Reweaving the Tapestry: Integrating Database and Messaging Systems in the Wake of New Middleware Technologies

Modern business applications involve a lot of distributed data processing and inter-site communication, for which they rely on middleware products. These products provide the data access and communication framework for the business applications. Integrated messaging seeks to integrate messaging operations into the database, so as to provide a single API for data processing and messaging. Client applications will be much easier to write, because all the logic of sending and receiving messages is within the database. System configuration, application deployment, and message warehousing are simplified, because we don’t have to manage and fine-tune multiple products. Integrating messaging into a database also provides features like backup, restore, transactionality & recoverability to messages. In this paper, we’ll look at some aspects of messaging systems, and the challenges involved in integrating messaging such as message delivery semantics, transaction management and impact on query processing.