As I have very little knowledge on how ESB's work in tandem with database I'm asking a question regarding how communication can take place between the two hoping I'll atleast be pointed in the right direction to search in!
SITUATION : We have two systems(one of them is the client's) on different networks which have their own databases. We are required to do a regular real-time data exchange of all points present in our database with the other. We are also required to have a provision to be abel to import data into our system. This exchange has to follow SOA functionality over customer provided Biztalk ESB.We are supposed to provide the exchange by the use of ODBC.
Question: My query is whether it is possible to integrate the databases to the ESB as some endpoints without making any use of WEBSERVICES or extra interfaces, and send the data over the ESB as a pull-push transfer mechanism?
I have tried searching the net for this situation but have not come up with a lot of straightforward answers. Could someone please point me in the right direction.
ESB Toolkit in BizTalk is not an ESB! It is just small additional tool for some special cases. Let's stop talk about the ESB, we need to solve the technical problem, right? As I can understand you have two SQL databases and want to integrate them. To do so with BizTalk the easiest way is to use the WCF-SQL ports/adapters. You start the Wizards for this adapter, choose the tables/sp-s which should provide data/consume data, the Wizard will generate all needed Xml schemas for you. Then you will use BizTalk Mapper to create the Xslt maps, which will transfer one SQL data format to another. They you will create a pair of ports. One will consume data from one SQL database, the second will insert data to another SQL database. One of this port will use the mentioned above Xslt map. If you need more processing, you could create and orchestration to manage additional processing, sophisticated error handling, etc.