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Do you know if there is a system/product/technique which would allow to "wrap" one or more relational databases into one object-oriented virtual database (or could we call it a "multi-database object-oriented proxy")?

Let me illustrate the principle:

Multi-database object-oriented proxy

So, basically, the pink thing in the middle (hereafter "object proxy") would contain definitions of business entities and their mappings to data in multiple relational databases. Applications would request or insert/update/delete data from the object proxy, which would magically synchronize with underlying relational databases.

Is that possible? Does such a system exist?

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  • I have updated my question
    – garik
    Commented Jan 21, 2011 at 0:21

3 Answers 3

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You may be referring to a Federated Database System.

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Do you mean products like InfoSphere Federation Server or WebSphere Federation Server? As variant it is possible, on my opinion, to use microsoft's implementation based on sql server partitioned tables and some ORM (Nhibernate or Entity Framework). And, of course: Cloud-based database solution

ADDED:

Maxim, please review this presentation (page #74): Not Only SQL (NOSQL) and you will find names of some non relational databases. it can help you, i think:

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  • I'll check those servers, thanks (what a pity there seems to be no open-source solutions...)
    – Xoum
    Commented Jan 20, 2011 at 23:26
  • @Maxim Gueivandov I have updated my question, please review
    – garik
    Commented Jan 21, 2011 at 0:21
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Yes there is such a system, but it depends on how you want to use it. Really you would have to expose a webservice for each data call that you want to use for most systems that would implement something like this, but there are automated tools for doing that too.

That that point something like BizTalk from Microsoft would probably do what you want.

However, my advice would be to have a few devs just write a single web frontend that exposes webservices that connects to the backends for you. Then you're writing a bit more of a broker of sorts. That's how we expose our webmethods to everyone, we just broker the requests between the apps that need the data and our calls to our internal databases or the ones of our sister-vendors that are internally acccessible.

An additional feature of that is we can use the webservice to make calls to other webservices, giving others a unified front to pull data from (our webservices)

Just my $0.05

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  • I'm developer myself, and while the concept may seem simple and we have good ORMs out there, I believe it's production-ready implementation would require months of development (business entity modeling accessible to non-developers, synchronization of multi-DB aggregate models, possible performance issues, etc.).
    – Xoum
    Commented Jan 20, 2011 at 23:18
  • @Maxim we are advocating 2000 hours to fully do something similar for all our vendors over the next year for such a project. Not quite what you describe but close.
    – jcolebrand ♦
    Commented Jan 20, 2011 at 23:21

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