Data Integration: Opportunities, Challenges, and MapForce

Data Integration Solutions:

The ability to seamlessly connect with customers, partners, and co-workers is vital for success; yet most enterprises store and exchange data in dissimilar formats, such as databases, EDI systems, text files, and, increasingly, XML-based applications. The ability to map between these different formats is mission-critical, and Altova MapForce 2005 offers a unique and powerful approach to easing the pain of systems integration. MapForce 2005 provides an easy-to-use interface for mapping any combination of XML, database, flat file, and EDI data. And, it auto-generates mapping code in XSLT 1.0, XSLT 2.0, XQuery, Java, C++, or C# for use in custom data integration applications.

Data is king For EDI and Data Integration Solutions:

Standing behind the explosion in e-commerce are open, standards-based technologies such as XML, which promise to unify enterprise data and enable advanced Web services and Services Oriented Architectures (SOA). However, Data Integration Solutions and the majority of existing enterprise data is stored in business applications and database systems, which are generally neither standards-based nor readily extensible. In addition, many large enterprises employ Electronic Data Interchange Solutions (EDI) systems for exchanging business information with partners. Though these systems have proven extremely effective and enjoy wide spread use, they are often not interoperable with other systems, are complicated to develop and deploy, and may not allow real-time transactions.

The challenge is to integrate data from these various sources in a standards-based, cost effective solution that can take a company securely into the future.

To achieve effective data integration, today's businesses require applications that can access core business systems through scaleable, tool-generated code that facilitates information re-usability and interchange. The ability to efficiently map data from disparate types of data formats is necessary for a truly unified view of corporate data and Data Integration Solutions; however, the process is often time consuming and cost prohibitive.

Altova MapForce 2005 offers a unique and powerful approach to easing the pain of systems integration and enabling value-adding enterprise data services.

Data Integration Solutions With Integrating Multiple Data Formats:

There are various formats for storing and exchanging data in use today, the most widely used being relational databases, flat files, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and, increasingly, XML.

Today, Data Integration Solutions dominant storage mechanism for structured enterprise data is the relational database, which has proven itself an efficient tool for storing, searching for, and retrieving information from massive collections of data. Relational databases specialize in relating individual data records grouped by type in tables. Developers can join records together as needed using SQL (Structured Query Language) and present one or more records to end users as meaningful information.

The relational database model revolutionized enterprise data storage with its simplicity, efficiency, and cost effectiveness. Relational databases have been prevalent in large corporations since the 1980s, and they will likely remain the dominant storage mechanism for enterprise data in the foreseeable future.

Despite these strengths, relational databases lack the flexibility to seamlessly integrate with other systems, since this was not historically a requirement of the database model. In addition, although relational databases share many similarities, there are enough differences between the major commercial implementations to make developing applications to integrate multiple products difficult. Among the challenges are differences in data types, varying levels of conformance to the SQL standard, proprietary extensions to SQL, and so on.

Integrated data solutions with programmatic access to relational databases is achieved through both standard and proprietary binary protocols and system APIs including ODBC, JDBC, Net8, ADO, and others. Although some implementations are highly efficient, and many companies have made efforts to adapt to database vendors' different implementations of the most common standard, ODBC, substantial complexity remains when it comes to connectivity.

Beyond merely simple (Data Integration Solutions) connecting applications to data sources, integration issues become even more problematic. Different enterprise applications store data in different ways. Names of tables and fields differ. Formats of identical data items are incompatible. Relationships between records are organized to meet completely different requirements.