Database Reference
In-Depth Information
In this example, the country code may be stored as
US
in one application and
United States
in another, and by using transformation functions within the
SOA code, developers can look up and map values as needed.
Though database tables can be used as a substitute for DVMs, DVMs are static
in nature and are optimized for speed and performance. DVMs are typically
created by developers at design time, or they can be created manually and
Management of SOA Composite Applications
for more details on how to import
DVMs into the MDS.
Cross References
are slightly different in that they are used to dynamically map
values from one application to another. For example, you may have two applic-
ations, each maintaining its own
Customer
table wherein customer-specific in-
formation, such as customer ID, customer name, customer address, and other
customer metadata, is stored. However, each application may have a different
format for the unique identifier called
customer ID
. For example, SAP may cre-
ate customer IDs in a format different than Oracle E-Business Suite, as shown
in the following table:
SAP
EBS
SAP_001
EBS_1001
SAP_002
EBS_1002
Thus, Cross References are used to map these dynamic customer IDs across
applications. Cross References, or XREFs, consist of two parts:
Metadata:
It is created as
.xref
files and stored in the MDS.
