So here you are trying to catch your breath with the jump from Oracle 10g to 11g and understand the brand new application that is SOA Suite 11g …and BAM! Someone goes “OPA/Haley” is better than OBR.
Before you begin to question that statement and wonder how we all moving with the Oracle Fusion Middleware flow are to now stop and look over our shoulders at another Oracle product (a fringe product?) – and gain experience in it to provide our customers with the right tool (and no nonsense product stack) …hear this … (phew!) … OPA/OPM a.k.a Haley is a really cool Natural Langugage Processing based rules engine. Oracle Business Rules (OBR) is a “RETE Algorithm” (A.I) based engine.
OPA/OPM – if for Oracle Policy Automation/Model and is meant for High Level Rules. And is good for use cases where the user has the rules in a word file and needs that file parsed on the fly and …. thats it! I don’t know enough about it and will need to dig deeper.
OBR is Oracle Business Rules – comes with Oracle SOA Suite, is familiar to a SOA or ADF application developer. Is not for the business user but can be. 11g version is much richer than 10g, lets you do “IF …then” type rules and tabular decision tables.
Which one would I use? Depends on the use case and my comfort zone. In-fact in some ADF development cases, where SOA suite license might be expensive – I’d prefer building the rules into a simple table. Fast and easy!
Your thoughts?
Alok Mishra 