Extensible data management in the middle-tier

Current data management solutions are optimized for intra-enterprise, client-server applications. They depend on predictability, predefined structure and universal administrative control, and cannot easily cope with change and lack of structure. However, modern e-commerce applications are dynamic, unpredictable, organic, and decentralized, and require adaptability. eXtensible Data Management (XDM) is a new approach that enables rapid development and deployment of networked, data-intensive services by providing semantically-rich, high-performance middle-tier data management, and allows heterogeneous data from different sources to be accessed in a uniform manner. We discuss how middle tier extensible data management can benefit an enterprise, and present technical details and examples from the Index Fabric, an XDM engine we have implemented.