What is the primary goal of service-oriented architecture (SOA)?

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) focuses on designing services that can be reused and integrated across different applications, which is its primary goal. This architectural style facilitates the development of loosely coupled, distributed systems by breaking down applications into smaller, independent services that can communicate with each other over well-defined protocols.

The emphasis on reusability allows organizations to create a library of services that can be leveraged by various applications, thus improving efficiency, reducing redundancy, and speeding up the development process. This modular approach also makes it easier to maintain and update systems, as changes in one service do not necessarily impact others.

By contrast, creating monolithic applications would oppose the SOA principles of modularity and reusability. Limiting functionality of components does not align with SOA's aim of creating flexible and powerful services. Optimizing database performance, while important in its own right, is not the central focus of SOA, which is more concerned with the design and integration of services rather than just performance tuning of database systems.