Adding an information service activity to a business process

The information service activity enables you to discover and invoke operations on IBM® Information Server and offers direct access to relational database management systems through full SQL support.

The interaction with IBM Information Server enables you to quickly understand and integrate the large amounts of heterogeneous information stored within an enterprise and ensure the quality of this information over time.

Applying the information service SQL abilities allows you to use data in a business process in various ways, for example:
  • To guide the control flow. For example, you might want to use inventory information to decide if a supplier service needs to be called for items that will shortly be out of stock.
  • To retrieve business data and send it to partners, for example, clients or other services
  • To update business data. For example, the delivery time of an item can be changed based on the information received from the supplier of this item.
There are different kinds of information service:
  • For interaction with IBM Information Server:
    Information server
    Invokes an information service that was created using IBM Information Server.
  • To access relational database management systems using SQL, the following SQL support kinds exist:
    SQL snippet
    Allows you to run an SQL statement against database tables, including Data Definition Language (DDL) and Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements.

    In an SQL snippet, you can pass only references to data sets rather than copies of the data sets which improves performance significantly. Also, which data sets are accessed can be determined dynamically at process runtime.

    Retrieve set
    Allows referenced data sets to be loaded into variables. The data is returned as a business object.
    Atomic SQL sequence
    Allows you to define any number of SQL snippets and retrieve sets in one information service activity. The sequence is processed in one transaction in the order in which you defined the sequence elements.

The information service activity is an extension to the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).

(C) Copyright IBM Corporation 2006. All Rights Reserved.