PRESS RELEASE

Contact Information

Raining Data Corporation
25A Technology Drive
Irvine, CA 92618
Ajay Ramachandran, CTO & Vice President,
XML-Centric Platforms and Applications
Phone: (949) 442-4400
Fax: (949) 250-8187
ajay.ramachandran@rainingdata.com

RAINING DATA TO PRESENT AT JAVAONE

IRVINE, CA. – May 8, 2006

• Supercharging SOA Registries for Improved Governance and Performance

Representatives from Raining Data Corporation will be presenting “Supercharging SOA Registries with XML Persistence and Management”, Session ID# TS-8098, at the 2006 JavaOne Conference to be held May 16-19, 2006 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

Ash Parikh, Director of Technology & Development, Ajay Ramachandran, CTO & Vice President and Premal Parikh, Lead Architect from Raining Data’s XML-Centric Platforms and Applications Group will discuss this emerging technology topic.

"Raining Data’s TigerLogic XDMS plug-in for Sun Service Registry adds new value to the Sun Service Registry product by enabling direct and efficient search of XML content within our repository using the XQuery standard. The new features complement and accentuate the already rich SOA Governance features of Sun Service Registry," said Farrukh Najmi, Federated Information Management Architect from Sun Microsystems.

This session discusses the following:

Problem:

The core challenge of SOA governance is to provide an adequate governance infrastructure that scales while still providing the agility and flexibility that SOA architectures require. SOA metadata is becoming the lifeblood of SOA implementations, because of its importance to corporate visibility, policy management, and governance. The more dynamic the business environment, the more important metadata becomes.

Enterprises traditionally store metadata and SOA payloads in relational databases and file systems, but these data persistence tools are not well-suited to handle SOA-related metadata and transactional payloads. SOA metadata and payloads are fundamentally XML (hierarchical) and therefore naturally do not fit well in relational databases, and relational database schemas are inflexible which do not adapt well to the always-evolving, often ad hoc schemas in an SOA implementation, especially when business requirements are changing. File systems do not provide the advanced querying and management capabilities that SOA implementations require.

Solution:

In order to preserve the agility of the SOA implementation as it scales, it is essential to implement an XML-based caching architecture.

In order for an SOA repository to enable increased performance, reliability, functionality, and usability of SOA artifacts, an SOA implementation requires an effective mid-tier caching architecture that supports the robust query capabilities that XQuery offers.

XQuery forms the last link in the IT governance chain: IT governance depends on SOA governance, which in turn depends upon policy and other metadata management. Effective metadata management requires scalable metadata persistence, which relies upon effective XML-native query capabilities.

XQuery enables sophisticated search for metadata discovery.

It is not sufficient simply to be able to find large quantities of disparate metadata; users must be able to discover just the metadata they need. Therefore, it is essential that users have access to sophisticated metadata search capabilities. Because of the diversity of metadata within the organization, such search capabilities must leverage the power and complexity of XML. Since most SOA content is XML, XQuery is the obvious choice for enabling such searches.

XQuery-enabled metadata and transactional payload persistence enables a policy-based caching service.

This caching service enables XQuery based policies to cache result sets of poorly performing services which can accelerate SOA payloads and improve responsiveness to service consumers. It is also possible to construct such policies to include the time-to-live before the cache needs refreshing. It is possible to base such policies on time of-day requests for determining the validity of cached data. Policies based on service availability can then ensure that if the service is not available, the consumer obtains the desired data from the cache, because policies can trigger the XML persistence mechanism.

XQuery-based persistence enables a data repurposing service to improve performance.

Such a service enables filtering and search criteria on content that a service returns. XQuery drives the transformations behind the repurposing of SOA metadata and payloads, providing analytics and reporting capabilities. In addition, XQuery is used to create a data abstraction service, which can eliminate the need for services to be aware of individual data sources.

XQuery-based metadata persistence enables a SOA registry-repository to scale by supporting the federation of services within a SOA implementation.

