Web Services for Data Integration
Data integration specialists usually define data structures, especially marts, warehouses, and operational data stores. Sometimes theyre happy with virtual structures: although pundits demonized virtual data warehousing a decade ago, EII has made federated queries respectable again.
These structures enable particular use cases. They emphasize entities (as in entity relationship diagrams). They accept redundancy, as long as it is controlled and rationalized. And they make users learn their schema, which adds complexity but makes usage patterns as flexible as possible.
This last element is crucial: in data integration, people add their own intelligence to raw data. Nothing stands between the data and the programmer or analyst except an IDE or a query tool.
The Effect of Web Services
SOA evolved from application integrations dependence on interfaces. In data integration scenarios, these interfaces will provide access to data sources.
ODBC and JDBC are interfaces that give us access to data, but they arent enough. They provide a generic data pipe between an application and a data source, providing access for well-understood business logic (e.g., a client/server or Web application) or for knowledgeable users of business intelligence tools. Administrators can tune their databases accordingly.
Web services can function in the same way, but often organizations will need to take other issues into consideration. Web services are used to open up information systems to more users, more use cases, and more queries – generally for consumers to use for any authorized purpose they can conceive. Therefore, Web services that provide general-purpose data access may cause problems, including:
- Difficult maintenance and tight coupling. Even trivial changes to data models may affect multiple data consumers and applications, possibly including some of which administrators arent aware.
- Unpredictable queries. Administrators are usually in close contact with the application designers or BI users that use their data, but usage will become increasingly difficult to predict as more consumers are added.
These problems (and others) have a common resolution: prepackage queries and expose them as Web services. The services will use the data model correctly and be completely predictable, and may provide stable interfaces even if the underlying data model changes.
In this way, Web services for data integration will be much more like application integration: data shielded by business logic, exposed through a standard interface.
Read more on how iWay Software tools can create and deploy Web services for data integration:
For More Information
No other company provides the kind of sophisticated data integration and SOA-based integration technology that iWay Software does. To find out more, call toll-free (866) 297-4929 or e-mail us at info@iwaysoftware.com.
