S.O.A.

I just came from the 2008 Oracle Technology Day where the leitmotiv of the conference was Service Oriented Architecture S.O.A.

 It seems that nowadays projects are evaluated not only on their CMMI compliancy but also to the degree to which their implemented architecture is Service Oriented. Do you user interfaces interact with your data base through re-usable services? Do you have a kind of service bus through which all calls to the data base transit?

 Put it simply, if you are doing direct select-update-insert-delete from your user interface or from within the data base then you are not following S.O.A. architecture. To select information from the data base then you should better implement a GetInformation re-usable service. If, instead, you want to update information in the data base then you should implement a SetInformation re-usable service.

 Well, this is in principle a good way of coding. However you should be careful about the performance side effects. Make sure to give the S.O.A. implementation task to persons knowing very well how the data base works. Particularly, on using bind variable, avoiding hard parses, choosing the best indexes, the best partitioning strategy and above all, persons who will not create the mother of the mother of the S.O.A re-usable services.