The flexibility of a service oriented architecture (SOA) is compared to that of the classic data warehouse across three categories: (1) source system access, (2) integration and transformation, and (3) end user access. The findings suggest that an SOA allows better upgrade and migration flexibility if back-end systems expose their source data via adapters. However, the providers of such adapters must deal with the complexity of maintaining consistent interfaces. An SOA also appears to provide more flexibility at the integration tier due to its ability to merge batch with real-time source system data. This has the potential to retain source system data semantics (e.g., code translations and business rules) without having to reproduce such logic in a transformation tier. Additionally, the tight coupling of operational metadata and source system data within XML in an SOA allows more flexibility in downstream analysis and auditing of output . SOA does lag behind the classic data warehouse at the end user level, mainly due to the latter\u27s use of mature SQL and relational database technology. Users of all technical levels can easily work with these technologies in the classic data warehouse environment to query data in a number of ways. The SOA end user likely requires developer support for such activities
