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Techniques for Integrating BI Into The Enterprise - Part 3
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This 5 page white paper discusses the key issues with ETL tools today, and how an "E-LT" architecture combined with a "business-rules-driven" approach is better. "E-LT" eliminates the need for dedicated ETL servers, and instead, leverages the power of the target RDBMS engine to perform compute-intensive transformations. "Business-rules-driven" development enables developers to describe end-to-end transformation and data quality rules in terms that are the most intuitive and easiest to maintain. The net result is better developer productivity, better performance and lower costs.
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In my last article I looked at embedding analytics in operational systems which is the second of four popular ways of integrating BI into business processes. These are:
- Integration of analytical applications with operational applications using an enterprise portal for access and exploitation by internal and external users
- Embed analytics in operational applications during application development
- Introduce Web services to dynamically integrate analytical processing with internal and partner operational applications for supporting collaborative commerce
- Deploy event-driven on-demand BI processing for user alerts, real-time recommendations, and automated actions. This approach includes business activity monitoring (BAM).
This month I would like to continue that discussion by investigating the third of these options, BI web services.
What are Web Services?
Web services provide a means of dynamically integrating intra- and inter-enterprise application processing using web technology. They can be used to provide access to business processes, applications, BI cubes, reports, queries and data integration functions, databases etc. Each Web service has an interface that describes operations accessible via standardized XML messages. Web services are described using the industry standard Web Services Description Language (WSDL) which is simply a set of XML tags. In order for people to find out about what web services exist, it is necessary to publish them to a registry which acts as a “yellow pages” of all web services. This registry is called a UDDI registry. Most companies have private internal UDDI registries. There are also external public UDDI registries on the public internet for services that you wish to expose to external portals and applications. In order to dynamically connect to a web service, an application or portal simply queries the UDDI registry, finds the service and then dynamically connects to it by sending it an XML message known as a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) message. This invokes the web services to do something and return an XML response or answer. This is shown in figure 1.
Figure 1 - Dynamic discovery and invocation of BI Web Services
BI web services are things like queries, reports, cubes, ETL workflows and mining models that can all be published as web services and invoke “on-demand”. BI web services can be used at multiple levels. These include:
- Application level BI web services
- Data level BI web services
- Process level BI web services
Application Level BI Web Services
Application level BI web services allow other applications and portlets to dynamically invoke BI tools and analytic applications to request BI on-demand via an industry standard web service interface. For example a request may be to run a query, produce a report, invoke a data mining model or access a cube. The resulting data from executing these services is then rendered in XML and passed back to the calling operational application for display or further processing. BI tools and packaged analytic applications can publish reports, cubes, and mining models as web services and also integrate them directly into a portal as Web Service Remote Portal (WSRP) portlets so that users can gain access to such services directly from a portal user interface. In addition, application level web services allow BI tools and packaged analytic applications to consume XML from other web services including BI web services in the DBMS, unstructured content services, and data integration web services (e.g. EII and ETL web services) that integrate data on-the-fly to provide the data back to a BI tool. Several BI tools (e.g. Business Objects, Oracle Discoverer) already have the ability to access XML data from other services and can incorporate this data into a report for example to enrich the BI they produce. Web services also allow power users and developers to develop custom built BI web services portlets using analytic application development tools and Java or .NET IDE tools. Application level use of BI web services is shown in figure 2.
Figure 2 - Integrating BI into operations – BI platform support for Web Services provides ‘On-Demand’ BI
Several BI platforms have now announced web service interfaces including Business Object, Cognos, and SAS and so this capability is already available. As an example, Figure 3 shows how Cognos’s new web service interface to their BI platform can be exploited to integrate “active” cross-tabs and graphs into the Plumtree Portal Server.
Figure 3 - Portal integration – Cognos Web Services as WSRP portlets
This is made possible because enterprise portals allow portal administrators to integrate remote web services into portals as portlets. Figure 4 shows a screen shot of how a portal administrator using IBM WebSphere Portal Server can do this.
Figure 4 - Integrating Web Services as remote portlets in IBM WebSphere Portal Server
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Oracle #1 in Business Analytics According to IDC Research
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The Business Intelligence Search Engine has all the answers.
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Find all you need on The Business Intelligence Search Engine.
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