1. BEA AquaLogic™
Data Services Platform
The Live Data Engine Powering the Service-Driven Enterprise
Executive overview
In any industry, in any region organizations are powered
by information—to understand the business and
make decisions, to serve customers, partners or
employees, or to support business processes and
applications. Data is at the core of all business activity.
But, organizations across the globe are faced with
the problem of accessing the data easily, consistently,
and securely. Data is everywhere—with an increasing
growth rate, with diverse types of data sources, many
often in proprietary formats, and with it being decen-
tralized due to ongoing mergers and acquisitions,
technology limitations or organizational structures.
Likewise, data management is difficult when there
are numerous, different consumers of the data such
as people processes and applications, coupled
with demanding requirements such as real-time
information that can be readily acted upon and is
secure. So, how does an organization get live
information they need? Delivering data as a service
through Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is
a best path to getting there.
SOA brings a fundamental change to the need and
value of data although it does not necessarily hide
or resolve the data management issues. Instead,
organizations need a better way to work with
enterprise data regardless of where it resides and
what type of data format it's in. The answer is data
services and a data services layer. A data services
layer provides data mediation or abstraction between
the different consumers of the data and the diverse
data sources. It not only insulates against impacts to
underlying sources but also provides a common API
for all application development and maintenance.
Data services are virtual, aggregated views of the data,
leveraged from sources across the enterprise—
simplifying data access and updates and, once
created, reusable again and again. As such, data
services are an essential component to an SOA
and service infrastructure.
AquaLogic Data Services Platform is the industry
leading data services platform that delivers live,
integrated and reusable information as a service,
where you need it and regardless of where it resides.
Product Data Sheet
Enable a business-friendly, unified view of enterprise data pulled from any source across
the organization. BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform allows data services to function
as a single access point for consistent, actionable and reusable information-for faster
time-to-value, reduced total cost of ownership and greater business agility.
2. It offers a unique metadata-driven approach, called
declarative programming. This approach helps
eliminate the need for application developers to build
workflows or code Java by hand, making it possible
to automate data service creation and maintenance.
It helps customers achieve faster time-to-value,
reduced TCO and greater business agility.
The foundation for SOA
BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform has been
engineered from the start to address the require-
ments for data services within an SOA. It offers
automation for both read and write services, optimized
composition of databases, Web services and other
sources, modeling and metadata management for
data services, and policy-driven security and caching.
Furthermore, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform
offers fast path integration with BEA AquaLogic
Service Bus. In the past, these products communi-
cated via standard Web services. Now, there is a
native custom transport to invoke data services
directly for enhanced performance and better security.
Each of these features is critical to building and
maintaining an enterprise-ready data services layer.
Metadata-driven approach
Declarative programming lets data service architects
and developers define which services they want and
what data and services they are based on; then BEA
AquaLogic Data Services Platform figures out the
best algorithms for providing the desired services.
It chooses the appropriate ordering of data source
accesses, orchestrating the underlying service calls
and, in the case of relational database sources,
generates a set of appropriate SQL queries. It
supports a rich set of algorithms for creating efficient
SQL queries that delegate as much query
processing to the underlying relational database
sources for overall system performance.
Flexible and rich tooling
In a SOA environment, a data model must be flexible
so that it can represent any complex entity and rich
enough to provide information about data structure,
relationships and about services to read or update.
BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform provides all
the tools to easily create model diagrams using
simple drag-and-drop interactions. Data services are
illustrated in model diagrams and can easily be
shared with others in the enterprise for greater data
consistency and reuse.
Product Data Sheet BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform
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Service Infrastructure
Application Infrastructure
To help IT departments make
an efficient transition to SOA,
BEA AquaLogic Data Services
Platform provides the foundation
for a strategic information data
services layer to access, update,
and maintain heterogeneous,
distributed, and real-time data.
Enterprise Data Services Layer
IT Landscape
Executive
Dashboard
Customer
Portal
HR Data
Promotions
Database
Order
Entry
Product
Catalogs
Syndicated,
Third-party
Data
Expence
Reporting
Research &
Intelligence
External
Data Sources
MRP Purchasing Pricing
Sales
Forecasts
Support
Bill
Payment
BPM ESB B2C Portal
3. Mappings and transformations can be defined in a
GUI tool with a library of over 200 functions. For
complex mappings and transformations, architects
and developers can bypass the GUI tool and use an
XQuery source code editor to define or edit services.
