I don’t really like what Oracle did with BAM user/roles and authentication.

I think they took Microsoft tables and just slapped them into Oracle (having to put quotes around tables and columns). I assume this process will change in the upcoming releases, but here is a quick SQL statement you can use to get a look at your users and their roles as BAM understands them:

SELECT iu."SysIterName" username, iur."RoleName" userrole
FROM orabam."SysIterUser" iu, orabam."SysIterRoleUserMapping" iur
WHERE iur."UserID" = iu."SysIterID"
ORDER BY iu."SysIterName"

We have been working with BAM since the beginning.  The product is certainly “interesting” and has some cool auto-refresh capabilities that make for a nice demo to executives.  However, there are a few pieces to the overall reporting puzzle that, well, leave me a little puzzled…

• No ability to write reports that query an RDBMS or even the BAM data objects — I hope you like simple query logic.
• No ability to manipulate data in the BAM data objects: I just want to run an update statement people.
• Filters that work in the normal browser window do not work when the report is placed in an IFRAME (which is their recommended approach for putting reports on another web site).
• Only support for IE: c’mon, the days of enterprise software only supporting IE are over.
• No documented calculation for INSTR: hmm…if you can’t use SQL, and you there is no [documented] way to implement an INSTR, I have a hard time saying this is ready for primetime.

Note: I hope I am wrong about a few of the above statements, but this is my current understanding based on what my consultants and developers have explained (and based on my cursory look over documentation and fiddling with BAM’s reports/data objects).  I’ll be happy to edit the post if someone can prove otherwise. 

We had an issue where BAM stopped working after installing SOA Suite on a Windows 2003 Server (BAM only runs on Windows at the time of this writing). After trying to uninstall/reinstall many times ourselves, Oracle Support suggested that this was not a compatible configuration. We have done it before (in play environments), but this clearly can cause some issues that are not easy to resolve. So, in this case, we ended up splitting the installation to different machines and have been sleeping much better at night.