Friday, May 25, 2007

On New Thinking in Service-Oriented Business Intelligence

Today one of my clients was kind enough to call my attention to an excellent article published last month by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz, which briefly reviews SOA and BI (ETL, specifically), considers the challenges in trying to resolve a service-oriented business intelligence (SoBI) architecture (network bandwidth costs from polling a service), and, positions the push model of event-driven architecture (EDA) as a way to overcome said challenges. The article is definitely worth the read, particularly as challenges (there's that word again) to conventional thinking on ETL emerge in increasingly service-oriented environments.

- Adrian Downes

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Adrian,

Have you thought about using SQL Server 2005 Service Broker in place of traditional SoA solutions? In a former life I implemented an "atomic" level ETL system used in our real-time BI platform that used the Service Broker services and queues to achieve this. The is still humming along to this day. I will try to post something on my blog in the coming weeks that describes it.

Adrian Downes said...

Hi Dan,

Apologies for the delayed response.

To my mind, Service Broker would be well suited for some atomic tasks in the ETL chain, but, I would be interested to see the use-case for handling SCD logic (Type 2 or 3) as well as how well it would really perform under heavy /high volume loads or highly volatile environments. Having said that, I'm looking forward to reading your ideas in this respect!

Cheers,

AD