Service-Oriented Integration

Connecting systems both within the enterprise and with suppliers, partners, and customers is of critical importance to today’s enterprise. However, integration remains complex, expensive, and risky. While Web Services won’t be the magic bullet that immediately solves these problems, they enable a new approach to integration. Service-Oriented Integration (SOI) leverages open standards, loose coupling, and dynamic description and discovery capabilities of Web Services to reduce the complexity, cost, and risk of integration. This report identifies the key aspects of SOI, solutions for implementing SOI, ROI metrics, and critical challenges.

XML Data Store Multi-Client Study

While much has been written about XML data storage, none of the research to date has focused on the key questions:

• What are the different needs for XML data storage?
• ow do those needs translate into different storage requirements?
• How are various vendor solutions best suited to meet these different needs?

In attempting to understand the answers to the above questions, ZapThink realized that there was no single answer for any of these key questions. In fact, it seems that the various requirements for XML data storage pull end-user customers in different directions when they are deciding how to implement XML storage requirements. As such, this study seeks to do what no other study before it has done: show that XML data storage is not a distinct market segment, but instead a functionality requirement for applications that require XML storage in order to achieve their overall system objectives.

ZapThink: Native XML Data Storage Will Evolve

nalysts at XML and Web services consultancy ZapThink Friday made the prediction that the native XML database (NXD) niche no longer exists as a separate market.

ZapThink Senior Analyst Ron Schmelzer told internetnews.com XML-enabled relational database (RDBMS), content management, and integration vendors are best suited to offer general-purpose XML data store solutions, while XML database pure-plays are offering more focused XML data storage solutions. Schmelzer believes XML database features will eventually become incorporated in an increasing number of major software packages, including those offered by Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.

Read more at: Internetnews.com

XML for exchanging data

The language basically solves interoperability problems by providing an interface between computers, databases, and systems, said Ron Schmelzer, a consultant with ZapThink, an XML and Web Services research firm.

Read more at: CNet Asia

“XML Appeal”

XML’s appeal is that it’s easy to use, and it is not bound by the rules many of the current relational databases use. XML marks data in such a way that two systems can agree on the XML format and read the data. The language basically solves interoperability problems by providing an interface between computers, databases, and systems, said Ron Schmelzer, a consultant with ZapThink, an XML and Web Services research firm.

Read more at: ZDNet

Service-Oriented Integration

Connecting systems both within the enterprise and with suppliers, partners, and customers is of critical importance to today’s enterprise. However, integration remains complex, expensive, and risky. While Web Services won’t be the magic bullet that immediately solves these problems, they enable a new approach to integration. Service-Oriented Integration (SOI) leverages open standards, loose coupling, and dynamic description and discovery capabilities of Web Services to reduce the complexity, cost, and risk of integration. This report identifies the key aspects of SOI, solutions for implementing SOI, ROI metrics, and critical challenges.

XML Data Storage Technologies & Trends

While file systems, relational, and object-oriented database management systems have met our needs in prior years for data storage and retrieval, XML imposes new requirements on how that information needs to be stored so that it can be retrieved in a structured, hierarchical manner. This ZapThink report, “XML Data Storage Technologies and Trends” covers the various commercial options that focus on meeting the requirements for XML storage and retrieval, and identifies benefits, disadvantages, key market drivers, and sizing and growth of the market for these products.

XML Data Storage Technologies and Trends

While file systems, relational, and object-oriented database management systems have met our needs in prior years for data storage and retrieval, XML imposes new requirements on how that information needs to be stored so that it can be retrieved in a structured, hierarchical manner. This ZapThink report, “XML Data Storage Technologies and Trends” covers the various commercial options that focus on meeting the requirements for XML storage and retrieval, and identifies benefits, disadvantages, key market drivers, and sizing and growth of the market for these products.

ZapNote: Coherity

Current aggregation infrastructures are good at integrating different data sources as long as there is a common subset, but the problem is what do you do with the incremental exchanges shared across more than one data source, but not all? Coherity solves this problem through their Adaptive Information Integration Suite consisting of a Native XML Data store, Coherity XML Database (CXD), and a CRM-focused integration application called Coherity Integrated Customer Care (ICC). The system enables transparent data and data model exchange by accommodating data structure variations that inevitably occur when aggregating data from multiple application sources.

ZapNote: eXcelon

There are two major categories of XML data store: extensions to relational database systems (RDBMS) and a new category of "Native" XML data stores (NXDs). While extensions to RDBMS systems simply enable RDBMS databases to map XML documents to relational tables, NXDs allow users to insert XML documents directly into the system without need for mapping or interacting with anything besides the XML document. eXcelon’s eXtensible Information Server (XIS) is an "XML data management system (XDBMS)" that is aimed squarely at the problem of storing arbitrarily structured XML documents. Among other features, XIS provides node level management of XML data, dealing with XML document information at the element level, rather than the document level.