IBM Informix - Integration Through Data Federation

ISBN : 0738499897

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Sample Chapter From IBM Informix - Integration Through Data Federation
Copyright © Chuck Ballard, Nigel Davies, Marcelo Gavazzi, Martin Lurie, Jochen Stephani

Data Federation Overview

In today’s e-business on-demand environment, integrating information across and beyond the enterprise is a competitive mandate. Initiatives such as customer relationship management, supply chain management, and business intelligence are based on successfully integrating information from multiple data sources. In this chapter we discuss the challenge of information integration. As with most technology directions, there are multiple levels of information integration and multiple approaches to consider when trying to accomplish it. One such approach is data federation. It is this approach on which we will primarily focus during the discussions.

1.1 The challenge of information integration

In most corporations, it is a given that different functional areas and departments will use different database systems, operating environments, techniques, applications, and software products to product, store, retrieve, and analyze critical data. It happens for many reasons, such as:

Mergers and acquisitions
Personal preferences
Changing technology
New product availability

As a result, corporations have their data stored in many different formats, on many different database systems, in many different applications, and in many different operating environments. This poses a huge challenge for the information technology (IT) department when data from these different areas must be consolidated, either temporarily or permanently. Also, this must be done if management is to get an accurate picture of what is going on in their businesses. It is a difficult position in which most corporations find themselves.

There are disparate sources of data everywhere, little of which is, or can easily be, integrated. For examples refer to Figure 1-1 on page 15. Most of the decisions made that resulted in this situation were well justified and probably good business decisions—at the time. But, now they are finding it extremely costly to consolidate, much less integrate, these sources of data to give management the information they need for decision making. So why do they not integrate all their sources of data?