Data Access discussed at Xcalia

Following the acquisition of Xcalia by Progress Software and its integration within DataDirect I will not maintain this blog any longer, starting today.

But the story is not finished, Data Services are very trendy these days, so the whole blog and its content has been moved to www.dataservices-connection.com and I will now post new articles over there.

See you there, then.

www.dataservices-connection.com

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/10/GDS-110-release.

See also: http://www.graniteds.org and Documentation.

WSO2 recently introduce its new version of Data Services. The big new improvment is the ability to aggregate data from multiple databases.

See http://www.ebizq.net/news/10368.html and http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=2741.

My personal opinion is that this tool is just useful to publish few stored procedures or queries over SOAP / REST. The limitations are important:

• Only supports relational DBMS.
• Integration model is quite limited (see their examples).
  • No intermediate, neutral business model in the middle.
  • No optimizations possible.
• Administrator have to manually create the query, then deploy the data services, this simply does not scale.
• There is no API at the client-side to smartly manage the results of the data services calls.

Curiously, they don’t say anything about updates and transactions.

See discussion here: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=51002.

Anyway, it is good to have an open source entry-level product in our Data Services market.

Seen this article by Jean-Jacques Dubray on InfoQ, related to this other article by Arnon Rotem who explains why Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is a bad idea:

• It circumvents the whole idea about “Services” - there’s no business logic
• It makes for CRUD resources/services
• It is exposing internal database structure or data rather than a thought-out contract
• It encourages bypassing real services and going straight to their data
• It creates a blob service (the data source)
• It encourages minuscule half-services (the multiple “interfaces” of said blob) that disregard few of the fallacies of distributed computing
• It is just client-server in sheep’s clothing

To me, DBaaS is just a new way to access a database and it is far from Data Services (which are all about data integration, mapping, persistence & SOA). The most interesting benefits of a DBaaS are to offer a DB that you won’t administrate. Conversely, it also raises some questions in terms of scalability and confidentiality.

A good introduction to Data Services by John Goodson, VP and GM of DataDirect, as part of the last Data Services World event, last June in NY.

Yet another ODBMS: NeoDatis.

I have no time to review its features, but it is so funny to see all these new ODBMS.