In any industry, in any region organizations are powered by information — to understand the business and make decisions, to serve customers, partners or employees, or to support business processes and applications. Data is at the core of all business activity. But, organizations across the globe are faced with the problem of accessing the data easily, consistently and securely. Data is everywhere — with an increasing growth rate, with diverse types of data sources, many often in proprietary formats, and with it being decentralized due to on-going mergers and acquisitions, technology limitations or organizational structures. Likewise, data management is difficult when there are numerous, different consumers of the data such as people processes and applications, coupled with demanding requirements such as real-time information that can be readily acted upon and is secure. So, how does an organization get live information they need? Delivering data as a service through Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is a best path to getting there.

SOA brings a fundamental change to the need and value of data although it does not necessarily hide or resolve the data management issues. Instead, organizations need a better way to work with enterprise data regardless of where it resides and what type of data format it's in. The answer is data services and a data services layer. A data services layer provides data mediation or abstraction between the different consumers of the data and the diverse data sources. It not only insulates against impacts to underlying sources but also provides a common API for all application development and maintenance. Data services are virtual, aggregated views of the data, leveraged from sources across the enterprise — simplifying data access and updates and, once created, reusable again and again. As such, data services are an essential component to an SOA and service infrastructure.

AquaLogic Data Services Platform is the industry leading data services platform that delivers live, integrated and reusable information as a service, where you need it and regardless of where it resides. It offers a unique metadata-driven approach, called declarative programming. This approach helps eliminate the need for application developers to build workflows or code Java by hand, making it possible to automate data service creation and maintenance. It helps customers achieve faster time-to-value, reduced TCO and greater business agility.

To help IT departments make an efficient transition to SOA, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform provides the foundation for a strategic information data services layer to access, update, and maintain heterogeneous, distributed, and real-time data.

The foundation for SOA

BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform has been engineered from the start to address the requirements for data services within an SOA. It offers automation for both read and write services, optimized composition of databases, Web services and other sources, modeling and metadata management for data services, and policy-driven security and caching. Furthermore, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform offers fast path integration with BEA AquaLogic Service Bus. In the past, these products communicated via standard Web services. Now, there is a native custom transport to invoke data services directly for enhanced performance and better security. Each of these features is critical to building and maintaining an enterprise-ready data services layer.

Metadata-driven approach

Declarative programming lets data service architects and developers define which services they want and what data and services they are based on; then BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform figures out the best algorithms for providing the desired services. It chooses the appropriate ordering of data source accesses, orchestrating the underlying service calls and, in the case of relational database sources, generates a set of appropriate SQL queries. It supports a rich set of algorithms for creating efficient SQL queries that delegate as much query processing to the underlying relational database sources for overall system performance.

Flexible and rich tooling

In a SOA environment, a data model must be flexible so that it can represent any complex entity and rich enough to provide information about data structure, relationships and about services to read or update. BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform provides all the tools to easily create model diagrams using simple drag-drop interactions. Data services are illustrated in model diagrams and can easily be shared with others in the enterprise for greater data consistency and reuse.

Mappings and transformations can be defined in a GUI tool with a library of over 200 functions. For complex mappings and transformations, architects and developers can bypass the GUI tool and use an XQuery source code editor to define or edit services. The editor provides real-time feedback about the correctness of the query, as well as usability-enhancing features.

BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform enables organizations to create virtual, aggregated views of data coming from distributed, diverse data sources.

Bilingual engine: SQL or XQuery?

BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform provides data services to numerous different clients or consumers of the data through a variety of interfaces to meet the needs of the organization. It can fluently speak both XQuery and SQL — there is no translator needed, enhancing overall performance and providing a greater return on investment by enabling more clients to consume data services. With XQuery, this means that BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform provides a flexible query facility to retrieve, transform and aggregate data into XML documents. It provides data service architect with extreme flexibility to meet SOA needs by querying diverse data sources including structured and semi-structured sources, relational sources, and Web services. With SQL, it means that BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform provides a virtual relational database interface to those applications via JDBC or ODBC. It augments BI and reporting tools with current, transactional data from both relational and non-relational sources. BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform not only provides connectivity to BI reporting tools but also is certified with the industry leading vendors.

Live data to the business user with Microsoft® Excel

Microsoft Excel has long been the de facto application for manipulating, analyzing and reporting data using spreadsheets. Traditional data integration into Excel occurred by hand entry, importing data from another file or writing an intermediate program such as Visual Basic or a macro to pull data from another source. BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform offers an Excel Add-in so that organizations can deliver real-time data regardless of where it is stored to the business user when they need it to do their job, not only alleviating the large amount of time and high cost of traditional data integration projects that heavily rely on IT, but also increasing user productivity.

Never met a data source we didn't like

BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform easily works with an organization's complex IT environment. It provides access to a range of data sources including relational sources such as Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, Informix, and DB2 or packaged applications such as Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP and Siebel, custom applications, files, Web services and XML-based sources.

No sacrifice on security

SOA breaks the tight binding between applications and data; applications will no longer care or know about the underlying source. Likewise with SOA, data will be consumed in many more and different ways than in the past. As a result, providing robust security over the data is paramount.

BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform provides both coarse-grained and fine-grained security. For example, for coarse-grain, it can protect resources such as data service functions (such as read, navigate or submit functions) and for fine-grain architects and application developers can specify what elements within the data service need to be protected or redacted based on security policies (such as creditapproval would be allowed to get all customer data including social security number but all roles outside would not be able to view social security number).

BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform also supports data-driven security where access control policies are based on specific values of the data elements of a data service (such as users who were granted role of premiumsales should be allowed to see customer orders greater than 10,000; the role of sales would only be granted access to those orders under 10,000).

Unparalleled transaction management

While some applications or processes only need to read or access the data, others may require updates or writes to the distributed, original sources. For the latter, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform, provides a number of automated services to handle updates to data sources. This includes auto-generated SQL update statements, concurrency management to ensure proper data integrity, and transactional updates to XA-compliant data sources, including two-phase commit.

BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform can help organizations quickly benefit from enterprise-wide data services through faster time-to-value, business agility, and reduced cost and complexity.

Faster time-to-value

Using BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform, SOA architects and developers can rapidly develop and deploy a data services layer. It's capability to quickly discover, create and reuse existing data services directly impacts project times from months to weeks or days.

Improve business agility

The BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform helps turn complex data inside existing IT systems into real-time actionable information. It facilitates higher levels of data consistency across applications and responsiveness to changing business demands and requirements.

Reduce cost and complexity

BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform helps lower overall development and maintenance costs by simplifying data management. It enables architects and application developers to create data services that are reusable and relevant to multiple service consumers. Applications need only access a single, unified data services layer to retrieve and update data from multiple back-end data sources.