Hi, Matthieu Riou wrote: > On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Rafal Rusin <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hello, >> >> recently I added feature request: >> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ODE-483 >> >> It's about adding save/load process instances to/from XML in management >> API. >> I'd like to hear from you, what's the best solution from your (user's) >> perspective. >> > > This is a pretty hard problem. Saving and reloading the instance state is > the easy part, migrating it to a new definition is where it gets hairy. > Generally speaking, automagically migrating any process definition to a any > new one is impossible, too many cases are undecidable. So whichever tool > gets used to do that migration will need human input to know what to do in > all but simple cases (which might already be interesting). The question then > becomes how to describe a transformation from one process definition to > another. With a relational database you would use SQL to alter the schema > and update data. There's no equivalent for processes. > > I'm not aware of much literature directly in that field although Tammo may > be able to point you to some papers.
Instance migration is definitely a non-trivial problem, though very interesting. The guys in Ulm have done a lot of research in this field [1], I think it is a good starting point (also to find related work). Best, Tammo [1]http://www.uni-ulm.de/en/in/institute-of-databases-and-information-systems/research/projects/adept2.html
