Mike Carey

Since the dawn of the database era more than three decades ago, enterprises have been amassing an ever-increasing volume of information - both current and historical - about their operations. For the past two of those three decades, the database world has struggled with the problem of somehow integrating information that natively resides in multiple database systems or other information sources (Landers and Rosenberg). The IT world knows this problem today as the enterprise information integration (EII) problem: enterprise applications need to be able to easily access and combine information about a given business entity from a distributed and highly varied collection of information sources. Relevant sources include various relational database systems (RDBMSs); packaged applications from vendors such as Siebel, PeopleSoft, SAP, and others; "homegrown" proprietary s... (more)

Keep Your Data Flowing

Providing a first-class online user experience can require access to multiple sources of data. The required data often resides in multiple databases, packaged applications, and other information silos. Accessing and relating such data is a key challenge facing modern enterprises. The IT world knows this problem as the enterprise information integration (EII) problem: enterprise applications need to be able to easily access and combine information about a given business entity from a distributed and highly varied collection of information sources. To meet this need, BEA offers Li... (more)

Integrating Enterprise Information on Demand with XQuery - Part 2

In Part I of this article (XML-J, Vol. 4, issue 6), we introduced the enterprise information integration (EII) problem and explained how the XML query language XQuery and related technologies - specifically XML, XML Schema, and Web services - are central to enabling this age-old problem to be successfully addressed at last. We provided a technical overview of the XQuery language and presented a simple "single view of Customer" example to illustrate XQuery's role in the EII domain. The example was based on an electronics retailer that wanted to share customer information across t... (more)

Liquid Data: XQuery-Based Enterprise Information Integration

Modern enterprises are drowning in a sea of information. Despite owning an ever-increasing volume of information, most enterprises cannot exploit it to even a fraction of its full potential. This is because the information is strewn across many systems with diverse data formats and interfaces - systems that are largely unaware of one another and of the relationships their content has with information contained elsewhere. Therein lies the Enterprise Information Integration (EII) problem: enterprises need the ability to easily access information about a given business entity, such... (more)