This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
13.3. Service Usage over Direct Data Store Usage
As we move towards multiple data stores in the application, there may be other applications in the enterprise that could benefit from the use of our data stores or the data stored in them. Using our example, the graph data store can serve data to other applications that need to understand, for example, which products are being bought by a certain segment of the customer base.
Instead of each application talking independently to the graph database, we can wrap the graph database into a service so that all relationships between the nodes can be saved in one place and queried by all the applications (Figure 13.4). The data ownership and the APIs provided by the service are more useful than a single application talking to multiple databases.
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Figure 13.4. Example implementation of wrapping data stores into services
The philosophy of service wrapping can be taken further: You could wrap all databases into services, letting the application to only talk to a bunch of services (Figure 13.5). This allows for the databases inside the services to evolve without you having to change the dependent applications.
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Figure 13.5. Using services instead of talking to databases
Many NoSQL data store products, such as Riak [Riak] and Neo4J [Neo4J], actually provide out-of-the-box REST API’s.