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Leveraging value of disparate information assets: XML to the rescue. (Information Assets).

Article Excerpt
Businesses today are trying to cope with an overabundance of electronic information. Beyond the silos of structured data that have been managed with traditional database technologies is a need to manage the ever-increasing deluge of unstructured data types and sources. E-mails, spreadsheets, Office documents, HTML files, and so on, contain a wealth of information, but are not easily accessible across the organization.

Content management solutions partially address the unstructured information, but cannot necessarily provide management of traditionally defined structured information. Portal technologies help address the delivery of information to the end user, but once again are incomplete storage and management solutions. What is needed is one single mechanism to access, manage, manipulate, and analyze all forms of information, regardless of source or format.

Traditional Solutions

Virtual database: managing data in silos

Virtual databases or data access solutions have been around for years. These systems were designed to access silos of managed data, primarily relational and mainframe systems. In their latest versions, they attempt to address unstructured and unmanaged information as well. The goal is to provide a common mechanism to access all corporate information assets. However, there are a number of drawbacks to this approach.

Reaching into a multitude of data sources distributed across an organization generally incurs significant performance problems, particularly when accessing nonrelational sources. Relational database technology can often handle the load placed on extending the user community, but may require significant software and hardware upgrades. However, when real-time accesses reach legacy mainframes designed for batch transactions, upgrades often aren't feasible. The...