadata information (for more information, see Schema for process tables).
Note: In earlier Business Process Server releases, BP Server never actually read any data from the database. Instead, there were two consumers for BP Server events: BPM Process Store and BPM Events. Now Business Process Server uses separate BP Server database tables to maintain process transactional data for recovery of active process instance and applications.
BPM Process Store reads events from the Event tables and determines the process state change information encapsulated by the events. BPM Process Store then uses this information to populate the Process tables, including the process instance, Workstep, and work item tables in addition to meta data tables. These tables store information such as the current state of process instances, start date, and end date as well as the current state of worksteps and workitems.
BPM Events is the other consumer of BP Server information. BPM Events reads events from the Event tables and evaluates its rules against these events. BPM Events populates the infopads, then stores these infopads into database tables.
The Management module of Business Process Portal is the ultimate consumer of information stored in the Process tables. It uses this information to prepare management reports that summarize the business intelligence and to monitor and control processes.
The information accessed by the Management module of Business Process Portal reflects a historical snapshot of a business state which may not be the most current state of process instances and infopads. The BP Server maintains the most current state of the process instances as Java objects. For the Management module to obtain the most current process instances, it must call BP Server API directly. Similarly, it can obtain the most current infopads by calling the BPM Events API directly.
Note: Tables containing event and process instance information may occupy large database space. If no action is taken, then all storage currently allocated to the database is consumed eventually, and Business Process Server will not run properly. We recommend you unload events, process instances, and infopads by archiving them periodically with the "autodelete" option after those events, process instances, and infopads are no longer required in the database. Refer to Server Administrator’s Guide for detailed information on archiving. You may also choose to increase the database size (table space size) as well.
