Querying Business Processes
Catriel Beeri
Anat Eyal,
Simon Kamenkovich,
Tova Milo
Querying Business Processes
VLDB 2006
Hebrew University
Tel Aviv University
1
Outline

Introduction and motivation

Overview of BPQL by example

Formal model

Implementation

Summary
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(Distributed) Business Processes
Complex applications
 Integrating remote Web Services

Common practice:
 Use BPEL for specifications
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BPEL in a nutshell
BPEL4WS (V1.0 by BEA, IBM, Microsoft, July 2002)
Process spec.

represented in XML
operations, flow and data
Actions:

atomic

compound : fork, join, while, process call,…
Commercial products:

Application generators compile to executable code

Application servers execute the code

Design tools with “conceptual” model
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Motivation
Not just simplifying development…
This is a new mine of Information!
Interesting questions:



What kind of credit services are used (in)directly?
How can I buy a plane ticket?
Can one get a price quote without first giving
credit card info?
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Requirements

Flexible granularity



Distribution



Zoom into remote components
Query remote specifications
Path extraction


Coarse-grain queries that allow for high level abstraction
Fine-grained queries that zoom-in on all components
E.g. What should I do to confirm my trip?
Ease of querying

Visual query similar to specifications (BPEL designer)
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Can a query language be based on
XQuery over BPEL?
NO!
The BPEL XML representation is machine oriented,
complex, unfit for human consumption

Difficult to understand

Queries require lots of joins
Need: Similarity of system and query models
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Outline

Introduction and motivation

Overview of BPQL by example

Formal model

Implementation

Summary
Querying Business Processes
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Travel Agency Spec

Property, data & activity
nodes

Control and data flow
edges
A process is a di-graph of atomic and compound activities
Compound activities can be zoomed-in (a-la statecharts)
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Zoom-in
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BPQL Queries

Use process patterns
(like tree patterns for xml)
Query1:Provided operations?
Single/double-headed edges

(compare to / and // in XPath)



Single/double-bounded activities:




Querying Business Processes
– edges
– paths of arbitrary length
– w/o zoom-in
– unbounded zoom-in
Mark requested nodes/edges by
Node label variables
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
Query2: used credit card services?
local
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Query3: search without login?
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Query4: data flow
Data elements
affected by
searchRequest and
affecting
returnTripResults
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Outline

Introduction and motivation

Overview of BPQL by example

Formal model

Implementation

Summary
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Formal Model
System:
 Process graphs + implementation function
 Graph refinement (graph rewriting)
implementation
startSearch
startTrip
Alpha-tours
getTripRequest
searchTrip
service
provider
behavior
capability
provided
provided
cancelTrip
fork
reserveTrip
searchCars searchFlights searchRooms
confirmTrip
...
requested
provided
provided
endTrip
Query:

requested requested
join
...
endtSearch
A system where some nodes & edges are marked transitive
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Semantics
An embedding: a mapping
from:
to:
query graphs
[refinements of] process graphs
satisfying conditions:
(nodes): preserves nodes types and labels
(edges): edge are mapped to edges
transitive edge mapped to paths
(imp): preserves implementation relationships
A result: image of query graph under an embedding
Answer: all results
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Large or Infinite answers!

Many fork/joins  exponential number of paths

Cycles in process graph
Cycles (recursion) in zoom-in relationships

 Infinite # of refinements
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Recursion example
Travel Agency
Querying Business Processes
Airline
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Compact representation
Query
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Infinite
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Compact
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Query Evaluation Algorithm
Systems and queries are essentially
(Vertex Replacement)
Context Free Graph Grammars
Bad news: 
These are not closed in general under intersection
Good news: 

Our systems and queries are sufficiently simple:
Complexity: Polynomial in size of spec
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Extensions:

OK extensions (implemented):





label predicates
Regular path expressions (on node labels)
Negation
Joins on node labels
Not OK extensions (hence not implemented): :

Joins on path variables



The result is not a VR context free graph grammar
Emptiness is undecidable
NP-hard (data complexity) even without cycles and
recursion
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Outline

Introduction and motivation

Overview of BPQL by example

Formal model

Implementation

Summary
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First Attempt
Translation to XQuery queries over the BPEL XML
Problem: too many joins, because of the relational
representation in BPEL
nodes
process
variables
var1 …
link …
“L1”
links
descrription
start
searchTrip
reserveTrip
confirmTrip
cancelTrip
link source description target source description target source source description
…
“L5” “L1”
“L1” “L2”
“L2” “L3” “L4”
…
…
…
end
…
edges
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Solution: use Active XML
(www.activexml.net)
Travel agency
serviceProvider capability
behavior
zoomin
AXML: XML +
Embedded calls to web services
start
searchTrip
zoomin
reserveTrip
cancelTrip
end
start
confirmTrip
xml:sc
getTripRequest
fork
getActivity(end)
searchCars
join
searchFlights
getActivity(join)
end
searchRooms
getActivity(join)
zoomin
getOperation(searchRooms,join)
zoomout
getActivity(reserveTrip)
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Results
Joins vs. calls to Web services
…
…
…
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Distribution Effect
Distribution effect
600
Local search
x10 msec
500
Global search
400
300
200
100
0
1
2
3
4
5
number of local operations (out of 5)
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Outline

Introduction and motivation

Overview of BPQL by example

Formal model

Implementation

Summary
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Summary

Simple and intuitive query language






Similar to how processes are specified
Flexible granularity
Two navigation axis
Path retrieval
Operates in a distributed environment
Systems and queries are modeled as graph grammars
 Allows compact representation of large/infinite answers

Ignores semantics of some BPEL constructs and data values


Reasonable tradeoff of expressivity and complexity
AXML as an implementation platform supports


Transparent distribution
Taking advantage of built-in optimization
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Ongoing and future work







Incomplete information
Querying/mining logs
Applications to software verification and
monitoring
Capturing more BPEL semantics
Process integration
Optimization
…
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Thank you
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