Enterprise SOA

How does persistence change in ESA?

The problem with persistence—a word describing the storage and synchronization of data in databases—is that the old architecture of enterprise applications assumed there would always be only a single database beneath the application. There would never be a risk of redundancy or duplication, as anyone seeking to change the data would always use that database, which could be kept consistent through rock-solid database transaction mechanisms.

In an ESA world, however, with data from CRM, SCM, third-party applications, partner systems, and beyond, data is scattered all over the system map. Redundancy, duplication, and inconsistency are real problems, and in order for ESA to succeed, it must provide a framework to deal with them.

In the case of ESA, SAP NetWeaver provides the technical capabilities to align and unify, clean, and harmonize data across the system landscape—and to provide a virtual view of that data as though all of it originates from the same database. (SAP NetWeaver Application Server handled persistence-related tasks for a single database in the past.)

From a technology perspective, the information management framework uses capabilities such as Master Data Management (MDM), data warehousing, and business intelligence, as well as knowledge management, to meet the challenge of managing overlapping information in a collection of distributed repositories.