Reporting and SOA

SOA is an architectural style that promises agility, scalability and reuse. The bottom line is SOA can save you money. There are many definitions to SOA. The best definition I found states that a service is something that exposes functionality by accepting data and maybe returning data. Service is simple. Data in - Data out.

To achieve all the SOA advantages a service must be autonomous. 

The problem starts with reporting and ETL.

The traditional two tier or three tier architecture had the reporting engine connected strait to the database. Simple and efficient but the service is not autonomous. There is a strong dependency between the service and the reporting engine. This dependency must be broken.

What is the SOA recommended architecture concerning reporting?

The answer is replication. The services data will be replicated to a central storage where the reporting and ETL will be executed. To do that there are few technologies that can be taken into consideration.

1. Synchronization framework

2. Expose the data as a feed using WCF syndication

3. Restful services (REST in WCF) or ADO.Net Data Services 

replication is not easy and might introduce complicated challenges but this is the only way reporting can be done in the SOA world.