The editor provides real-time feedback about the
correctness of the query, as well as usability-
enhancing features.
Bilingual engine: SQL or XQuery?
BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform provides
data services to numerous different clients or con-
sumers of the data through a variety of interfaces to
meet the needs of the organization. It can fluently
speak both XQuery and SQL—there is no translator
needed, enhancing overall performance and providing
a greater return on investment by enabling more
clients to consume data services. With XQuery, this
means that BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform
provides a flexible query facility to retrieve, transform
and aggregate data into XML documents. It provides
data service architect with extreme flexibility to meet
SOA needs by querying diverse data sources
including structured and semi-structured sources,
relational sources, and Web services. With SQL, it
means that BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform
provides a virtual relational database interface to
those applications via JDBC or ODBC.
It augments BI and reporting tools with current,
transactional data from both relational and non-
relational sources. BEA AquaLogic Data Services
Platform not only provides connectivity to BI
reporting tools but also is certified with the industry
leading vendors.
Live data to the business user with Microsoft®
Excel
Microsoft Excel has long been the de facto application
for manipulating, analyzing and reporting data using
spreadsheets. Traditional data integration into Excel
occurred by hand entry, importing data from another
file or writing an intermediate program such as
Visual Basic or a macro to pull data from another
source. BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform
offers an Excel Add-in so that organizations can
deliver real-time data regardless of where it is stored
to the business user when they need it to do their
job, not only alleviating the large amount of time and
high cost of traditional data integration projects that
heavily rely on IT, but also increasing user productivity.
Never met a data source we didn’t like
BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform easily works
with an organization’s complex IT environment. It
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BEA AquaLogic Data Services
Platform enables organizations to
create virtual, aggregated views
of data coming from distributed,
diverse data sources.
4. provides access to a range of data sources
including relational sources such as Oracle, Sybase,
SQL Server, Informix, and DB2 or packaged applica-
tions such as Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP and Siebel,
custom applications, files, Web services and
XML-based sources.
No sacrifice on security
SOA breaks the tight binding between applications
and data; applications will no longer care or know
about the underlying source. Likewise with SOA,
data will be consumed in many more and different
ways than in the past. As a result, providing robust
security over the data is paramount.
BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform provides
both coarse-grained and fine-grained security. For
example, for coarse-grain, it can protect resources
such as data service functions (such as read,
navigate or submit functions) and for fine-grain
architects and application developers can specify
what elements within the data service need to be
protected or redacted based on security policies
(such as credit approval would be allowed to get all
customer data including social security number but
all roles outside would not be able to view social
security number).
BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform also
supports data-driven security where access control
policies are based on specific values of the data
elements of a data service (such as users who were
granted role of premium sales should be allowed to
see customer orders greater than 10,000; the role of
sales would only be granted access to those orders
under 10,000).
Unparalleled transaction management
While some applications or processes only need to
read or access the data, others may require updates
or writes to the distributed, original sources. For the
latter, BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform,
provides a number of automated services to handle
updates to data sources. This includes auto-
generated SQL update statements, concurrency
management to ensure proper data integrity, and
transactional updates to XA-compliant data sources,
including two-phase commit.
BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform can help
organizations quickly benefit from enterprise-wide
data services through faster time-to-value, business
agility, and reduced cost and complexity.
Faster time-to-value
Using BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform,
SOA architects and developers can rapidly develop
and deploy a data services layer. It’s capability to
quickly discover, create, and reuse existing data
services directly impacts project times from months
to weeks or days.
Improve business agility
The BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform helps
turn complex data inside existing IT systems into
real-time actionable information. It facilitates higher
levels of data consistency across applications and
responsiveness to changing business demands
and requirements.
Reduce cost and complexity
BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform helps lower
overall development and maintenance costs by
simplifying data management. It enables architects
and application developers to create data services
that are reusable and relevant to multiple service
consumers. Applications need only access a single,
unified data services layer to retrieve and update
data from multiple back-end data sources.
For more information
Please visit bea.com/dataservices
Product Data Sheet BEA Aqualogic Data Services Platform
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5. Features Benefits
Data services—“What, not how”
Querying, not coding Developers can create data services by writing simple queries against a unified
model, eliminating the need to write code to access, transform, and merge
information from multiple sources. This makes data services faster to write and
easier to maintain, reuse, and extend, without requiring expensive integration
resources or extensive coding.
Data service decomposition Analyzes, composes, and optimizes individual queries and sub-queries such that
the required underlying sources are accessed and only relevant data is returned.
Distributed query optimization Includes a robust distributed query optimizer. Based on data source capabilities,
it delegates as much work to the underlying sources as possible and employs
efficient join techniques. Developers can create efficient data services without
writing complex code.
Data transformation Data architects can map data from underlying sources into desired schemas via
powerful XQuery-based data manipulation and transformation tools. This shields
developers from source complexity, simplifying application development.
Policy-based caching Optimizes system performance by managing the trade-off between response time
and freshness of information, through caching of frequently used data services.
Rapid development and reuse
Data service design Data architects and developers can create unified views and queries rapidly using a
graphical drag-and-drop tool. BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform discovers
metadata from physical sources, reducing overall development time and costs.
Data service reuse Improves IT productivity by enabling creation and reuse of data services across
multiple applications. Developers can publish data services once, and then reuse
them across multiple projects—portals, Web applications, and business processes—
accelerating time-to-value of project delivery.
Data services for SOA Developers can easily publish data services as Web services, allowing business
information can be accessed and reused as services in an SOA. This enables data
delivery for SOA.
Fast path integration with BEA AquaLogic Service Bus provides native transport
between products. Custom service bus transport invokes data services directly using
RMI for better performance and security.
Integrates with BEA AquaLogic and BEA WebLogic products as well as interoperable
with other SOA products including enterprise service buses, service registries,
portals, BPMs, external security providers, etc.
Unified data access Developers can save application development time and costs by rapidly utilizing
data services. Data services provide a single, unified interface to all enterprise data
regardless of where it resides, simplifying application development.
Data service updates Provides a number of automated services to handle updates to data sources. This
includes auto-generated SQL update statements, concurrency management to
ensure proper data integrity, and transactional updates to XA-compliant data sources,
including two-phase commit.
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6. Product Data Sheet BEA Aqualogic Data Services Platform
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Application maintainability Application developers can respond to new business requirements or changes in
IT infrastructure quickly while isolating applications from underlying data sources.
Developers can now change a single data service—as opposed to changing many
lines of code in multiple calling applications—dramatically simplifying application
maintenance.
Data service dependency and Offers visual data lineage graph and tools to conduct impact analysis between a data
impact analysis service and backend data sources for greater visibility without having to inspect code.
BEA BEA WebLogic Workshop®
Developers can create BEA BEA WebLogic®
applications faster with round-trip visual
integration modeling and data service creation.
Enterprise strength
Secure access to information Delivers granular control over information assets by establishing security policies at
the individual source level and at the data services level, providing coarse-grained,
fine-grained and data-driven security.
Unified administration Reduces training and management costs by providing a single, unified administration
console for data services.
Uniform auditing framework Enables consistent auditing of all data service events across all heterogeneous data
sources for greater compliance and control.
Operational monitoring Captures metrics associated with data service and data source executions to be
streamed to databases, log files or the calling client applications for SLA tracking
and management.
Rich connectivity
Back-end connectivity Data services can access tables, views, stored procedures in all major relational
databases.
Data services can invoke Web services and access non-relational data sources such
as legacy enterprise applications, flat files, XML files and dynamic XML messages.
Leverages Web service-based adapters to packaged applications such as those from
SAP, Oracle, and Siebel.
Client connectivity Developers can access data services through alternative client APIs including the
Java/SDO mediator API, Microsoft ADO.NET services, JDBC, Web services, and
BEA WebLogic Workshop controls. This provides developers with choice and
flexibility in how their applications connect to data services.
Excel Add-in Brings live data from distributed, heterogeneous data sources to the business user
through Microsoft®
Excel, alleviating the burden on IT to integrate data while providing
greater office productivity to the user.
Native SQL access Developers can expose data services as SQL objects for access via JDBC interface.
BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform delivers relational data to industry-standard
reporting tools.
Standards
Standards-based Applications can leverage XML, Web services, SQL, JDBC, and J2EE standards.
XQuery Supports querying a broad spectrum of both relational and non-relational information
sources (based on XQuery 1.0).
