The most important feature of the RefDb architecture is its use of publish and subscribe messaging to distribute data to its subscribers. Once an application has subscribed to the service guaranteed message delivery ensures all clients receive the data as soon as it changes without the need for the client to keep requesting it. This means RefDb can easily scale to support the enterprise. Some applications may wish to take advantage of RefDbs database directly, in which case the message server feeds a satellite database which the application then uses, rather than consuming resources on the main database. However, most legacy applications will use their own internal database to store data.

The diagram below shows the main components of the system where the RefDb components are coloured yellow.

Reference Data Message Broker [Label A]

The core of the system is the reference data message broker. It contains a standard relational database with a business object layer. All database accesses are made through the business object layer which ensures data integrity constraints and business rules are enforced.

The message broker allows clients to subscribe to a particular topic, such as a security topic, and sends messages containing XML data to the client when data changes.

Message Subscribers in Applications [Label B]

Message subscribers simply wait for messages from the message broker after they have subscribed to a particular topic and normally store the contents in their own database. We provide message subscribers which can easily customised or integrated with your own applications.

Manual Data Maintenance [Label C]

We provide a set of screens accessible from a web browser to maintain the data. These screens access the reference database through the business object layer.

Data Publishers [Label D]

A variety of external sources can be connected to the system. Each one uses the message broker layer to store data in the database rather than accessing the business objects directly. This allows external sources to simply send an XML message and the broker ensures it is delivered and processed correctly using the business object layer.

Satellite Database [Label C]

Some applications will find it convenient to access the business object layer directly. However, it is not desirable to have applications to directly access the main database, so a satellite database which subscribes to the main database is used to replicate the data and provide access to the business objects.

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