5 Paths To The New Data Integration

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - Information Week, Seth Grimes

Data integration will be a top story in information technology in 2011.

Whether your interests are in business intelligence, information access, or operations, there are clear and compelling benefits in linking enterprise data -- customer profiles and transactions, product and competitive information, weblogs, -- to business-relevant content drawn from the ever-growing social/online information flood.

ETL (extraction, transform, load) to data stores, together with the younger, load-first variant ELT, will remain the leading integration approaches. But they'll be complemented by new, dynamic capabilities provided by mash-ups and by semantic integration, driven by data profiles (type, distribution, and attributes of values) rather than by rigid, application-specific data definitions.

These newer, beyond-ETL approaches constitute a New Data Integration. The approaches were developed to provide easy-to-use, application-embedded, end-user-focused integration capabilities.

In this article I consider five examples, with capsule reviews of same-but-different approaches at Tableau, Attivio, FirstRain, Google, and Extractiv. Each example illustrates paths to the new data integration.

Click here to read the full article on data integration and Attivio at Information Week!