SOA


"The XQuery language has become an integral technology for connecting heterogeneous data sources within service-oriented solutions. It's a natural fit for the typical XML data interchange format used in most SOA implementations and it provides powerful, cross-repository data access features without compromising scalability or performance." (Excerpt from "SOA and the Importance of XQuery" by Dr. Carlo Innocenti)

SOA Data Management

The following "Top Tips for Simplifying Data Management in SOA," by Dr. Carlo Innocenti explain how the XQuery feature-set can be leveraged in support of SOA:

  1. XQuery and XML can be used effectively to provide an abstraction layer between the multitude of different data sources IT organizations need to deal with and the variety of client applications that needs to be built.
  2. While Data Integration Suite allows application developers to ignore the physical details of the data sources being accessed, scalability and performance are preserved.
  3. Data Integration Suite is able to provide fast and scalable access to relational data stores, very large XML documents, Web services and EDI or flat files thanks to its ability to deal with each data source in a dedicated and highly optimized manner.
  4. As most SOA implementation rely heavily on XML (just think about Web services based on WSDL/SOAP or REST interfaces), XQuery is a natural language to access and provide SOA endpoints.
  5. Data Integration Suite provides the ability out of the box to consume Web services and to expose XQueries developed by users as WSDL/SOAP or REST based Web services without any additional coding and in the context of a variety of application servers.

Additional Resources