What Role Does a Data Warehouse Play in A Service-Oriented Architecture?

摘要

Description of the Material Organizations have long struggled with providing integration, interoperability and data exchange among a variety of disparate databases across the enterprise. Many organizations are adopting service-oriented architectures (SOA) to provide both application and data integration services. Incorporating data warehousing into an overall service-oriented architecture is critical for enabling integrated business intelligence. Application Business intelligence architectures focus on delivering data from source systems to data warehouses and then to data marts for reporting and analytical applications. They have typically used ETL to move data, and more recently, EAI. SOA brings the promise of using an umbrella approach for not just batch data movement, but also for real-time application and data integration. This paper describes how data warehousing fits into a service-oriented architecture, some of the common challenges that it addresses and what the combined architecture looks like. Additionally, this paper takes a look at a common business scenario utilizing Data Warehousing within a service-oriented architecture. Results, Observations and Conclusions Successful business process management and access to direct transactional business intelligence are two of the main benefits resulting from the capture of timely, accurate data at the source. Creating business intelligence that performs efficiently and provides strong corporate memory requires incorporation of data warehousing into the overall serviceoriented architecture model. Undertaken correctly, SOA can supplement existing technologies to deliver data and process driven business intelligence. Significance of Subject Matter The challenges of lack of data standards, "silos" of information, and lack of a common integration framework make the SOA promise of easier data and application integration sound very appealing. Many oil and gas companies have started implementing SOAs within their enterprises. With business intelligence solutions continuing to be a top focus for Oil & Gas IT leaders, informal surveys of this same group have found that many lack an understanding of the composite view of SOA and BI.