The Unification Server enables an enterprise to integrate its information sources and provide unified access to its structured data. It is the engine at the back end driving the unification of databases, legacy systems and enterprise applications in the Enterprise Portal.

At the heart of the Unification Server is the patented Drag&Relate technology. You implement this technology on top of existing data sources (applications and databases). As such, you do not need to make any changes to the IT infrastructure in your company.

To implement the Drag&Relate technology, you use the development environment of the Unification Server to create a Database Unifier project, which retrieves structured data from a database. Other unifiers can be installed on the Unification Server, and extend its development tools to handle enterprise applications such as SAP R/3, SAP BW, Oracle Applications. The unifiers leverage the target applications' own architecture, user interfaces, security mechanism, and customizations.

At the front end, the user is working from the project’s iPanel in the Portal, and intuitively querying data sources using Drag&Relate. This consists of the user dragging visual elements representing data and dropping them onto other such elements, interrelating the data to create queries dynamically.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture of the Unification Server:

Each machine containing a unifier requires a Web server installation. The Unification Server is a COM-based extension to the Web server that enables unification functions such as Drag&Relate. The unifiers are adaptors which enable unification between specific applications, such as SAP R/3, SAP BW, Oracle and so on. The Distributed Query Processor (DQP) is Microsoft technology that enables the Unifier Server to launch complex SQL queries that span different information sources (unifiers). It is imbedded within the MS SQL Server.

When the user performs a Drag&Relate action in the front end, the client sends a HRNP (hyperrelational navigation protocol) request to the Unification Server through HTTP. The Unification Server resolves the relationship between the drag source and the drop target, and queries the database and/or applications to determine the record set. Then it redirects the result set to the Portal Server and launches the screen which appears in the browser.

The Unification Server features a repository of metadata it has extracted from the installed unifiers, a hyperrelational OLE DB provider, a security mechanism that supports LDAP-based directory servers, and Active Server Pages which, running on the Microsoft Internet Information Server, retrieve XML and display results in HTML. Its open architecture, supported by utilities and a full API set, lets developers customize and extend hyperrelational projects.