IBM will announce later this month that it will ship by June the first product from Xperanto, an initiative aimed at helping companies fetch information from many data sources all at once, from sales records to documents stored in e-mail servers.Given that Oracle, BEA and Microsoft are going after competing schemes, wouldn't this technology change one incompatible layer for another (with less hooks)? Hopefully they a standard will eventually emerge, a SOAP or XML-RPC-based derivation for working across databases. If not, the same problem will eventually appear again.
