Shared work items

What are shared work items?

Work items are created in the Business Process Choreographer database for each combination of human task instance and all people who are permitted to perform actions on that instance. If the number of human task instances and the number of users increases significantly, the number of work items in the database can grow so large that the database performance is affected.

The idea behind shared work items is an optimized implementation of work items, such that redundant information about work items is not stored in the database. This can improve the performance of many BPEL process and human task queries. Whether shared work items are being used, or not, is transparent to the users of Business Process Choreographer APIs.

How to decide whether to add support for shared work items

It is only if you migrate your Business Process Choreographer configuration from Version 7.0.0.2 or earlier, that the support for shared work items is not activated. Although activating is optional, certain factors indicate that using shared work items will improve performance.

• If you only have hundreds or a few thousands of human task instances in your system, there is probably little or no performance advantage in migrating to using shared work items.
• If you have hundreds of thousands of human task instances in your system, and your task list and process list queries are taking too long, migrating to using shared work items should improve the performance.
• Using shared work items can improve the performance of the following queries:
  • query()
  • queryAll()
  • queryEntities()
  • queryEntityCount()
  • queryRows()
  • queryRowCount()

Restrictions