Service-oriented Business Intelligence (SoBI)

Presented by: Hari Menon

Service-oriented Business Intelligence (SoBI)

SoBI is the synergy of the Business Intelligence and Service Orientation paradigms

• SoBI is the mixing of approaches from Service Orientation and Business Intelligence
• It attempts to solve real word problems of integration in an Enterprise of disparate ‘stove
piped’ systems
• It attempts to provide for Operational and MIS data
• It attempts to provide a road map for better class integration
• It attempts to provide a common data transformation mechanism
• It sets out guidance in the form of principles and patterns

BI & SO

BI and SO are broad paradigms.

BI: The components of a successful data warehouse can be summarized as data collection,
cleansing, and consolidation (Extract Transform and Load, or ETL) and data storage. BI is the
delivery of information to support the decision-making, it can be described as the process of
enhancing data into information and then into knowledge. Every BI system has a specific goal,
which is derived from the requirements of the business. When we refer BI, we mean both DWH
& BI.

SO: SO is a means of building distributed applications; at its most abstract, SO views

everything as a service provider: from applications, to companies, to devices. The service
providers expose capabilities through interfaces and these interfaces are made use of by the
callers.

Until recently, SO has had little or no part to play in the world of BI, primarily because the SO
approach to data integration seemed laborious and overly complex to a community used to
moving data of any volume around by connecting directly to the source system at database
level. In BI, data integration is accomplished through the ETL process, which is the keystone of
every BI solution, and BI solutions tend to look for the most direct and efficient way of
accomplishing it. Enterprise application integration (EAI), like BI, has been around for many
years.

Solutions to EAI problems can involve solving the application integration problem at a number of
different architectural levels such as data, application, process, and so forth. In this way, both
ETL and SO can form part of an EAI solution. In many ways, SO grew out of the need to find
common, open, and interoperable solutions to the EAI problem.

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 Service-oriented Business Intelligence (SoBI)
Presented by: Hari Menon

BI consuming SO events

Comparison

The below table compares the SO with BI & DWH on various basic aspects.

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 Service-oriented Business Intelligence (SoBI)
Presented by: Hari Menon

Service Orientation BI & DWH

Definition • Service Orientation is an • Data Gathering - Extract,

approach to building distributed Transform and Load (ETL)
applications • Data Storage - Data Warehouse
• Services expose capabilities (EDW)
through interfaces • Data Presentation (The BI bit)
• OLAP
• Reporting

View • From an SO perspective, BI is • From a BI perspective, SO is

seen as a collection of services seen as a collection of data
sources

Differences • Small messages on demand • Infrequent exchanges of (large)

• Transformations tend to be amounts of data
simple • Transformations complex
• Increasing drive for Real Time
DW

Core • Provides application-to- • Well suited for data-to-data

Strengths application integration integration
• Well suited to events and real- • Can handle large data volumes
time data – high frequency • Provides foundation for business
• Allows agile change in business decisions
processes • Provides a combined model of
• Supports reuse of enterprise the enterprise data
components • Good tools and mechanisms for
• Encapsulates and abstracts transforming data
functionality • Ability to question the data and
• Tightly defined data formats and to answer key business
structures questions

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 Service-oriented Business Intelligence (SoBI)
Presented by: Hari Menon

Why SOBI?

• Customer projects driving similarities in EAI / ETL

• Change in Vendor Landscape and need for convergence
• Real project
• Looks like a BI project
• Client wants Service Orientation
• Provides a logical model of enterprise data which can be exploited by SO
• Ability to reuse transformation logic usually hidden in ETL
• Brings interface abstraction patterns to BI
• Provides road map for integration
• Driving improvements in enterprise data quality
• Expose Reference Data to other Services & Systems

Although service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and BI architectures have evolved separately

and include technologies and disciplines specific to their own individual architectural aims, many
of the technologies that they utilize overlap. There is also a clear mapping between the concepts
used, with each able to view the other in their own terms.

From a BI perspective, a service can readily be exposed as a data source with the introduction
of a simple facade layer that provides a mapping between the BI interface and the interface
exposed by the service. The facade then transforms the results of the call from the data schema
used on the service bus to the data format expected by the BI platform and returns the results
to the caller.

Disclaimer: This is only a collection of facts and views published in various articles and blogs on various forums
and websites, collated for easy reading Page 4
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 Service-oriented Business Intelligence (SoBI)
Presented by: Hari Menon

BI and SO views

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 Service-oriented Business Intelligence (SoBI)
Presented by: Hari Menon

The SoBI framework

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 Service-oriented Business Intelligence (SoBI)
Presented by: Hari Menon

SOBI – Logical Architecture

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 Service-oriented Business Intelligence (SoBI)
Presented by: Hari Menon

SOBI – Technical Architecture

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