Composite Information Server

Composite Information Server is, technically speaking, an enterprise information integration (EII) platform. What this means is that it does four things:

1. It virtualises your data—it makes all relevant data sources, including both databases and various application environments, appear as if they were in one place so that you can query that data (or report against it) as such.
2. It abstracts your data—that is to say, it presents the data to interrogating applications in a consistent fashion regardless of any native structure and syntax that may be in use in the underlying data sources.
3. It federates the data—it allows you to pull data together from diverse, heterogeneous sources (which may contain either operational or historical data or both) and present that in a holistic manner, while maintaining appropriate security measures.
4. It presents the data in a consistent format to the front-end application (typically, but not always, a BI tool) either through relational views (via SQL) or by means of web services. Testing facilities are provided to ensure the validity of web services.

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There have been 1 review(s) of this paper:

This is a great review, but I thought I must shed some light on the software as well. We evaluated the Composite in our IT organization and after some research decided to use Jboss open source product TEIID: http://www.jboss.org/teiid. It does everything that composite did and more and we were already using JBoss cache for example. So Teiid came in very nicely and needless to say the price was a factor. We also looked at Informatica, Oracle and Queplix, but not ready for these yet ($$).
Zoltán Fekete (08/03/11)

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