SOA and Data Warehousing

[DilMustafa]

Hello everyone....

I need your help here. I am working on some DW related roadmaps. I am stuck on role SOA(Service Oriented Architecture) is going to play in Data Warehousing ETL in- particular and BI in-general. Your comments on above mentioned are much appreciated.

Thanks,

Dil

[ngalemmo]

I really depends on what you are trying to do.

For traditional batch loading of a DW, using a SOA to implement it is incredibly inefficient and buys you absolutely nothing in terms of maintainability and flexibility. But, it may be worthwhile to implement a real-time data feed from web based/capable applications.

It is more useful as a means to provide data to custom applications, as it provides a secured, structured mechanism to expose data in a generic manner. However, if the intent is to implement BI using out-of-the-box BI tools, then a SOA doesn't help.

Thing is, there is not particular reason to commit to a SOA up front. The data warehouse is, after all, just a database. If a future need comes up that is best handled using services, it is easy enough to implement them without affecting the existing infrastructure.