Integration Insider: Mind if I SELECT * Your SOA?

Has anyone done a study of how DBAs feel about SOA? If so, send it my way. I don't know of one. But if I had to wager a guess, I'd say the consensus would be somewhere from uneasy to defensive.

It's not just that database schemas look quite different from XML schemas. It's that all of this 'service enablement' opens up a Pandora's box of unoptimized access patterns. For all this talk of business agility, there's the small matter of database stability. Let's see, what rhymes with flexibility? How about 'fragility'?

You see, today's databases are typically designed to support a specific application. Or, commonly they are designed to support reporting or business intelligence applications. Unlike the Web boom, where databases were designed to support large scale and sometimes even wacky applications, enterprise databases have years of modeling and tuning in them. But now Web Services are taking off inside enterprises, and the SOA architects are eying the databases that belong to the data architects. Imagine the first time a Web Services developer launches a SELECT * query on the wrong database. The fur will fly.

But, as with many things in technology, the SOA horse is out of the barn, and while the data architects may accuse the SOA architects of putting the cart before the horse, something needs to be done. Enter EII - or data services if you like.

As I wrote last year in Web Services Journal, EII is the perfect mediator. An EII server a) understands SQL, b) understands data models, c) has built-in query optimization, d) has built-in security and governance, and e) can output Web Services. So what's not to like? You allow the EII server to mediate SQL queries to back end databases, complete with monitoring, caching, query tuning, and - importantly - adjustable thresholds on the allowable load on the back-end database. The EII server can likewise service-enable these EII Views, publish them to an SOA registry, and monitor their accessibility and performance. Everyone's happy.

What's even cooler with Ipedo's product is that all of this can be scripted. As my colleague Peter Spielvogel wrote about in The EII Files, Ipedo can automatically import data models from popular modeling tools like ERwin and ER/Studio. So you can import all of the data models you need in a matter of minutes. Once in Ipedo, you can script which Views you would like to be made available as Web Services, and voila! A little testing and tuning later, and your SOA developer and your DBA can leave work early to have a beer together.