Using Oracle AQ in Java Won’t Get Any Easier Than This

Starting with jOOQ 3.5 we’ve included an awesome new feature for those of you using the Oracle database: Native support for Oracle AQ! And your client code will be so easy to write, you’ll be putting those AQs all over your database immediately.

How does it work?

jOOQ rationale

The biggest reason why many of our users love jOOQ is our code generator. It generates a Java representation of your database schema, with all the relevant objects that you need when writing SQL. So far, this has included tables, sequences, user-defined-types, packages, procedures.

What’s new is that AQ objects are now also generated and associated with the generated object type.

A simple schema

Let’s consider writing this simple schema.

CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE book_t 
  AS OBJECT (
  ID         NUMBER(7),
  title      VARCHAR2(100 CHAR),
  language   VARCHAR2(2 CHAR)
)
/

CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE books_t 
  AS VARRAY(32) OF book_t
/

CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE author_t 
  AS OBJECT (
  ID         NUMBER(7),
  first_name VARCHAR2(100 CHAR),
  last_name  VARCHAR2(100 CHAR),
  books      books_t
)
/

CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE authors_t 
  AS VARRAY(32) OF author_t
/

BEGIN
  DBMS_AQADM.CREATE_QUEUE_TABLE(
    queue_table => 'new_author_aq_t',
    queue_payload_type => 'author_t'
  );

  DBMS_AQADM.CREATE_QUEUE(
    queue_name => 'new_author_aq',
    queue_table => 'new_author_aq_t'
  );

  DBMS_AQADM.START_QUEUE(
    queue_name => 'new_author_aq'
  );
  COMMIT;
END;
/

So, essentially, we have both OBJECT and VARRAY types for books and authors. You might prefer using TABLE types rather than VARRAY types, but for the sake of simplicity, we stick with VARRAY (as it isn’t so easy to use nested TABLE types with AQs in Oracle).

We have also created a queue that notifies listeners every time a new author is added to the database – along with their books. Imagine enqueue operations being done in a trigger on either the author or the book table.

jOOQ-generated code

When you run the jOOQ codegenerator (version 3.5 upwards) against the above schema, you’ll get a new Queues.java file, which contains:

public class Queues {
    public static final Queue<AuthorT> NEW_AUTHOR_AQ 
      = new QueueImpl<AuthorT>(
         "NEW_AUTHOR_AQ", SP, AUTHOR_T);
}

Obviously, also the previously shown OBJECT and VARRAY types are also generated by jOOQ, just like lables.

(of course, the actual naming patterns for generated Java code are completely configurable)

Using the generated artefacts

The above code is not really nicely formatted on this blog, but you don’t see any of this in your every day work. Because when you want to enqueue a message to this queue, you can simply write:

// Create a new OBJECT type with nested
// VARRAY type
AuthorT author = new AuthorT(
    1,
    "George",
    "Orwell",
    new BooksT(
        new BookT(1, "1984", "en"),
        new BookT(2, "Animal Farm", "en")
    )
);

// ... and simply enqueue that on NEW_AUTHOR_AQ
DBMS_AQ.enqueue(configuration, NEW_AUTHOR_AQ, author);

Seriously? That easy? Yes!

Compare the above to anything you’ve written before through JDBC, or using Oracle’s native APIs. You’ll find a couple of examples about how to serialise / deserialise RAW types, but frankly, queues are awesome because you can send OBJECT types through the database, and we don’t see those examples from Oracle. In fact, trust us, you don’t want to serialise OBJECT, VARRAY, or TABLE types through JDBC. You don’t. That’s our job. We’re hacking JDBC so you don’t have to.

Of course, you can also pass MESSAGE_PROPERTIES_T, ENQUEUE_OPTIONS_T, and DEQUEUE_OPTIONS_T types as arguments to the enqueue() and dequeue() methods.

Dequeuing is just as easy. The following will generate a blocking call and wait for the next AUTHOR_T message to arrive:

AuthorT author =
  DBMS_AQ.dequeue(configuration, NEW_AUTHOR_AQ);

That’s it. Can’t be that hard, can it?

Goodie: Java 8 and Oracle AQ

With the above simple API and Java 8, we can do what Oracle must’ve known long ago, when they renamed Oracle AQ’s marketing name to Oracle Streams. Let’s create a Java 8 Stream of AQ-produced OBJECT types with jOOQ. Easy as pie. Just write:

static <R extends UDTRecord<R>> Stream<R> stream(
    Configuration c, 
    Queue<R> queue
) {
    return Stream.generate(() -> 
        DBMS_AQ.dequeue(c, queue)
    );
}

And now, use this beauty like so:

stream(configuration, NEW_AUTHOR_AQ)
    .limit(10)
    .forEach(author -> {
        System.out.println(
            author.getFirstName() + " " +
            author.getLastName());
    });

The above statement takes the next 10 messages dequeued this way and prints them to the console.