Problem – Data Consolidation Is Not the Only Solution
Everyday IT is challenged to provide their business colleagues with new information typically sourced from existing data silos. When choosing between physical consolidation and virtual approaches, architects have to consider a number of business, data source and data consumer considerations. Increasingly, data federation is proving the right approach, especially when the business needs a solution fast, doesn’t have a sizable budget to spend on infrastructure and staffing, and wants to minimize the risk involved in deploying a new solution. queries and ETL scripts.
Optimize queries across your disparate data sources
Solution – Federate Data Faster, for Less with Composite
Composite helped pioneer data federation starting in 2002 and today provides the most proven data federation offering in the market. Further, Composite provides architects and developers with the most flexible pallet of federation options including:
- Federated Views
- Data Services
- Data Mashups
- Caches
- Virtual Data Marts
- Virtual Operational Data Stores
Forrester’s Case for Data Federation
In Federation: Sharpen Your Focus On Vast Constellations of Data, Forrester analyst James Kobielus and colleagues summarize the case for data federation as follows:
“Scattered business information permeates many enterprises. This disunited data often conforms to various schemas and formats, resides in sundry databases and applications, and falls under the purview of myriad owners, administrators, and business domains. Such a fragmented state of affairs can prove frustrating for information workers who require a single, unified view of disparate operational data within their reports, dashboards, query tools, and other business intelligence (BI) applications. The most common approach for integrating heterogeneous data into a single, unified BI view is enterprise data warehousing (EDW), which has constraints that often limit its applicability in highly decentralized and agile environments. When users simply need unified, near-real-time, on-demand access to data that originates in many source applications, data federation is an attractive alternative. Information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals should also consider data federation a complementary approach that can extend and enrich their current EDW environment.”
Gartner’s Case for Data Federation
In Hype Cycle for Data Management, 2009, Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst Ted Friedman provides the following data federation advice:
“The potential of data federation technology is compelling. In theory, this technology can create an abstraction layer for all applications and data, thereby achieving flexibility for change, pervasive and consistent data access and greatly reduced costs, because there is less need to create physically integrated data structures. The end result is greater agility from, and freer access to, an organization’s data assets.”
