Oracle Information Architecture Explained

July 5th, 2004 by Mark Rittman

If
you’ve been to an Oracle technology day recently, or read some of the

articles in Oracle Magazine or on
AppsNet,
you’ll probably have heard about “Oracle Information Architecture”. So what is
it, and how is it shaping Oracle’s  product
development and marketing?


Oracle Information Architecture is a model that describes how Oracle’s
products can be used to create a ‘modern, real-time enterprise’. It uses the new
10g server technology (database, application server) together with the
e-Business Suite and the new Customer Data Hub, with application development
being carried out using JDeveloper and ADF. Oracle Information Architecture
is Oracle’s way of bringing its different product strands together, and
positioning itself as the leading enterprise infrastructure software and
business applications vendor. What it boils down to is a unified data model, and
two of the hottest buzzwords in the industry at the moment, ‘grid computing’ and 
’service-orientated applications’.

The foundation for Oracle’s Information Architecture is a
grid computing infrastructure where many servers and
storage systems act as one large ’super-computer’ to run your applications. This
is achieved through Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Application Server 10g and
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, which all have new ‘grid technology’ features.
Oracle Database 10g’s grid technology is partly based on enhancements to
Oracle 9i’s Real Application Clusters, and partly through the new automation
features that manage storage and carry out routine tuning and administrative
tasks. Application Server 10g similarly features technology to virtualise the
mid-tier, presenting a group of separate servers as one J2EE application
server to run your applications on. Enterprise Manager now comes with ‘Grid
Control’ and ‘Grid Repository’ for storing and controlling grid resources, and
a number of agents for monitoring all servers and applications.

The next element of Oracle’s Information Architecture is the Enterprise Data
Hub, a centralized repository that keeps information synchronised throughout the
organisation. This is where the unified data model comes in, with an Oracle
database being used to store the data and, in the first instance, the new
Customer Data Hub
being used to clean up and manage all an organisation’s customer data. Customer
Data Hub is the first of several planned data hub applications, and uses the
customer tables in e-Business Suite to hold its data. A point to note here is
that this enterprise data hub is not just aimed at Oracle applications – it’s an
open data model and APIs are available so that it can be integrated in with
best-of-breed applications and other bespoke applications, the idea being that
Customer Data Hub, and the Oracle database, become with one store of customer
data for all a customer’s applications.

Sitting above the grid computing foundation, and using the enterprise data
hub, is the Real-Time Business Processing element. This part of the architecture
centres around the e-Business Suite, enhanced by the recently-announced APIs and
interfaces that make it work nicer with non-Oracle applications such as Siebel
or Peoplesoft. The real-time element also comes into play with business
intelligence, with the Information Architecture data warehouse being build using
materialized views and the built-in ETL features of Oracle 10g to reduce latency
between transaction capture and analysis. Another term that is often used when
describing this part of the architecture is

Service-Orientated Applications, a bit of a hot topic at Oracle at the
moment that is all about creating reusable transaction and collaboration
processes, using web services and tools such as
Oracle’s new BPEL Process
manager. I touched on
this area a while ago and the implications for traditional data warehousing,
which often has multi-stage data loading processes and a 24-hour timelag, is
fairly striking. Apart from the e-Business Suite, the key server technology here
is Application Server 10g, again for its grid capabilities and also the business
activity monitoring feature announced back in June.

Working in concert with Real-Time Business Processing is the Information
Access part of the architecture. This centres around Oracle Application Server
Portal, Oracle Collaboration Suite and Oracle Business Intelligence, which in
this context means the Daily Business Intelligence feature in the most recent
e-Business Suite versions. The emphasis here again is on real-time business
intelligence, moving away from BI being the preserve of a few analysts in head
office to being something embedded in everyone’s day-to-day applications.

The last part of the architecture is the Development Framework, based on
Oracle JDeveloper 10g and the new Application Developer Framework (ADF), the
successor to BC4J which most of you will probably be aware of. The Development
Framework is all about XML, J2EE, web services and all the other usual
buzzwords, and focuses on building on and extending the core business
functionality in the e-Business Suite.

So, what does this mean for us, as business intelligence developers who work
on Oracle products and deal with Oracle? Well, as visions go, it’s not bad
actually, and clearly a response to SAP and their
NetWeaver offering which
offers much the same kind of vision, though arguably not as clearly defined as
Oracle’s and with less obvious immediate benefits. Applications being exposed as
web services (the ‘Service-Orientated Architecture’) is more of a concern for
applications developers, but the really interesting part for me is the unified
data model, maintained and populated using these new enterprise data hubs. By
making the e-Business Suite work better with third party applications, and
making a play for their data, this leaves us Oracle business intelligence and
data warehousing developers in quite a strong position, with an opportunity now
to build on this information architecture and add to the built in BI that comes
with the e-Business Suite. It could all blow over in a year or two, with
something else replacing grid technology and web services, but as a vision that
centres on the provision of information and services without any restrictions,
it’s as good a way as any for business intelligence to really reach out to
everyone in the organisation.

To read more about Oracle Information Architecture, take a look at:

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