A SOA repository can serve as a persistence layer in the middle tier, storing transactional information for many purposes, including analysis and integrity management issues. SOA-enabling technologies such as enterprise service buses and orchestration engines can then employ such an XQuery enabled SOA repository for state management, workflow persistence, content acceleration, content based routing, policy management & enforcement, and message persistence.

XQuery optimizes metadata management by improving agility and efficiency of SOA administration and maintenance across the enterprise.

It is not sufficient to erect a SOA registry-repository without providing a seamless, flexible and real-time mechanism to administer and update the SOA as organizational policy, business conditions and customer needs change. XQuery provides a powerful and flexible approach to automate SOA maintenance and eliminate the need for costly manual and programmatic updates to SOA metadata, especially when the SOA spans across enterprise departments and stakeholders. Furthermore, XQuery can be utilized to refresh the metadata in a SOA registry-repository by querying or polling the actual service endpoints across the enterprise and between trading partners to assess any changes thereby keeping the SOA continually updated and responsive to business change.

XQuery improves SOA governance and policy management by enforcing policies on SOA transactions and payloads.

As the number of services endpoints, transactions and payloads in the SOA increase, XQuery plays an increasingly important role in the SOA to enforce policies by introspecting payloads, analyzing their content, determining policy violations and taking the appropriate action. This approach to SOA governance and policy management ensures organizational alignment, consistency, and reliability of an SOA.

XQuery enables high-performance composite applications with real-time, flexible composite data by exposing heterogeneous legacy data as consumable data services.

XQuery enables composite data services by representing existing data sources such as relational databases, java and .net applications, JCA, JMS, websites, web services, file systems as web service endpoints that can be rapidly exposed in an enterprise SOA.

Raining Data Advantage:

Raining Data’s TigerLogic XDMS offers the highest performance and scalable XML persistence and XQuery platform on the market. The TigerLogic patent pending XML indexing/profiling technology and Pick® Universal Data Model persistence engine enables it to perform up to 150x faster when accessing XML metadata with XQuery than relational databases, XML repositories, XML index/search engines or file systems, therefore providing the lowest total cost of ownership option (http://www.rainingdata.com/products/tl/index.html). The TigerLogic XDMS platform also provides sophisticated mid-tier data caching services for SOA architectures allowing for rapid creation of composite data services of existing legacy systems and the acceleration-repurpose of content in the SOA.

The presentation will be given as part of the “Leading Edge” track, session TS-8098. More information on the 2006 JavaOne Conference can be found at http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf/.

About Raining Data

Raining Data Corporation (Nasdaq: RDTA), headquartered in Irvine, California, offers enterprise-grade XML database management and information aggregation software solutions and has been providing reliable data management and rapid application deployment solutions for ISVs and developers of database applications for more than three decades. Raining Data's flagship products include: 1) The high-performance TigerLogic^® XML Data Management Server (XDMS), which provides flexible, scalable and extensible XML data storage as well as query and retrieval of critical business data across a variety of structured and unstructured information sources, delivering mid-tier scalability and transactional integrity across heterogeneous enterprise databases as well as dynamic extensibility and ease of use plus low total cost of ownership; 2) Powerful Pick^® Universal Data Model (Pick UDM) based database management systems and components, including D^3®, mvEnterprise^® and mvBase^® that are the choice of more than a thousand application developers worldwide and .NET Integration components including the Pick Data Provider for .NET and the Pick Reporting Services Connector; and 3) Omnis Studio^®, a powerful, cross-platform, object-oriented RAD tool for developing sophisticated thick-client, Web-client or ultra thin-client database applications.

Raining Data’s installed customer base includes more than 500,000 active users representing over 20,000 customer sites worldwide, with a significant base of diverse vertical applications. With more than 160 employees and contractors in five countries, Raining Data offers 24x7 customer support and maintains a strong international presence. More information about Raining Data Corporation and its products can be found at www.rainingdata.com.

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