Rock your Data Warehousing with SOA
The lazy big giant who serviced the BI world on a periodic basis is getting an overhaul. It’s all set to keep a finger on the pulse of business and ship all the different [BI] pieces that customers require. Service-oriented architecture makes room for data warehousing! This could be the beginning of a perfect marriage.
The relationship between data warehousing and SOA was always complicated. Opposite ends of a spectrum - aggregated vs. federated data, data centric vs. process centric. But how about bringing them together to deliver data as a service? The suitability of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to transform data warehouses into information as a service is addressing this challenge, though with important conditions and qualifications.
When my latest BI project METL (Managed ETL) chose IBM WebSphere DataStage to handle real-time and near real-time scenarios, many eyebrows were lifted. Doesn’t the number of interfaces between upstream and downstream transactional and BI systems end up like a messy college party?
ETL technology with message brokers, and network protocols such as XML (extensible markup language) and SOAP (simple object access protocol) and information integration enabled real time (dynamic) processing; it narrowed the gap between business and IT. It indeed proved that the demands on data warehouses to provide feedback for operational decisions on the latest / up-to-date data available is possible. Going hand in hand with the current ETL load strategies SOA adds the on demand feature. It enables enterprises to capture and structure content that was previously unstructured, making it tractable for business processing in the data warehouse. Real time functionality decreases the load on your usual ETL process. Development costs on integrating your new application data into data warehouse is no more a headache nor is as costly as it was. SOA can provide a method of abstracting from the underlying location of the master data, hiding the complexity under the hood as long as the defined service is accommodated. Everything remains the same, data marts, data modeling, ETL strategies? but a venture with your current / enhanced / new SOA is really going to make your data warehouse rock.
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