Yesterday's DM Radio broadcast on data federation

I enjoyed appearing on the The DM Radio session yesterday The Extended Enterprise: Federated Data Models hosted by Eric Kavanagh and Jim Ericson, editorial director of Information Management. The guests, besides me, were Bob Eve, Composite Software; Bradley Wright, Progress DataDirect; Diby Malakar, Informatica; and Jeff Stutz, Denodo.

The topic was on using data federation to enable an enterprise to leverage information for analyzing their business and decision-making.

This technology is also called data virtualization and used to be called Enterprise Information Integration (EII).  Any time a technology gets renamed it’s guaranteed to be misunderstood by the industry. Marketing departments scramble to prepare Microsoft PowerPoint slides with new jargon and buzzwords to generate excitement.

Data federation should be considered as part of an enterprise’s data integration portfolio as I have discussed in my podcast Enterprise data integration software basics and my article
Beyond ETL and Data Warehousing.

A refreshing aspect of DM Radio (Information Management magazine)  is the No-Sales Pitch zone. Although vendors sponsor and appear on the sessions, Eric, Jim and an industry analyst (me yesterday) focus the session on:

•    What is the technology
•    How and where one uses it, and where you avoid using it
•    What are the gotcha’s
•    How should one proceed if interested

Bob, Brad, Diby and Jeff were terrific at answering those questions.

Click for the archived recording.