Reports in SOA (Business Intelligence & Service Oriented Architecture)

Question

I have SOA with a Employee service and a Travel Service. The travel service will create a travelID entry for the employeeId in the [Travel] database. The employee will be u

Answer 1

I don't think your design is wrong. Your architecture just seems to be missing a data mart or warehouse or some sort of way to support business intelligence in addition to transaction processing.

BI in SOA is a complex topic and it's impossible to give advice without knowing some details about your architecture. But here are some articles to get you started:

• http://www.infoq.com/articles/BI-and-SOA
• http://blogs.informatica.com/perspectives/index.php/2008/09/30/how-soa-enhances-data-warehousing-and-business-intelligence/

Have you considered ESB for your SOA? It could make integrating a data mart easier into your SOA. See this article: http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/3018

One of the potential users of an ESB is a data integration service. In fact, several vendors have modified their data integration and ETL (extract, transform and load) tools to be event-driven so that they can consume event messages from an ESB. These events can carry information about source data changes, which can be used by the data integration service to incrementally update an operational data store (ODS) or data warehouse. This approach is particularly useful for operational BI applications that require intra-day data.