Holistic Management of Integrated Content in Enterprise Information Systems

Today’s enterprise systems typically include both data-centric and document-centric applications. Data-centric applications are built on top of DBMS products which have excelled on advanced query processing and ACID transaction support for structured data. On the other hand, document-centric applications usually rely on content management system (CMS) products to perform advanced unstructured data management operations due to inherent differences in the usage patterns and required feature set (e.g. versioning, records management, etc.). We observe that a new class of hybrid applications are emerging that require the combined set of DBMS and CMS features on structured and unstructured integrated content due in large part to increasingly complex business requirements and the widespread adoption of XML technologies. However, today’s hybrid applications are forced to fragment their business artifacts in separate DBMS and CMS repositories, and cope with accessing, augmenting, and processing the separate pieces. The lack of a unified repository model for integrated content makes the development of hybrid enterprise applications painfully difficult, and often leads to shortlived, inadequate solutions. In this paper, we explore the trends in hybrid enterprise applications and their requirements for a unified repository model. We suggest a holistic approach for the design of the new repository model covering both DBMS and CMS features under one umbrella. We discuss the integration challenges, and present our experience with a prototype that we developed in the MUSIC (Management of Unstructured and Structured Integrated Content) project.

By: Mehmet Altinel, Kevin Beyer, Hamid Pirahesh, David Simmen

Published in: RJ10403 in 2007

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