Federated Views
Problem - Database Views are Useful, But Do Not Work Across More than One Database
Database views are a useful tool within a relational databased environment. They provide an easy-to-create, semantically-independent way to model data using standard SQL methods. They simplify underlying data structures by abstracting from the source column names and data types to names and types more appropriate for the consuming application And they can join data sets from multiple tables to provide a more complete and useful data set. Finally, when queried, they leverage the optimizers in the database to maximize performance.
Unfortunately, when you need to perform these functions across multiple databases or other source types such as files, services, applications, and more, database views do not work.
Solution - Federated Views Enable Views to Work Across Multiple Sources
Composite data virtualization lets you easily build and run federated views. With Composite you can create a reusable federated view to model, access, combine, federate, and deliver data from multiple relational and non-relational sources. The Composite Studio, with it’s easy-to-learn, point-and-click development environment and automated code generation tools, greatly simplifies federated view building. With Composite provided APIs, you can include data from multiple relational databases, a wide variety of files including Excel and other formats, application data such as from SAP, and even XML sources without worrying about difficult connections, transforms, or other barriers.
The Composite Information Server stores these views, making them available at runtime to mulitple consuming applications such as BI or portals via popular standards including JDBC, ODBC, and ADO.NET. When run, Composite optimizes the query across all the sources required, leveraging source system resources and myriad other optimization techniques, to acheive performance levels unmatched by our competitors.
Federated Views
Selected Examples
- Budget vs. Actual Financial Analysis - Using federated views of budget data from spreadsheets and actual expenditures from SAP, financial analysts at a large retailer analyze variances using Composite data virtualization.
- Interest Rate Sensitivity Analysis - To calculate interest rate exposure for risk management 7x24, risk managers at a global money center bank use Composite data virtualization to federate up-to-the-minute interest rate and financial position data from multiple trading systems.
- IT Performance Management Dashboard - To gain a complete applications performance picture, IT operations managers monitor SLA and other system status metrics using Composite federated views sourced from a wide range of application management systems.
