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June 22, 2006
Entities for Developers. (Whither the future of MDM?)
At TechEd2006 in Boston last week, the Microsoft ADO.Net and Visual Studio teams were generating excitement around Entities and LINQ.
I can do no better than to quote from Soma (the VP of Visual Studio) in his blog.
Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) is a breakthrough technology that eliminates the impedance mismatch among different data domains. With LINQ, developers do not need to learn separate query syntaxes when querying over diverse data domains such as XML, Relational and Objects.
At the same time, our ADO team has been building a new data mapping substrate called ADO.NET Entities. Entities move the data model up from the physical structure of relational tables to a data model that more accurately represents business entities such as “Customer” or “Order” that could map to multiple relational tables and views. You can think about entities as a declarative way to specify the structure of a business object which you can then add business logic to and, through the power of LINQ, be able to query over them as well.
What does this mean for MDM? Well, I honestly can't say yet - that is in the cooking pot and the devil is in the detail. Nevertheless, we talk a lot about MDM on the B-EYE network, so let's throw this into the mix.
ADO.Net is arguably the leading data access layer for all developers. (Arguably, simply becuase I don't exactly how it stacks up against JDBC in the market. It's certainly hugely significant.) Visual Studio tools are by a long way the leading development environment.
Together they will include a data model for representing entities, and a syntax for querying and manipulating them in all the most popular programming languages.
Now, there's a lot more to MDM than that, of course. But I am excited that MDM, CDI and other entity management solutions are going to be much easier to deliver, and much more productive and interoperable for administrators and end users.
Any thoughts?
Posted by Donald Farmer at June 22, 2006 11:00 AM
Comments
Hi Donald,
I have a couple thoughts - LINQ appears to be a wonderful advancement. I have a data modeling architecture which accomplishes what you are looking for from an entity-relationship standpoint. It's called the Data Vault Architecture (Common Foundational Integration Architecture) which starts with the business, common business keys at the same semantic layers and drills down to a physical model that is supportive of change.
You can read more about the freely available architecture at: http://www.DanLinstedt.com - I'd love to hear what you think.
Cheers,
Dan L
Posted by: Dan Linstedt at November 10, 2006 8:43 AM
