While much of this book has focused on web services, some systems-both legacy and current, use file-based integrations. Legacy services may use them because integration technologies have been limited to file transfer. While contemporary solutions still choose file transfer as it is an effective way to move large volumes of data without exposing backend data stores as you might with Extract Transform Load (ETL)-the way Oracle describes and implements it. Oracle technologies perform the movement of data and then transform it within the destination data store (typically a database).

The movement of bulk data is often schedule driven and referred to as batch processing. As the need for data to be moved in a timely manner is increasing, we now come across the idea of micro-batching. This is simply the act of executing the batch process more frequently, with the batch being smaller. So, what used to be a nightly batch, may now be addressed by running...