The major difference between yours, AW, and mine approach is that you (it looks like) believe that data stored in the database has any sense on its own. This was and is very popular opinion until we have moved business logic and busienss data meaning into the ... objects/components/services. I belive that the data becomes the business data ONLY as the result of business interpretation performed by objects/components/services in particular business executions context.
This is why I am saying that the business service does n ot care where data comes from and how it is stored whiles offered data can fit into business data meta-model owned by the service. I am ready to recognise business aspect of a data service only if this service performs a business data transformation or aggregation, which some other services may need and nobody else doing this work. The service exists without actual data because its meaning is a business functionality; service knows the meta-data only. This is the core nature of the function - if it counts money and I send it the post-code of my grandmother, the function must count it as money. With this respect, the importance of data services is very high, but it is still outside of business realm. The same data field called 'price' may be interpreted as 'cost' or as 'fee' by different business services depending on their needs. - Michael ________________________________ From: A W <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2009 3:10:32 AM Subject: Re: [service-orientated-architecture] Joe on Microsoft's combination of SOA & Storage Sorry I hit the send button by mistake without completing my post. Here you go: Let's consider an order service. The order service has add order, update order, ..etc. These are business services orchestrated together to build the order business process or service. Each service require data service from the underlying database. It is business service, although it could be considered as an infrastructure service too. I consider it a business service because without it, the service has no meaning. it is a transformation. Let me go back to your comment which i think you referred to Information as a service pattern. Information as a Service that makes information usable in an SOA by expanding the business value of data. it is applicable when an enterprise: has too much information but is not sure of its business relevance, stores multiple versions of information, making it difficult to determine which information source to use,does not rigorously enforce data quality in its store(s) of information and maintains disconnected silos of information that may duplicate each other or contain different sets of data that cannot be reconciled. The crux of this scenario is the virtualization and centralization of information to create a set of consistent, reliable data. That virtual single version of data can then be made available as a service to the entire SOA system, which can use it in a standardized way for business process enablement. Thanks to Tilak Mitra, Senior Certified Executive IT Architect in IBM. All the best Ashraf Galal On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 6:43 PM, Michael Poulin <m3pou...@yahoo. com> wrote: Following AW's line of logic and considering data access functionality, let me ask: why data access functionality must be service-based (while data IS important for services)? Some time ago we discussed Data Services. My 'take away' from that discussion was that entities performing just CRUD are not services; Data Service appears when it adds something that is not available from the data resource itself, i.e. accumulation of data, aggregating of data from different data feeds, data transformation, and so on. That is, Data Service has to add some functionality on the top of data source driver. If this functionality is based on business requirements (e.g. an aggregation performed according to special business combinations of data), the Data Service may become a business service, if it is just a data transformation - it is an infrastructural utility service. I hope, this explanation better shows what I mean... - Michael ________________________________ From: A W <ashra...@gmail. com> To: service-orientated- architecture@ yahoogroups. com Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 6:10:57 PM Subject: Re: [service-orientated -architecture] Joe on Microsoft's combination of SOA & Storage A new service-oriented application exposes business behaviour as a service and also reuses business logic, which is exposed as a service. We need to know how to provision the services as soon as they are created. The identification and realization of services are the first steps in implementing the vision of a set of optimized business processes. Services can be identified essentially from three main sources : * Existing assets -- Services that are identified from high-value business functions already deployed in existing systems (for example, legacy application) * External service provider -- Services that are provided by an external vendor, most likely a vendor who provides services in a specific area. * New services identified using a "top-down" approach -- Services that are identified through a top-down decomposition technique; that is, process decomposition (These services fill the gaps that are not addressed by the first two sources; they are new services that need to be implemented from scratch. All of these services need data in some way. We cannot consider SOA from a business view only. Any business service has to be realized and supported by some technology. The data store is one of the important aspects of SOA. But from business view, I do agree that data store is not important from such view, but this doesn’t mean that data must be out of SOA scope. it is very important from the other different views. All the best Ashraf Galal On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 4:46 AM, Michael Poulin <m3pou...@yahoo. com> wrote: What is service oriented in "In addition, data management is increasingly being seen in a service-oriented context, as “data services” are delivered to end-user business units."? Isn't this just a data store driver-on- RPC? The statement "Microsoft has combined its data storage and Web services business units into a single group" has confirmed that MS is looking for data storage driver-on-WebServic es, like before there were solutions based on CORBA. Interestingly enough to note that association of Web Services and SOA contradicts Microsoft own's Oslo, at least, their Business Capability Model, IMO. "SOA is moving closer to ... enterprise data management" may be interpreted in, at least, two ways - as data access channel - remote driver - and as meta-data management, which is very much important to the service definitions and executions. I still think that data storage should be outside of SOA scope: business services do not care where data comes from whilst the data is of good quality. - Michael ________________________________ From: Gervas Douglas <gervas.douglas@ gmail.com> To: service-orientated- architecture@ yahoogroups. com Sent: Sunday, April 5, 2009 11:11:00 PM Subject: [service-orientated -architecture] Joe on Microsoft's combination of SOA & Storage <<Storage and SOA? That seems like an odd marriage, like combining “American Idol” with “Masterpiece Theater” into one show. Or “24″ and “Monk.” Or “Monk” and “House.” Or SOA and Chuck Norris. I could go on… According to this report by Software Development Times’ David Worthington, Microsoft has combined its data storage and Web services business units into a single group, called the Business Platform Division. The new division is comprised of Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division and Data and Storage Platforms Division. Products under this wing include Windows Application Server, BizTalk Server, .NET Framework technologies including Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation, .NET cloud services, and the Oslo modeling platform. Of course, the company says the combined group will create “greater synergies.” For anyone worried about Microsoft’s commitment to Web services and SOA, the vendor does offer these reassuring words: “We will continue to deliver technologies that enable customers to extend the significant benefits they are achieving with ‘real-world’ SOA,” according to said Darrell Cavens, director of product management in the Enterprise Application Platform team at Microsoft. Should we worry? Storage and SOA seem like an odd combination. Worthington’s article suggests that the realignment is due to economic conditions. But I think another factor is at work here. That is, SOA is moving closer to both enterprise data management and cloud computing. Storage — the ability to store, archive, and manage large volumes of data — is a pain point for many enterprises these days, to which the cloud model offers a compelling source of relief. Such capabilities are being offered as services, both from external providers and potentially internally, from other parts of the enterprise. The whole concept of SANs (storage area networks) advances the concept that any and all devices are pooled as a gigantic disk. In addition, data management is increasingly being seen in a service-oriented context, as “data services” are delivered to end-user business units. So, I don’t think Microsoft is retrenching or cutting back SOA to save money — rather, I think the vendor sees more opportunity in the cloud, with the growing service-orientation of data management — with SOA as the enabler.>> You can find Joe's blog at: http://blogs. zdnet.com/ service-oriented /?p=1805 Gervas
