SOA Begins at the Data Layer
By David S. Linthicum
July 1, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Those who build SOAs have one thing in common—the use of services to create an architecture that’s both agile and better supports reuse. While services are a key component to SOA, the “A” in SOA stands for “Architecture,” and that’s where you need to begin...working from the data up to the services.
Think of SOA in layers, as with most architecture. Typically, at the lowest level you have information, either existing in databases or enterprise applications. The services sit on top of the data, both as transactional services that are more behavior-oriented and as data services that are more data-oriented. From there you move up into messaging (ESB, for instance, and it’s optional), and perhaps a process/orchestration layer for forming and reforming the services into true business solutions. Of course, you have to keep track of the services using registries and repositories (SOA governance really), and security systems to ensure that no bad or dumb people access your services.
So, given that SOA is so complex, why focus on the data first? It’s really about building the right foundations for your architecture, and data is the place to start. Indeed, as we build SOAs, the first step is having a clear, semantic understanding of the problem domain, and then dealing with logical abstraction of the data, and how the data exists within services. Let’s start from the beginning.
Having a semantic understanding of your problem domain means that you know information about all of the information aggregated and abstracted within your SOA, including what, where, why, who, how and validation. This, in essence, becomes the SOA metadata layer that allows you to mix and match the right data within the right services to make sure you have all of the services exposed to solve any potential business problems, now and into the future. This means that all databases and enterprise applications must be understood at the semantic levels, including their interfaces, security issues and anything else that matters to other entities that are consuming the information.
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