There are two main technical trends I’m seeing in my clients today. The first is their drive for information that has integrity, consistency, and usability to satisfy a wide range of uses, including enterprise-wide reporting, executive dashboards, operational analytics, data mining, and ad hoc reporting and queries. The second trend is toward using service-oriented architecture (SOA) to create a more responsive and agile application environment to increase reusability and reduce duplication of software functions, such as capturing customer information and their associated data. Both trends intend to help businesspeople and applications adapt to new business needs more easily.

Because data and processing cannot be truly separated, these two trends are converging. Also, as business intelligence (BI) becomes near real-time, it is becoming more integrated into the application environment. This integration can be accomplished using an SOA infrastructure for messaging and/or data transport. As SOA becomes a foundation for application systems, the demands on database design need to be thought through because it differs from those of traditional stand-alone applications.