One biggest advantage of the Tibco ActiveSpaces is it's ease of integration with the TIBCO suite of products. Hence it is more suitable to TIBCO AS in conjunction with the TIBCO suite of products.
All products could offer the same or different level of advantages. For the …
TIBCO Integration (including BusinessWorks and Flogo)
Likelihood to Recommend
TIBCO Software Inc.
TIBCO ActiveSpaces is useful for storing in memory data which enables fetching data quickly and efficiently. We can make use of TIBCO ActiveSpaces APIs for storing and retrieving data. In our organization, we store user session details in TIBCO ActiveSpaces and this session detail is used for authentication and authorizing user. We have integration TIBCO ActiveSpaces with React UI and TIBCO Business Works.
In BusinessWorks it is quite easy to develop applications and monitor where as it is not similar with Scribe. The data which successfully processed in Scribe is quite difficult to view. I think the Scribe console tool should have better view for the data it has processed.At times we founds some of our sales orders are missing which are unable to update/insert in the DB, after investigation found the issue is in Scribe tool. A case has been raised 02129657 for the same and as per the guidelines from the Scribe support engineer we did changes in the shutdown interval to zero. ''update SCRIBEINTERNAL.SCRIBE.KSYNC set keyvalue= 0 where KEYNAME = 'SETTINGS.SHUTDOWNINTERVAL''. Later this change we started getting alert emails like ''Fatal error 325 occurred: Message processor shutting down - defined maximum memory usage (900MB) exceeded. Please contact Scribe support at support@scribesoft.com if this problem persists''. We found this issue is a critical one as the occurrences of it is decreased but still it is persist.
Like all other IMDG solutions, Tibco ActiveSpaces provides a scalable and distributed cache solution, which is supposed to have high throughput and high availability.
As it is under the Tibco umbrella, it is seamlessly integrated with other Tibco products.
It breaks the traditional "local cache" boundary and limitation, instead unifies many "local physical memory" to create one huge "In-Memory Data Grid", and serves the data provider/consumer application logically as one "Memory Cloud."
A lot of non-frequently updated data can be cached in this IMDG, to allow fast access, which saves the I/O latency caused by many traditional file system-backed storage solutions.
The UI is easy to navigate and map flows are intuitive and easy to build upon after some basic training. However, a user should have some basic knowledge of writing nested statements.
Very responsive customer support.
The debug feature is a great tool for troubleshooting. You can easily identify where the issue is in your flow. At each debug step, it returns the expected value, and when there isn't the expected value, you know when to modify your flow.
ActiveSpaces 3.2 is not compatible with the latest version of TIBCO Business Event 5.x. And ActiveSpaces 2.x is not compatible with ActiveSpaces 3.x hence there is a big difference in the BusinessEvents supported version of AS and the latest.
ActiveSpaces takes more disc space and TIBCO does not offer data compression logic out of the box. Developers need to do extra coding to use java snippets to compress and decompress the payload. Although the data compression gives must better performance and speed to the system.
The compression and decompression API are not offered by TIBCO out of the box, which is a shame. These are so easy and simple to implement, still TIBCOdoes not provide them as an option out of the box.
Missing functionality: We like to run all the files available in the FTP when clicking the run button. Right now, we have to click the run button several times (or have multiple solutions) in order to run files from our FTP site one at a time.
Generating column fields every time a file changes from the source in the FTP is very tedious. Working in integrations makes me have to go back and forth a lot of the time, and doing this is incredibly annoying.
The security is horrendous. We installed an on-premise agent on the customer side, but we don't want them even touching the ETL tool at all. The only knowledge we are fine with knowing and being able to see is that they installed the agent, not the solutions themselves.
Our company's connector would have to point to the dataset name rather than dataset ID. It was very frustrating because we change the dataset name a lot, and then we'd have to repoint it.
It's very difficult to monitor the different integrations that go on because there isn't a consolidated dashboard.
