Bringing the Internet to your database: using SQL server 2000 and XML to build loosely-coupled systems

Loosely-coupled, distributed system architectures need to be flexible enough to allow individual components to join or leave the heterogeneous conglomerate of services and components and to change their internal design and data models without jeopardizing the whole architecture. A well-established approach is to use XML as the lingua franca for the integration layer that hides the heterogeneity among the components and provides the glue that allows the individual components to take part in the loosely integrated system. The article focuses on how to provide the basic technology to enable a relational database to become a component in such loosely-coupled systems and it provides an overview of the features that are needed to provide access via HTTP and XML.