SO BI IT or Service Orientation meets Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) and Service Orientation (SO) are two architectural paradigms that have been developed independently.

In the Architecture Journal 6:

There is a complete article about this new concept, which draw my attention since one my BI colleague mention it.



So what is about; well BI and SOA together. That's thought did not cross my mind before. Currently I am working at Inter Access in a business-unit Microsoft & BI Solutions. I am working in the BizTalk, SOA, EAI space and doing interesting jobs/projects around it. Brainstorming with my colleague about this SOBI (BI with SO) concept is challenging. One important thing about SOBI is message size and frequency. When to use ETL or Services.
The picture below, taken from the article says it all in my opinion and experience. Large messages, low volume (frequency) use ETL tool like (since I am a Microsoft guy) SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) a component of SQL Server 2005.




Message size versus message volume

While with small message sizes and high volume one can make use of services. During a recent BizTalk solution I architected and implemented I used the same lets say rule of thumb. In a flex worker company in Holland a solution was needed to integrate applications together among these applications where data warehouses. So using BizTalk to extract data and load to a warehouse one a week was not a good idea, but using SSIS is. In this case I was confronted with BI and bulk data. Looking at this article about the two paradigms together it’s nice to see that in real life these two come together. I will be studying some more on this article and will have a discussion about with my BI colleague soon. I will get back on this subject later.....

Microsoft's ESB Guidance : its finally there !!!

Last week I received the ESB Guidance package from Microsoft 'The Netherlands'. Since my company is a Microsoft gold partner in the business process & integration (BPI) space I was able to get my hands on it. I got a VPC image with all the binaries installed on them (ESB Core, ESB Client, ESB Services, ESB Portal Framework, Exception handling, namespace resolution pipeline component and Java Messaging Service) together with a user guide.

For enabling a SOA one needs an infrastructure, which the service bus can provide. There are some vendor's already in this space like Sonic (one of the first ESB product vendors, IBM, webMethods). Now Microsoft has stepped in by not selling a product, but by using a toolset (BizTalk) and Web Services (build with .NET). The picture below gives a schematic overview of the Microsoft ESB.

To get your hands on the toolkit one can ask questions by sending an email to esbtlkt@microsoft.com and be sure one is a Microsoft Partner in de BPI Competency. Other info about this toolkit can be found by the following URL's:

http://www.crn.com/sections/infrastructure/infrastructure.jhtml?articleId=193104205

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2006/10/08/Microsoft-ESB-Architecture-Guidance.aspx

http://geekswithblogs.net/bloesgen/

I will be toying with the toolkit the coming weeks and try to figure out it's implementation.

My Next SOA Book

After browsing and reading through BizTalk 2006 Recipes I pick up another SOA book. It's called Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): Concepts, Technology, and Design.

Erl uses more than 125 case study examples and over 300 diagrams to illuminate the most important facets of building SOA platforms: goals, obstacles, concepts, technologies, standards, delivery strategies, and processes for analysis and design. His book's broad coverage includes Detailed step-by-step processes for service-oriented analysis and service-oriented design
An in-depth exploration of service-orientation as a distinct design paradigm, including a comparison to object-orientation A comprehensive study of SOA support in .NET and J2EE development and runtime platforms Descriptions of over a dozen key Web services technologies and WS-* specifications, including explanations of how they interrelate and how they are positioned within SOA The use of "In Plain English" sections, which describe complex concepts through non-technical analogies Guidelines for service-oriented business modeling and the creation of specialized service abstraction layers A study contrasting past architectures with SOA and reviewing current industry influences Project planning and the comparison of different SOA delivery strategies

Bootcamp Inter Access Texel 2006

Last weekend my company organized a boot camp at Texel, a small island above mainland of the Netherlands. Several of my colleague’s and I presented session around a couple of topic like LINQ C# 3.0, Software Factories and SOA. I did a session about stuff I heard at the SOA Conference in Redmond. So I talked about the 3 part model expose/compose/consume and BizTalk as a cornerstone in ESB Microsoft way. Microsoft did actually just release the ESB Toolkit for Microsoft Partners in the Business Process Integration Competency. I must I enjoyed this boot camp together with my colleague’s and I learned alot. Also doing a session about SOA, ESB, BizTalk was fun to do.