With Xperanto, IBM stirs up a longtime industry debate over how best to manage enterprise data. On the one side are IBM, BEA and Microsoft, which favour a federated approach. On the other side, the leading advocate of a more centralised approach is Oracle, which argues that fewer large databases are less expensive to maintain than a larger number of smaller databases. But Oracle databases can also query multiple data sources and handle XML as a data format, said Benny Souder, vice president of distributed database technology at Oracle. "We think that a smaller number of larger nodes (databases) gets you economies of scale," Souder said. IBM argues that companies need integration at multiple levels -- between information sources, applications, and business processes -- and it has invested in all three areas. By using IBM's programming tool, WebSphere Studio, a developer can create an application that exploits the capabilities of Xperanto, its WebSphereMQ application integration middleware and WebSphere Business Integrator. "Customers are finding that Xperanto increases the productivity of application developers. If they are writing a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) application and need to bring in data from three databases, they have to connect to each, issue a query, extract the data and join it at the application server level," explained IBM's Mattos. "With Xperanto, they connect and do one query and get the data merged the way they want." IBM points to a handful of implementations in the life-sciences industry, where its customers used IBM's Data Joiner product, which was designed primarily for querying relational databases and mainframe-based flat-file systems. IBM is also trying to recruit software companies to exploit Xperanto within their own products. Crystal Decisions, which sells software to create business reports, has signed on as an Xperanto partner. IBM intends to manage information in relational databases, which are the cornerstone of most business applications, as well as in email and content management systems that store documents. To handle both the structured data in relational databases and "unstructured" documents, IBM will rely on XML technology. IBM will also include support for SQL (structured query language), a method for querying relational databases used by all database makers. "We don't believe in a revolutionary approach. Our customers back the idea of leveraging data in existing environments and looking to get quick returns. And there is a huge investment in SQL," Mattos said. IBM said the first Xperanto-enabled product will be a dedicated information integration server built on IBM's flagship DB2 database. It will include IBM's WebSphere Studio development tool for building applications that rely on distributed data, said Mattos. In a Xperanto release planned for 2004, IBM will add the ability to write queries using the XML-based XQuery language, which is still under development. Other future releases will improve the ability to search and analyse text documents, Mattos said.
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