Virtual-View Technology Brings Order To Data ChaosVirtual-View Technology Brings Order To Data Chaos

Some software companies think they can help fix disorganized data. They're moving on from efforts to store all kinds of business, engineering, and scientific data in a single database system toward a federated approach that emphasizes virtual views of information.

BEA Systems Inc. this week will deliver software called Liquid Data for WebLogic that represents relational, flat-file, and Web-services data from enterprise and front-office apps with XML schemas, letting users write common queries against them. It's an add-in to BEA's application server, priced at $25,000 per CPU. BEA's WebLogic integration server will make it easier to work with popular apps such as those from SAP and Siebel Systems Inc.

The Liquid Data software uses a proposed Web-services standard called XQuery that prevents companies from having to expose their database schema to large numbers of users, BEA says. Trouble is, many more developers know SQL than XQuery.

IBM is also creating technology for virtual data views. Xperanto will let users query commercial databases, Web services, Excel spreadsheets, and other systems and receive an XML document in return, distinguished engineer Laura Haas says. Xperanto works with SQL and XQuery, and is included in IBM's DB2 Universal Database. Performance and capability enhancements are due next year.

Exposing the means to access a database as a Web service could avoid performance problems caused by letting users write arbitrary queries against a database, which can slow it down. IBM has a deep background in managing data access, says James Governor, an analyst at research firm Illuminata. "Every time you make a query, it's a performance hit. This issue of not allowing ad hoc queries came out of mainframe computer science," he says.

Microsoft is also building technology for federated views of data. The company's Sharepoint Portal Server can query SQL Server data, metadata about Office files, and E-mail messages. Says group product manager Tom Rizzo, "The next big thing we'll do is support XQuery in the next release of Sharepoint Portal."