News

Data Junction, NeoCore target 'XML on-ramps and off-ramps'

• By Rich Seeley
• October 23, 2002

NeoCore Inc., Colorado Springs, Colo., and Data Junction Corp., Austin, Texas, this week disclosed plans to combine NeoCore's XML Information Management Systems (XMS) database with Data Junction's ETL capabilities.

Officials said the combined offerings will provide users with the technologies they need to import data from a variety of sources and generate XML content from the aggregation of different databases.

Greg Grosh, co-founder of Data Junction, told XML Report that a key advantage of the combined technologies is its ability to help IT executives manage the problem of ''XML on-ramps and off-ramps.''

The on-ramp and off-ramp metaphor describes the way data may be pulled out of non-XML legacy systems, have XML tags applied to it for a Web services application, and then be returned to the legacy system. Converting data from legacy to XML to legacy, Grosh said, often causes performance and consistency problems. An integration application using NeoCore's XMS database technology will minimize this bi-directional on-ramp/off-ramp traffic by providing at least temporary storage for the data in XML format, he said.

''You would hope to have the least number of conversions for the end result,'' he explained. ''If you find yourself going in and out of XML a lot for whatever reason in your architecture, then having a resting stop that is native XML would give you a big boost there because you are not going in and out as many times. If, for example, you are going in and out of XML and in and out of relational databases, you may find that you can cut down the number of conversions you're doing by having some of it stored natively in an XML database.''

Data Junction ETL tools and NeoCore's XML conversion and database technology could be used to pull data from disparate sources, including relational databases, fixed files and Excel spreadsheets and create an XML-based operational data store, David Leeper, NeoCore product manager told XML Report. XML applications for analytics could then be built on top of that, he added.

One of NeoCore's customers developed an analytic application that takes financial and sales history information on clients from a variety of sources to create such a data store, Leeper said. The XML data can then be analyzed to discover patterns, determine the status of a client and whether it would make a good reference for potential new clients.

For more information, click on http://www.datajunction.com or http://www.neocore.com.