Thursday, July 11, 2013

How to do versioning with Oracle Business Rules

In one of my discussions on oracle business rules, one query that I got was on versioning, for example  a scenario in which clients major business rules are written in Oracle  business rules and  as per requirement it is modified at runtime using SOA composer. There were lot of transaction that happened in that period with new rules and later it was reverted back to old rules. How can we track the changes that went in so that it is easy for rolling back to previous versions, know how any versions/changes have been made on the initial business rules.
It is a valid query from the user perspective and oracle has the solution.
Runtime Versioning is supported in Oracle Business Rules using MDS. The rules dictionary is stored in MDS and if MDS has database as the backend instead file based repository then versioning is supported using MDS. Any changes made to dictionary are made visible to the application in MDS. The rule service engine (decision service) does this automatically.
There is also option of creating metadata labels for each release or each update which will be helpful (similar to tags in SVN). A metadata label is a means of selecting a particular version of each object from a metadata repository partition. This tag/label comprises of the document versions which were the latest versions at the time the label was created.
Labels that are created will be available till they are deleted explicitly using wlst commands. Automatic purging will not remove the labels. Same as versioning, labels are also supported only in database-based repositories. As a good deployment/promotion practice, you can create a label and then promote documents/rules associated with a metadata label. It will be easier to rollback to an earlier version in case you use create/promote label approach.
References

No comments: