This blog post is part two of an ongoing series highlighting the importance of data in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). I look forward to hearing your thoughts and input on the subject.
I'm back. It's been a little longer than normal, longer than I would have liked. Perhaps that’s because 'addressing SOA's data-centric pitfalls' isn’t easy. (Really it’s because I’ve been working on other things. But let’s get back to the topic at hand.)
One of the benefits of the SOA approach is the ability to think top-down about problems. The usual approach is to work tightly with the business to define your processes from a business perspective, leading to clearly defined services that the business understands and you can implement together.
This is wonderful and has a clarifying symmetry that Software Engineering has been trying to achieve since the days of CASE. But now, here we are in 2008 with the SOA standards defined and the tools available to potentially achieve this vision. Ah, finally, the integration hairball will be contained and life will improve immeasurably for all!
But as I talked about last time, one of the reasons that things aren’t that simple is the data-centric pitfalls. And addressing this problem is not easy if you want to take a long-term, enterprise-oriented approach.
In talking with folks who have walked down this path, struggled with data problems, and are trying to think holistically about a workable longer-term solution, three themes come up again and again: [Read more]