As discussed earlier in this book, OER is a fundamental component for effective design-time Governance (refer to Chapter 3, Introduction to Oracle Enterprise Repository). OER delivers critical information about current service capabilities to architects, SOA designers, and developers at design time, empowering them to make informed decisions for service re-use. All Design Time components and metadata are stored in OER.
OER provides a flexible meta-model for cataloging all assets within the SOA ecosystem and their dependencies and relationships to other artifacts. It is primarily used during the plan, design, and build phase of the lifecycle as a single source of truth for service and composite application development.
The OSR, on the other hand, acts as a reference point for services that have been deployed into the runtime environment. It is primarily used by components of the SOA infrastructure for programmatic, dynamic discovery and binding. OSR typically contains a subset of the metadata from the OER for runtime discovery. From a Service Provider's perspective, OSR also creates a service virtualization layer, providing a means to insulate applications from service failures or changes to service end points.
It must be stressed that, unlike OER, OSR only exposes a service interface. It does not show service dependencies, related assets and other important governance requirements. It is aimed at service consumers only.
OER and OSR can be synchronized using the Oracle Enterprise Repository Exchange Utility . OSR effectively bridges the gap between the design time and runtime environments via automated synchronization with OER, Oracle Service Bus, and Oracle SOA Suite.
OER's enterprise metadata repository capabilities together with the OSR's comprehensive support for UDDI v3 provide support for managing and governing the full SOA lifecycle. The tight coupling of OER and OSR gives organizations a means to manage their enterprise assets in order to provide visibility, reusability, and traceability throughout the enterprise.