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There's more to data and SOA

Certainly a process-driven data integration approach that is exposed as a reusable service makes sense when the data involved requires some human intervention in order to perform the desired integration (e.g., rationalizing some naming mismatch between two siloed systems).

But the vast majority of data integration that occurs in most organizations doesn't require human intervention. Namely, the data integration that goes on inside every application and is typically hand-coded by a developer - get some data from multiple places, join it together, apply some validation rules, transform it into a useful object, repeat.

This type of repetitive activity occurs untold times inside every application in every organization. When adopting service-orientation, this type of data integration also deserves attention but has often been overlooked. If the goal is loose-coupling and reuse, why not factor significant portions of this data integration behavior out of the application tier into a data service tier that is reusable? Why not also build useful, logical, consumer-friendly data objects that hide the physical details of the various data sources from the consumers?

This is one of the less sexy but incredibly important aspects of service-orientation that delivers significant long-term benefits in terms of cost reduction and increased agility. Unfortunately, many SOA projects don't extend the principles of service orientation to the data. Standards and technology exist to make a reusable data service layer for this 'bread-n-butter' type of data integration a reality now. I'd be happy to brief you on them.

Posted by: bradcw64   Posted on: 02/04/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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