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Product Overview

Introducing Liquid Data

This topic provides a high level overview of the BEA Liquid Data for WebLogicTM product. It contains the following sections:

- What is BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic?

- Liquid Data Capabilities

- Liquid Data Roles and Responsibilities

What is BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic?

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic is a data access and aggregation product for Information Visibility, allowing a real-time unified view of disparate enterprise data. Information visibility is essential to enable greater supply-chain visibility, a unified view of customer information, and better decision-making.

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic provides a cost effective, standard way to rapidly aggregate and expose logical views from any number of heterogeneous sources (including Web services, databases, flat files, XML files, applications and Web sites). This enables developers to re-use information across applications without dealing with the complexity of the underlying data.

One of the greatest challenges for IT organizations is that today's technologies do not adequately address the complexity inherent in aggregating data from distributed systems. BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic allows IT departments to easily aggregate data, in real time, from many sources within and outside of the enterprise, and tailor it for different business users, providing information visibility anywhere in the enterprise.

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic is an easy-to-use product that simplifies the development of applications and portals that require aggregated, real-time information from disparate or heterogeneous sources. BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic returns results in XML for easy consumption by Web applications.

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic delivers flexible, reusable information without the high cost and time consuming custom coding of queries and data transformations required with other products and solutions. Developers access BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic as simple Business Information Services created and published by a company's domain or data architects. Additionally, developers have the power and flexibility of XQuery, a standard SQL-like query language represented in XML, to directly access the distributed data sources, which are represented as integrated logical views.

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic builds on existing IT infrastructure and leverages XML standards and BEA WebLogic® PlatformTM—the industry-leading application infrastructure—for easy and secure deployment in existing IT environments. BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic can be deployed as a standalone solution or within the framework of a larger project.

Liquid Data Capabilities

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic provides the following capabilities:

- Real Time Data Access

- Share Corporate Assets

- Increase Developer Productivity

- Standards-Based

Real Time Data Access

- Universal data access—Using XML translators and optimized XML queries, BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic can retrieve data from legacy and client-server applications, enterprise applications, relational databases, Web Services, Web sites, flat files and XML files, and other data sources, both inside and outside of corporate firewalls. BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic returns results in XML for easy consumption by Web applications.

- Abstract Data Views—A virtual abstraction layer aggregates distributed data sources as an integrated, logical view. For developers, these logical views of aggregated data sets—or data views—can be thought of as a single, virtual database. Data views allow easy access to shared business entities without needing to deal with the underlying complexity of varying data structures, semantics, and access methods.

Share Corporate Assets

- Reusable Views—Information about customers, orders, and inventory is needed again and again, by a variety of groups within the organization. BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic enables views of data to be presented as services that can be customized and reused. It makes it easy to modify views when new data sources need to be added.

- Leverage domain resources—Data views are created by a organization's data domain expert or data architect, who can quickly examine source schemas, and identify needed columns or elements. Data views are created and published once and shared many times by developers accessing data views as simple services, making the role of data access completely transparent to the developer.

Increase Developer Productivity

- Expose and share Web Services—Data views can be shared as Web services with other applications and departments by creating and sharing corporate entities (like customer or product profiles). The information is automatically tagged and organized for presentation by Web applications and can be invoked by a Web service or embedded rapidly and easily within an integrated application.

- Dramatically reduce coding—By providing developers with a high-level query language and visual development tools, BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic replaces months of custom coding with simple, familiar queries. Developers have the power and flexibility of a standard SQL-like language called XQuery for capabilities that can be written as familiar database queries, in only a few minutes.

Standards-Based

BEA Liquid Data for WebLogic takes full advantage of BEA WebLogic ServerTM, leveraging all the J2EE and XML standards, including new XML standards like XQuery. Adherence to these standards protects your investment.

Liquid Data Roles and Responsibilities

This section describes the roles, responsibilities, and resources for the following types of Liquid Data users:

- Data Architects

- Application Developers

- System Administrators

Each type of user has different tasks and tools for using the Liquid Data technology.

Data Architects

Data Architects know about the desired business entities to be created and the data sources that are required. Data Architects tend to be subject matter experts and have a deep understanding of the data, underlying schema, and relationships across the various data sources. They create the data views and stored queries used by the Application Developers, using either the Data View Builder tool or creating hand-coded XQuery queries. For more information, see Building Queries and Data Views.

Application Developers

Application Developers create applications that use the data views and stored queries, created by the Data Architects, to access real-time information. Application Developers can access data views and stored queries using the following mechanisms:

- Invoking queries in EJB client applications using the Liquid Data Query API.

- Invoking queries in JSP (Java Server Pages) clients using the Liquid Data JSP Tag Library

- Invoking queries that have been published as Web services

Application Developers can also write custom functions in Java code to extend Liquid Data functionality.

For more information, see Invoking Queries Programmatically.

System Administrators

System Administrators install, deploy, configure, and maintain the Liquid Data server. In addition to standard WebLogic Server administration tasks, an administrator uses the Liquid Data node in the Administration Console to perform the following kinds of tasks:

- Deploy Liquid Data in WebLogic domains.

- Configure access to data sources and queries.

- Set up and configure the Liquid Data server repository.

- Implement security using WebLogic Server's extensive compatibility security features, such as configuring users, groups, and access control lists (ACLs).

- Configure query caching to optimize performance.

- Monitor Liquid Data server operation, tune performance, and provide support.

For more information, see the Liquid Data Administration Guide and Deploying Liquid Data.