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).