Physical MDM architectural overview

InfoSphere® MDM’s physical MDM capabilities make use of a base platform that is flexible and extensible, along with a number of core features.

This section contains high-level information on InfoSphere MDM’s physical MDM architecture to help you understand how it can be customized to meet your needs.

InfoSphere MDM is developed on the Java™ EE 5 platform. It is designed and built using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and is composed of loosely coupled multiple infrastructure and business components. The InfoSphere MDM services tier is deployed on an application server and the database tier uses a relational database management system.

The business services are made up of a collection of services provided with the product and any custom services built using the InfoSphere MDM Workbench. In addition to the business services, the service tier also offers administration services and a Web-based administration user interface.

You can interface with InfoSphere MDM using one of the supported interfaces including:
  • RMI
  • JMS
  • Batch
  • Web Services

InfoSphere MDM supports an XML based transaction interface. It comes with a schema for requests and responses, defined in the XSD file MDMDomains.xsd. The schema describes the canonical model for the business objects that can be passed in or returned from InfoSphere MDM services. For a complete list of all the available services and the corresponding input and output business objects, refer to the transaction documentation.

InfoSphere MDM also provides the ability to process services using an XML message format different than the InfoSphere MDM canonical model defined in MDMDomains.xsd. The external message format must be mapped to the InfoSphere MDM canonical business model prior to sending message requests to InfoSphere MDM. The InfoSphere MDM Workbench provides graphical mapping tools that enable you to more easily set up the message format mapping.

You can also interface with InfoSphere MDM using data formats other than XML.

Additionally, InfoSphere MDM also provides the ability to accept batch feeds for transactions.

Internally, InfoSphere MDM consists of two categories of modules, which are business modules and infrastructure modules.