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Oracle SOA Suite is used for the process orchestration.

These processes are primarily stateful and long-running. The service bus is used for routing messages and message transformation.

Oracle Service Bus provides support for communication with Oracle BPEL Process Manager, which enables us to include the BPEL processes in our SOA composite applications.

Using the native BPEL transport within Oracle Service Bus, one can expose BPEL processes as web services in the Oracle Service Bus layer allowing other services to invoke BPEL processes.

Oracle Service Bus was previously known as BEA AquaLogic Service Bus, which was a part of the BEA product acquisition. Oracle Service Bus has a separate install as compared to Oracle SOA Suite.

The mediator component of the Oracle SOA Suite is similar to that of Oracle Service Bus.

However, Oracle Service Bus is great for enterprise-wide integration, message transformation with XSLT and XQUERY,  that is, it is large and powerful compared to the mediator component of the  Oracle SOA Suite.

The service bus functionality of the Oracle SOA Suite (that is, the mediator component) is a lightweight service bus used for VETRO (Validate, Enrich, Transform, Routing, and Operate) pattern, value mapping, and cross-referencing to support Canonical Data Models, which are used for minor message transformation with XSLT and are a part of the Service Component Architecture (SCA).

The following diagram shows sets depicting the differences and common features of the Oracle SOA Suite mediator component and the Oracle Service Bus.