Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I
must admit I’ve only just come across this, but it looks interesting anyway.
"Oracle
XML Data Synthesis (XDS)" is "designed
to solve the problem of accessing disparate information sources like package
applications (Oracle 11i, SAP, PeopleSoft), databases (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server),
files (MS Excel, XML) and aggregating the information from these kind of
information sources in real-time. XDS provides an easy-to-use declarative
framework to plug-in and query across the information sources. Instead of
writing custom applications to access information from disparate information
sources, customers have a choice of using XDS to build their information
integration applications. The benefits are similar to what SQL provides when it
comes to accessing data from databases. Oracle XDS has been designed to employ
both emerging and standards-based technologies like XML, XQuery, JDBC, Web
services, and J2EE Connector Architecture."

Sounds like the sort of thing someone working in
data warehousing would be interested in. The "XQuery" mentioned above is one of
the

hot new technology areas within Oracle with native support
rumoured for inclusion
within 10g Release 2. All looks very interesting, and if you’re looking for more
information on XML Data Synthesis there’s also an
Oracle
XML Data Synthesis overview, and an Oracleworld presentation entitled

"Heterogenious XML-Based Information Integration" that are worth taking a
look at.

In a similar vein, I keep meaning to post a link
to Andrew Newman’s blog, which
you’ll also find interesting if you’re into the
semantic web, data query languages, the
WC3 ‘Resource Definition Framework’
and uses of metadata. There’s a lot of similarity between the technologies
Andrew links to, together with what Oracle are trying to achieve with XDS and
XQuery, and what we’re trying to do with business intelligence, data warehousing
and data mining. It wouldn’t suprise me if we start to hear more about XML,
XQuery, RDF and so on in a business intelligence context in the future, and I
fully expect these sorts of technologies making their way into Oracle’s BI &
knowledge management products over the next few years.

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