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XML and the Enterprise database infrastructure today

The enterprise database infrastructure today consists largely of high-end transaction processing systems such as Adabas and IMS on one hand and RDBMS-based information systems on the other.

Over the last five years, however, there has been an explosion of demand for access to these enterprise databases over the internet, and also to use them to support electronic business operations. These include transactions between systems within an enterprise ("enterprise integration"), between businesses in a supply chain ("B2B e-commerce") and directly to customers ("B2C e-commerce"). The initial reaction of most companies was to integrate these diverse operations by building or buying software such as "application servers" that employed protocols such as DCOM or CORBA to perform such integration. More recently, XML offers the option of performing the necessary integration by exchanging standardized data.

Why is this, and what about XML has changed the situation? The SQL standard defines a vendor-neutral way of finding and extracting data from an RDBMS, so it is quite possible to write middleware applications that extract data from one database and put it in another. Nevertheless, these applications must be relatively complex and pay careful attention to the database schemas on each side in order to work properly. XML, on the other hand, is simply a standardized "meta-format" that can represent any kind of data, and for which precise schema definitions are optional.

Thus, XML has become widely used to integrate enterprises, supply chains, and Web applications because it is:

• Standardized - Many products from many vendors are available that implement something close to the World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation on XML. 
• Simple - the technology is easy to learn and implement, with many tutorials and "how to" books available.
• Self-describing - straightforward data exchange applications can be written without reference to detailed format descriptions or schemas. 

So, XML is redefining today's database infrastructure by serving as the "glue" that binds diverse enterprise systems to each other and to the internet.

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