Re: Database Integration Question

Hi Dan

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a whole area in its own right and I am far from an expert. But I have had to support a few applications and technologies from this area (IBM MQ Series Integrator and Oracle InterConnect) and they all seem to work in a similar way.

To prevent a transactional nightmare and to keep the systems loosely-coupled they all use some means of asynchronous messaging (eg Oracle AQ) to pass messages between the systems with the common payload of the message being XML.

MQSI and Oracle InterConnect have this hub and spoke architecture with the idea that you have a business view 'model' and that you write adapters for a given system to generate / receive data according to the   model. The benefit of this is meant to be that any new integration only involves you writing an adapter for the new system in order for it to be able to communicate with any other system on the hub.

I have seen this work successfully in the Legal, Telecoms and Banking world. But it is one of those front-loaded projects, so if you only have a few integrations may not be worth the effort.

Using XML and async messaging is probably worth the effort whatever the scale of the project. This technologies are also well suited to Java.

HTH KJP Dan wrote:

> Hello all.
>
> I am currently working on a project for several Hospitals. The
> application is written in Java, and the database is either Oracle or
> MySql, depending on the client. For a while now, we have been asked
> to integrate our appliations database with the databases of the other
> Hospital applicatoins, such as payroll, scheduling and so on. I have
> been looking around online to see how others have done this, and I
> have come up with two standards, the HL7 standard and DICOM standard.
>
> Now, lets look at this on a slightly higher level than this. Even
> conforming to these standards, we would still need to establish some
> sort of communication between ourselves and whichever application we
> wish to integrate our database with, correct? How does database
> integration work in the real world? Standards are great, and I am
> sure that they help a great deal when it comes down to it, but the
> fact is that there are hundreds of applications we need to integrate
> with across various clients and it seems like it would take a lifetime
> to do one at a time. So, is there an easier way? Are there any good
> vendors that do this? I have found some vendors, but picking one can
> be detremental to my career if they are no good. How have others
> tackled this problem?
>
> Thanks in advance
> Dan
  Received on Tue Sep 30 2003 - 00:35:40 CDT