In the past few weeks, I have encountered a similar discussion in various organisations. Each organisation uses either SOA Suite (11g) or Oracle Service Bus (11g) at the core of their SOA infrastructure – either for integration purposes, for workflow and process orchestration or for both. In each organisation, the role of one or more databases is crucial and interaction between the SOA environment and the database is one of the most common and therefore important functions in their enterprise IT environment.

Given the importance, it is only logical that the way(s) chosen for linking the SOA component to the database is carefully selected – and evaluated every now and again. Technology may have progressed, experience may have taught us a lesson or two, the knowledge and skills may have evolved.

Interestingly enough, the number of ways for SOA Suite and OSB to communicate with the database is quite high. This article includes an illustration that shows over 20 different interaction channels that we can choose from with a fairly wild variation of attributes, required skills, productivity and performance characteristics.

Among the choices we face is the question of the communication More >