Foundation

More than 50 customers, including 20 large companies in Europe, running millions of transactions per day, already benefit from Xcalia experience in accessing data. This has been made possible by the original design of Xcalia Intermediation.

Our technology has always relied on a strong abstraction of what data sources could be: transactional or not, database engine or just files on disk, synchronous or asynchronous, etc. The result is a layered architecture where most features are available for all supported data sources.

The development of business processes is based on standard APIs. Xcalia is committed to support all standards related to data access. The source code of business objects has no dependencies on the data sources, and no dependencies on XIC itself.
This fundamental characteristic is what we call "transparent development." Some of the important benefits include:

• The concept of "database independence" is now extended to services.
• Experience reduced development cycles.
• Ease portability between data sources: the same code can be deployed over any supported data source.
• Decoupling the required skills of developers, simplifying staffing: developers can focus on business processes and not back-end plumbing
• Positively impacting performance at runtime by tuning of data loading at runtime

Generic integration behaviors, such as transaction support, distributed queries on the business object model and multi-level caches are globally put in a common layer for all supported data sources. Many critical runtime features that were previously available only for a single database are progressively becoming available for the distributed, heterogeneous data sources within the enterprise.

Additionally, some components of the mapping layer are put in a common data model abstraction layer (called "Entity mapping engine"). This covers data, type and model mapping. Model mapping is the way to manage discrepancies between a business object model running in memory and data source model physically stored on disk, a gap known as the "impedance mismatch" in the IT literature. That initial generalization effort now allows Xcalia to support new kind of data sources like services with minimal additional development.

It is important to note that powerful abstraction does not decrease performance, as each supported data source comes with its own specialized XIC wrapper.

The bottom layer (called "Operation mapping engine") captures all the particularities of data sources. Here, there is a strong differentiation between database-oriented data sources and services-oriented data sources. This layer defines the semantic of all the operations of the data sources.

• ++ Understand Xcalia's exceptional expertise enabling unified Data Access and dynamic integration
• ++ Discover Xcalia's products to assemble, deploy and manage composite applications on the Java and Microsoft .Net development platforms
• ++ Download and evaluate Xcalia Intermediation from Java, .Net or any SOAP enabled programming language
• Ask Xcalia how they can help you deliver the promise of SOA in the enterprise
•