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To remain competitive, companies must connect with customers, suppliers, and internal business units – who are all likely to store and process data in different formats - through seamless enterprise data integration.
The majority of existing enterprise data is stored in business applications and database systems that are generally neither standards-based nor readily extensible. In addition, many large enterprises employ Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems for exchanging business information with partners. Though these systems have proven extremely effective and enjoy widespread use, they are often not interoperable with other systems, are complicated to develop and deploy, and may not allow real-time transactions. The challenge is to implement a standards-based and cost effective data integration solution that can take a company securely into the future.
Information system incompatibilities frequently pose data integration challenges of many types:
- Small one-off conversions. A trade show event generates 1,000 leads from a lead capture system that need to be integrated into your company’s prospect list data. Or a new account executive comes on board and his personal single-user contact management database must be made consistent with and integrated into the company CRM (customer relationship management) data.
- Repetitive conversion demands. A potential customer demands that your organization communicate with an older EDI transaction system or forfeit a large monthly order.
- Huge conversion tasks. Your company buys a division of a former competitor and you inherit a different database architecture. Shareholders demand that you gain efficiency by combining and streamlining information systems and integrating data.
- Web services. Your VP of Sales asks you why your company's legacy order administration system can’t give him up-to-the-second product availability and order status information in a standard Web browser, just like his favorite e-commerce site.
The range of technologies supporting contemporary information systems tends to make every information warehouse and every data integration challenge unique. No two are alike.
Relational databases specialize in relating individual data records grouped by type in tables. Developers can join records together as needed using SQL (Structured Query Language) and present one or more records to end users as meaningful information.
Starting in the 1980s relational databases became pervasive in the business information management environment. Although their basic technology is aging, the sheer volume of information stored in databases and the number of hours invested developing structures and specialized systems from relational database technology cause them to remain valuable assets. However, despite their strengths, relational databases lack the flexibility to seamlessly integrate with other systems, and there are enough differences between the major commercial implementations to make data integration difficult.
EDI existed long before the Internet made B2B electronic trade standard practice. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a set of widely-used formats for communicating electronically, developed to help independent organizations reliably exchange virtually any type of data, such as purchase orders, invoices, shipping notices, medical and insurance claims, and much more.
Many companies still have substantial investments in EDI technology. Those that do not use EDI internally want to map EDI data to the newer data storage and interchange formats or risk missing business opportunities.
Flat file formats are supported by many popular enterprise applications, such as accounting software packages, banking solutions, CRM systems, standard UNIX applications, etc., as well as by Microsoft Excel®, and are often used as an interchange format for transferring information between different applications, including databases. However, flat files generally require additional processing to interoperate with common data formats such as XML and EDI and can be cumbersome to apply when dealing with a vast data integration project.
Use of XML has grown steadily, and it now plays a central role in data integration, management, transformation, and exchange, with widespread support among leading software tools, server, and database vendors. As importantly, XML can reduce the cost of processing, searching, exchanging, and reusing information. Web services are software components that are made available over intranets, extranets, and the Internet using Web technologies and a standardized XML-based messaging system. Since they are based on open standards such as HTTP and XML-based protocols including SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, Web services are hardware, programming language, and operating system independent. This means that applications written in different programming languages and running on different platforms can seamlessly exchange data using Web services.
Some enthusiastic supporters call XML “the ultimate interchange for everything,” but XML alone does not directly read databases, EDI, or information stored in flat files.
Further complicating matters, different enterprises design information management systems in different ways based on their own priorities. Names of tables and fields differ. Formats of identical data items are incompatible. Relationships between records are organized to meet completely different requirements. Certain information management systems are optimized for fast updates, while others are optimized for fast searches, and so on.
The high-end Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) vendors would have you believe that data integration requires complicated ESB installations in large and expensive server deployments. Instead, developers need a solution that simplifies data integration and allows them to easily define mappings and conversions that fit the unique requirements of each data integration challenge.
Altova MapForce® 2008 is an affordable data integration tool that simplifies data mapping by allowing customized mappings to be created visually. When you load data structures into the design window, MapForce visually represents their hierarchical structures. You map between inputs and outputs by dragging connecting lines between sources and targets. You can also define and insert data processing calculations to modify data during conversions.
The advantages of a visual data integration tool cannot be overstated. What used to require a team of highly-skilled and specialized XML, flat file, database, and EDI experts can now be accomplished quickly, easily, and without errors by one well-rounded person. MapForce reads and writes all the native file formats described above and lets you design mappings with a visual interface so you don't have to understand the specific details of how to programmatically access the data formats being mapped.
MapForce delivers the increase in productivity that allows data integration projects to achieve the timeliness and success today’s businesses demand.
- MapForce converts data on the fly for one-time conversions. Mappings can also be saved for reuse.
- MapForce also generates XSLT 1.0/2.0, XQuery, C++, C#, or Java source code to compile into your own application for repetitive data conversions. MapForce® 2008 generated code is royalty free.
- Whether running directly or from generated code, the MapForce conversion engine is lightning fast and efficiently handles large data integration tasks.
For more information on data integration, check out the following resources:
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