An Introduction to Oracle Fusion – a Solid Foundation for Service Inventory - Applied SOA Patterns on the Oracle Platform - page 144

with some configuration amendments regarding max cursors and processes) with SOA
DB schemas installed (by the Repository Creation Utility, RCU), and Oracle WLS with
soa_server , a domain dedicated for orchestration.
From a component perspective, Oracle SCA consists of the following:
• BPEL
• Decision Service
• Mediator
• Human Workflow
Interestingly, after five years of exploitation, SOA Suite 11 g is sometimes called BPEL,
where BPEL actually represented just 25 percent of the overall functionality. In fact, it
plays a clearer role now, acting as the glue between other services and the components.
SOA Suite itself presents a very good example of the separation of concerns. Probably the
most disputed component is Mediator. Its role is sometimes mistaken for the lightweight
service bus . We do not believe that the weight matters here; Mediator can also be dehyd-
rated as it's stateful, and so it's not that lightweight. Mediator relieves the BPEL processes
from the implementation of complex if-else / routing functionality: parallel, sequential,
static, dynamic, and rule-based.
Tip
The execution of parallel rules requires the enqueuing of messages in the DB dehydration
store. As a DB is involved, performance tuning and performance monitoring are required.
Oracle Mediator's dynamic rule-based routing is an effective feature, but we are limited
only by an asynchronous MEP (nonsynchronous or one-way MEPs) and we cannot alter
the payload (no transformation). Also, only SOAP binding is currently supported.
Thanks to the BPEL-based artifacts, we can finally focus on the grouping task-centric lo-
gic related to particular EBMs, presenting enterprise-centric business logic in a transpar-
ent and manageable way. Clearly, that's the Process Abstraction SOA patterns' implement-
ation, which aims at the creation of a task service layer in our service inventory. A new
SOA pattern-candidate has been introduced recently—Entity Linking. According to its
name, the purpose of this pattern is to maintain the desirable level of the Loose Coupling
principle between the isolated Entity services, giving them a possibility to natively com-
municate as some business relations always exist between them ( Order <-> In-
voice , Schedule <-> Vehicle , and so on). In this context, Mediator can be seen