An Overview of SQL Support in Workflow Products

Over the last years, data management products as well as workflow products have established themselves as indispensable building blocks for advanced IT systems in almost all application areas. Recently, many vendors have created innovative product extensions that combine service-oriented frameworks with powerful workflow and data management capabilities. In this paper, we discuss several workflow products from different vendors with a specific focus on their SQL support. We provide a comparison based on a set of important data management patterns and illustrate the characteristics of various approaches by means of a running example.