EII
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EII is the industry acronym for Enterprise Information Integration. It describes the process of using data abstraction to address the data access challenges associated with data heterogeneity and data contextualization. Data is the foundation upon which the "Information Age" and critical components such as the burgeoning Web 2.0 and a future Semantic Web are being built. Uniform data access and uniform information representation are critical aspects of this journey.
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Data Access Challenges
Data takes many forms within an enterprise, but it is safe to identify the following forms as most dominant:
- SQL - as result of the prominence of Relational Databases in modern business applications
- Non SQL Data - most dominant in legacy mainframe environments with a variety of proprietary storage, indexing, and data access methods.
Irrespective of data form, the issue of data access is pivotal en route to producing Information; hence the emergence of standardized Data Access APIs such as ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB, and more recently ADO.NET.
Standardization of Data Access APIs and the emergence of XML as a universal representation format, collectively provide a foundation for Information creation, persistence, and dissemination. It is this capability expressed via a software offering that describes an EII product.
EII Product Characteristics
An EII product offers virtualization of heterogeneous data where data takes the form of SQL, XML, Data-returning Web services, and other URI-referencable resources. Such SQL data is typically accessible via ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, OLE DB. XML is generally URI based, and is thus accessible via WebDAV.
EII, Virtual Database, and Universal Server products are more alike than different. In all cases, they provide single -- homogenous -- data representations and/or access points (SQL, ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, XML, or Web Services) for disparate data sources. For instance, a single JDBC or ODBC or XML resource URI could provide access to data in several relational database tables, each associated with a different database engine, from a different database vendor, and associated with a myriad of enterprise applications.
EII products enable loose coupling between homogenous-data consuming client applications and services and heterogeneous-data stores. Such client applications and services include Desktop Productivity Tools (Spreadsheets, Word processors, Presentation Software, etc.), Development Environments and Frameworks (J2EE, .NET, Mono, SOAP or RESTian Web services, etc.), Business Intelligence, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) software, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Process Management (BPM and/or BPEL) Software, Web Content Management
EII Utilization Mechanics
The steps that follow are common across all EII product offerings. Naturally, the implementation specifics will differ on a per vendor basis.
- Determine shape and form of information to be processed
- Identify associated data sources
- Create EII product references (data source linking process) for respective data sources
- Process information - for instance via a discrete or composite Web Service, Dynamic HTML/XHTML/XML Web Page, XML transformation (e.g RSS/Atom/RDF feed) etc.
EII Solutions Vendors
- Composite Software (http://www.compositesw.com/)
- IBM DB2 Information Integrator (http://www.ibm.com/software/data/eip/) from IBM
- Virtuoso Universal Server from OpenLink Software (http://www.openlinksw.com)
- Metamatrix (http://www.metamatrix.com/products/overview.html)
- Avaki (http://www.avaki.com)/Sybase (http://www.sybase.com)
Related Technologies
- Data access
- Data storage formats
- Universal Server
- Virtual Database
- Web 2.0
- Web Services
- Metadata Repository