I attended a good speech the other day on database security and one issue the guy asked was whether folk knew where their data was. I think some folk have a one dimensional view that data resides in the MS-SQL, Oracle DB and no where else.
As DBA’s can you give me a big list of everywhere corporate data for a specific system can go/end up. For example at a top level if you ask me you information system
1) gets/obtains data (online forms, data feeds, data extracts)
2) stores it and makes it available to the end user via some GIU (web app, intranet app, report viewer i.e. crystal)
3) exports data/processes it further (reports, test databases, extracts, backups)
Are there any more stages? Also where can your data come from? Some systems can obtain the data via online forms, but there must be other apps that get data from other means, i.e. not directly from the user.
Can you give me some examples in the lifecycle of database/information system, everywhere that “data”, intended for the database, can reside in your IT environment? From one extreme to the other, any where data could be stored in the IT environment for stages 1, 2, or 3.
See here for more info - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647328.aspx
or here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_service_bus
re: flat files, they are just files outside of the database. e.g. someone connects to sql server and exports all of a particular tables data to a .txt or .csv file.