In almost every significant SOA deployment, a few services have advanced
requirements that force those services to intelligently manage the data that
they use. A fault-tolerant service might be deployed on a cluster of
machines, which means that the instances of the service must share data
across several machines.
A high-performance service might use in-memory caching to achieve fast
response time. An aggregation service might retrieve or update data from
multiple sources, transform that data into a standard representation, and
integrate the resulting data in real-time. For these kinds of services, the
data management infrastructure can significantly reduce development effort
and deployment risks.
In a SOA, services act as the building blocks for implementing business
processes. Each service, hereafter called a functional service, offers a set
of operations. The i... (more)