[Podcast] How does Extract, Transform, Load fit with SOA?

Ask Udi Podcast – Udi Dahan – The Software Simplist

This week’s question comes from Jayan, who asks:

Hi Udi,

I just went through your Blog which talks about not creating entity services, but instead creating a business service. I understood why you would want it to be a business service, although I am still struggling to fully define what a business service is.

Currently what we have requested is to have a single service, extract, transform and load master data. From your explanations it seems like this is a business service and not just an entity one. What one of the sales guys from an SOA company is saying that this is very possible and would be easy to do.. What I wanted to get your perspective is if this is the right thing to do. What we requested is below:

1. To create a business service that will extract, transform and load data (One service for user, one for customer and one for product?)
2. This service will then be called by the different applications we have (3 Java applications, 1 .Net Application and 1 Siebel Application as well as a host of VB/Excel Applications)
3. The service will be calling on different backend sources for data from SAP systems, Access DBs, Excel Files, Web Pages & Oracle Systems

They say that creating this would produce a.) a reusable service and b.) cost savings. Although I am still apprehensive because it seems as you mentioned in your podcast, each system would have slightly different set of rules for the data entity (and btw you are right).. would this still matter? The thing we want to eliminate is the replication of extracting and loading, although each system would transform the data in its own specific way..

Appreciate any perspective that you might have.

Thanks,

Jayan

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Additional References

Podcast on Master Data Management and SOA
Podcast on Business and Autonomous Components in SOA