David S. Linthicum: Roles Shift in SOA World
By David S. Linthicum
December 1, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Lately, a number of debates have erupted around who does what when it comes to building and operating a SOA. It’s a turf battle really. For instance, who controls the data services? The database administrator (DBA) or the developers? Who controls SOA security? Who controls services management? You get the idea.
Truth-be-told, traditional IT roles and responsibilities can be turned on their head when one takes into account the special needs of SOA. Consider these facts:
• SOAs are widely distributed.
• SOAs are loosely coupled.
• SOAs deal with things that are autonomous.
• SOAs deal with IT assets you may not own or control.
• SOAs deal with abstracted data.
So, while the demarcation lines were easy to draw, today they are not that cut and dried, and indeed may not be functional in the world of SOA. For the best analysis of the changing nature of roles and responsibilities, let’s break SOA up into five categories: Data, Service, Process, Policy and Security.
Data
DBAs have clear responsibility within the traditional enterprise: the database. However, within the world of SOAs, many databases are abstracted into virtual databases that exist only in middleware, re-representing the source physical schema as something that’s much more logical to the SOA. So, does the DBA control the abstraction layer as well?
Moreover, we have the notion of data services, or the externalization of data, bound to behavior, delivered as a true service. Since you interact with the database, does the DBA control that? Or, perhaps the developers who built those services?
While best practices are emerging, it does seem logical that the person or persons who maintain the database also maintain the database interfaces as well, with data abstraction being one of those things. Data abstraction is, in essence, a schema configuration layer between the physical database and the service. However, things do get a bit cloudy when it comes to data services. Typically, developers have built them, and thus could be the best people to maintain them…hopefully working with the DBA. Of course, many DBAs are claiming control of data services.
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