Data services are at the leading edge of data integration. Traditional data integration involves moving data to a central repository or accessing data virtually through SQL-based interfaces. Data services are a means of making data a 'first class' citizen in your SOA.
Recently, the idea of SOA-enabled data services has taken off in the IT industry. This is not any different than accessing data using SQL, JDBC, or ODBC. What is new is that your service-based architecture can now view any database access service as a web service. Service Component Architecture (SCA) plays a big role in data services as now data services created and deployed using Oracle BPEL, Oracle ESB, and other Oracle SOA products can be part of an end-to-end data services platform. No longer do data services deployed in one of the SOA products have to be deployed in another Oracle SOA product. SCA makes it possible to call a BPEL component from Oracle Service Bus and vice versa.