We are deeply entrenched in using Tibco Scribe capabilities, and we are only expanding our usage. It would be one thing if we used it only for a one-time data load, but we have several Scribe maps running constantly, keeping business-critical data up to date. And the ease of use for the occasional, mass data update or upload is simply icing on the cake. I'm a big Microsoft fan, so there is potential down the road to convert our Scribe data integrations to Microsoft Flow (or Power Automate as it is now called). But for now, the functionality just isn't there with Flow (Power Automate), plus the work involved to change all our current integrations would be a large undertaking. So for now and the foreseeable future, Scribe will remain our data integration tool of choice.
TIBCO ActiveSpaces is easy to install and integrate with other product suites. It is easy to understand and implement as well. TIBCO ActiveSpaces supports multiple databases for storing the data(we are using Oracle Database). All the master data related to the users is being stored using TIBCO ActiveSpaces which keeps the data in memory and help to retrieve it quickly. It has helped to prevent concurrent login sessions by the same user as session details are stored in TIBCO ActiveSpaces and we override the existing user session with the new session details.
As mentioned in the previous sections, setup and maintenance is extremely easy. We don't have many issues for which we need support and there is no need for deep technical skills to use Tibco Cloud Integration platform. The solution provides everything we need for our specific use case, being the replication of our Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM data to our on premise database for reporting.
We have not had any issues with TIBCO not being available when needed. I have only had to contact support less than 5 times in about 5 year time frame due to syncing issues or a problem with the agent. Support is very quick to respond as well as very helpful.
TIBCO Cloud Integration (including BusinessWorks and Scribe)'s performance of the user interface are not to be complained about. The user interface is swift and is a pleasant user experience. The replication jobs take some time to finish but that is because the number of records to be updated/created on a daily basis is quite big. I did split up the jobs between highrunners (entities with a lot of changes) I update on a daily basis and quite stable entities that I update weekly. That solved my issue of a way to long replication.
For creating new process, you have lots of palettes to do every develop you need. For created process it is easy to understand even if you have ever seen before it. You can analyze your process in all their detail. User Experience is positive for beginner and expertise people. Just debug mode is still raw, but better in TIBCO BusinessWorks 6.x than TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.x .
Before using TIBCO Businessworks, I participated an official training with a specialized instructor. In this training, I learned what I needed to know to build some applications or web services and how to manage its. It was been very important to me. I understood many technical stuff to familiarize with this powerful platform. I can advice TIBCO Educational Services.
If we don't design the process correctly, it can do lot of damage (like deleting files or data etc.,) and might assume product issue rather than a design flaw. So it is always recommended to do thorough unit testing , QA and a design review even for a small process to avoid major problems.
Actually, we are gradually replacing the Tibco ActiveSpaces with Redis (for caching purpose only) or Hazelcast (for embedded mode and also for in-memory distributed computation purpose + in-memory distributed IPC purpose).
Used TIBCO for migration of our data for our learning management system.TIBCO, succesful Content ,data migration(courses, classes, registrations, transcripts etc.) ,User migration(Internal users and Partner migration)and Report migrationIntegrations with different applications Workday,Single Sign-On,CertTracker,Okta,Partner contact sync and Questionmark is succesful.LOD: Learn on demand is a third party vendor application where all Virtual classes are delivered by the vendor application. Learning management system sends the class and registration events to learn on demand via real time web service call through TIBCO
We could easily add multiple agents and new systems. This had no impact on the performance. We had some issues because flows cannot be splitted and called by each other. So you have lots of flows which are the same. It would be great if this was improved. Also transferring values via variables between flows seems to be impossible. You can only use global lists with dictionaries.
Developers with basic knowledge of TIBCO and general data knowledge can easily design and develop an ActiveSpaces based cached solution. As the ActiveSpaces concepts are very simple and easy to understand.
Some business areas can predict the high influx of a service usage during a certain period. Business will be highly rewarded if they can identify these business areas and provide a cached solution using TIBCO AS.
Again, this is not a TIBCO ActiveSpaces only advantage and this is true for any/all caching products.
Some examples for the previous points are
a. telecom company pre-loading (eager load) customer's usage for the last month, right before releasing/issuing the bills to the customers.
b. Airline industry loading the customer's itinerary a week before his travel start date. Hence the last minute scrambling to fetch the customer's itinerary travel plans can be avoided.
