Biztalk Bam Interview Preparation Guide

BAM Activities identify the milestones and tracking data an individual is interested in tracking. Milestones are the steps in an activity that are measured in time, and tracking data are the key data points in a process you are interested in tracking (such as a customer ID or name).

A BAM view is a representation of the milestones and business data tracked in one or more activities on the BAM Portal.

BAM Management utility or “bm.exe” provides for end-to-end management and deployment of BAM. You can use the BAM utility to perform the following tasks:
☛ Consume BAM definition and BAM configuration XML as input.
☛ Deploy the run-time infrastructure on the server, which includes the BAM Primary Import database, BAM Star Schema database, BAM Analysis database, and corresponding Data Transformation Services (DTS) packages.

Yes. There are some shapes like:
☛ Terminate
☛ Throw Exception
☛ Group
☛ Loop
☛ Message Assignment
☛ Suspend
☛ Transform

Add a reference of that dll (class). The class must be strongly signed and in the GAC.
Make sure your transaction type of Orchestration is Long Running transactional.
Add an Atomic scope.
Create an Orchestration variable of that class inside the scope.
Create an instance on that object inside the scope.
Call the method

When a message is received, or else when a timeout has expired, the orchestration engine can be automatically triggered to rehydrate the instance – it is at this point that the orchestration engine loads the saved instance of the orchestration into memory, restores the state, and runs its from the point it left off.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is used to monitor business milestones and key metrics in near real-time throughout a process in BizTalk. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is a module in BizTalk that captures business data and process milestones to allows business decision makers to gain insight of their in-flight processes. Using BI tools to derive up-to-date metrics and key performance indicators from the BAM databases, users can forecast process trends and monitor processes in real-time. BAM also provides a mechanism to alert users to situations that require their intervention to prevent undesirable outcome or to encourage a beneficial result.

An activity relationship exists when an activity relates to one or more other activities. An example of this is having multiple Shipment activities related to a single Purchase Order activity, or one Shipment activity containing items from two Purchase Order activities.

To indicate that two activities are related, you need to know both names and have the corresponding ActivityIDs in memory in order to call AddRelatedActivity. This API creates the link between the corresponding activity records.

The most commonly data sources used with BAM are:
☛ BizTalk Application
☛ BAM API
☛ WCF Services (WCF Interceptor)
☛ WF Workflows (WF Interceptor)

The storage of RTA is a SQL table and the aggregation is updated and maintained by SQL trigger. The event importing and aggregation update are completed in the same transaction, therefore its data latency is negligible and almost real-time. The scheduled aggregation is saved in Olap cubes which need to be processed periodically by the cubing DTS package