Oracle Business Rules 11g - II

Well, as promised, here I am, back with some updates. Oracle Business Rules 11g (OBR) really is an interesting tool to work with. That does not mean I am going to take back my words that the scope of the OBR is limited. Its limited for those who plan to use the OBR more as a tool and for those who want to customize the product OBR, avenues are many and there is no stopping them from improvisations.

Its been a little over a couple of months on OBR now. I have a fairly clear idea on what the OBR should be used for and what it can deliver to you. There situations where OBR can be used are plenty, but there is always the choice that one has to make, whether you really need to use OBR. OBR really should be used where one is not sure about the conditions or touch points and how these touch points would change in the future. A simple case would be, in a telecom sphere, if you would have to choose the sets of commands to be fired at the network layer, you could use OBR to configure the parameters. If there are additional commands that need to be added or removed, it becomes easy in that case. And most importantly, the one who would be configuring plans and commands would be the product manager, who need not be technically proficient in Fusion Middleware and he would ideally be a person with more business knowledge and the use of OBR would make things simpler for him. There are humpteen scenarios which one can think at the wink of an eye.

But, there are scenarios where one cannot decide whether to use OBR or not. In those cases, more than analysing whether OBR is required or not, we would have to look at what the OBR would do. If OBR is used as a processing engine, my instinct tells me, its a strict NO to OBR. If the purpose is more of a simple decision making component with runtime flexibility, no doubt, OBR ! The only reason for NO to OBR in the case where OBR would be a processing engine, would be performance. OBR is bad in peformance when its loaded too much. When there are components like BPEL and Mediator available which are meant to be the processing engines and which deliver excellent performance, it does not justify the need to use OBR in those cases. With this post, I hope I have introduced OBR and would like to get to the technical part of OBR in the posts to come. All said and done, this has not stopped me from ruminating on what I have written above...

Peace !

Cheers,
- AR