Business Intelligence (BI) and Service Orientation (SO) are two architectural paradigms that have been developed independently.
In the Architecture Journal 6:
There is a complete article about this new concept, which draw my attention since one my BI colleague mention it.
So what is about; well BI and SOA together. That’s thought did not cross my mind before. Currently I am working at Inter Access in a business-unit Microsoft & BI Solutions. I am working in the BizTalk, SOA, EAI space and doing interesting jobs/projects around it. Brainstorming with my colleague about this SOBI (BI with SO) concept is challenging. One important thing about SOBI is message size and frequency. When to use ETL or Services.
The picture below, taken from the article says it all in my opinion and experience. Large messages, low volume (frequency) use ETL tool like (since I am a Microsoft guy) SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) a component of SQL Server 2005.
Message size versus message volume
While with small message sizes and high volume one can make use of services. During a recent BizTalk solution I architected and implemented I used the same lets say rule of thumb. In a flex worker company in Holland a solution was needed to integrate applications together among these applications where data warehouses. So using BizTalk to extract data and load to a warehouse one a week was not a good idea, but using SSIS is. In this case I was confronted with BI and bulk data. Looking at this article about the two paradigms together it’s nice to see that in real life these two come together. I will be studying some more on this article and will have a discussion about with my BI colleague soon. I will get back on this subject later…..
