Data Services in SOA and WSO2 Data Services Server 2.2.0

Support for large XML outputsData Services are Web Services that encapsulate operations on key data entities of relevance to the enterprise, thus making data integration easy for business processes, mashups, gadgets, BI application and any service in general. According to David Linthicum

Most in the SOA community understand that data services provide controlled interfaces to underlying data, but typically don’t understand the strategic value of data services to the SOA.

He emphasized the fact that those who focus on the notion of a service as delivering functional behavior, neglect the need to manage the underlying data. He tells that

In many cases, data quality and consistency issues quickly arise, and the agility that SOA should provide is limited by the need to alter services directly after the underlying data has changed.

David argues that data services created and leveraged correctly within the context of a SOA, should provide a wide variety of features including data quality assurance, data governance, and, most importantly, the ability to support data abstractions.

Even though there are lot of benefits(David’s opinion is further elaborated by Ash Parikh), getting data service right is not an easy task. You need to consider about the design, implementation, technologies and tools you are going to use for this. You can find several guide lines and best practices in designing and implementing data services from articles “Introduction to Data Services“, “Incorporating Enterprise Data into SOA” and “How To Get Started with Data-Orientation – What Architects Told Me…“.

Even you get the concepts and your designs correct, you must find a tool which allows you to incorporate you design and best practices into the implementation in flexible and easy manner. There are so many tools out there which provide support for developing and deploying data services written following various standards. In this post I am going to introduce you to the WSO2 Data Services Server, which is a award winning product from WSO2.

WSO2’s award winning Data Services solution WSO2 Data Services Server is a data services solution that will help you to achieve your targets in data orientation.

With the recent 2.2 release WSO2 Data Services Server provides some major improvements to it’s industry leading data services solution. Following new features are included in this release.

• Support for large XML outputs – The core engine has been modified to support XML streaming. This has resulted in two notable improvements.
  • Efficient use of server memory – No matter how large the payload is, server memory does not grow propotional to it. The streaming capabilies push data to client side as and when needed
  • Improved response time
• Google Spreadsheets as a data source
• Content filtering based on user roles
• Support for named parameters
• Ability to configure schema type for output elements
• Mixing multiple data source types in nested queries
• Excel 2007 support
• Support for Oracle Ref Cursor – Oracle Ref cursor is a Data type. A variable created using this data type is usually called as a Cursor Variable. Some of the primary advantages of using a ref cursor are,
  • ability to pass resultset between sub programs (eg: functions, stored procedures)
  • dynamic queries
  • efficient memory utilization

For more tutorials on WSO2 Data Services Server visit wso2.org.