Someone at work mentioned this morning that a company they knew of has an interesting API strategy for collecting data from 3rd parties. You have heard of REST, and SOAP and xml-rpc…this is DSI. DSI is interesting in that it doesn’t require that you learn their particular web service, you only need to know SQL. That’s correct, DSI means DIRECT SQL INSERTS.
(I made up the DSI acronym, not the actual story)
Sure. Well-defined constraints plus insert rate-limiting plus authentication would probably work fine for most business to business interaction. I mean, I can see cases where this could work well, especially if all others can do is insert and you track who added what, so you can recover from impure data that passed the constraints.