September 14, 2020 Posted in API, Blogs, BPM, Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Integration, ESB, SOA

During past two decades, I worked for Oracle, Accenture, Deloitte and involved clients from different industries, including consulting, forestry, finance, healthcare, retails and government agencies, what I observed was their IT environments are more and more complex and expensive, hard to manage and maintain. To simplify IT and reduce cost become strong demands from business.

In enterprise environment, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is outstanding since the IT environment is changing quickly with the continuous procurement and integration of new systems. The purpose of this article is to provide the perspectives on middleware selection, approaches and tools, and enterprise integration strategies.

A few key principles of enterprise integration:

June 7, 2020 Posted in Blogs, Database

Often we need work on existing database schema. How to quickly master the database structure can be a challenge since we might not be able to get the data model ERD diagram from project repository.

However, as long as you get access to the database, then you should be able to generate the data model using SchemaSpy. SchemaSpy is LGPL-based, developed by John Currier in 2004. It has been improved constantly since then.

SchemaSpy is written in Java and deployed as a jar file. Current version is 6.1. It’s a command line tool. The output is a folder with html and other files which outline the database tables, views and their relationships. But before you run, you need have JDBC driver and GraphViz ready...

December 15, 2019 Posted in BI, Blogs, Data Visualization and Analytics, Database, LiveSync Automation

One of my municipality clients has a requirement to handle batch data from multiple data sources for visualization and analytics needs. The data source can be ERP system, sensors or internal databases. Sensors load data into time series database continuously. It requires BI dashboard show charts based on latest data in near real-time manner.

Let’s see how we design the architecture to satisfy the requirements.

First, we have data sources listed in the left, including ERP, time series database-based backend systems, other databases and data flow from APIs ;

Second, we have ETL process to load data from data sources to DVA platform. You may choose any ETL tool you like, but we highly recommend Lionsgate Software’s LiveSync Au...