Data Virtualization: An Introduction

Leveraging business data as a valuable asset is no longer a debated concept – it’s a broadly adopted, competitive undertaking that’s part and parcel to cloud modernization. Today, if there’s one thing that defines competitive advantage in the data analytics arena it’s streaming data platforms. Older approaches employing batch-only analytics, brittle ETL pipelines, and the latency they can introduce just don’t cut it anymore. Cloud-Modernized Analytics are poised to step in and take over.

Fanatics, a popular sports apparel website and fan gear merchandiser, needed to ingest terabytes of data from multiple historical and streaming sources transactional, e-commerce, and back-office systems to a data lake on Amazon S3. Once ingested, the data would be analyzed to better identify, predict, and fulfill customer needs related to the products Fanatics offers in over 300 online and offline stores. To accomplish this, Fanatics chose Attunity Replicate, a software solution featuring continuous data capture (CDC) and parallel threading for streaming data in real time from multiple sources into a data lake on Amazon S3. The data can then be consumed in Apache Kafka for real-time analytics. Attunity helps Fanatics avoid the heavy lifting of manually extracting data from disparate sources and enables the organization to see results in real time.

Business users have a tremendous appetite for data. The “single version of the truth” was a rallying cry to deliver business data in data warehouses for years. Users were able to digest and analyze large volumes of corporate data. They reviewed trends, identified anomalies, and supported decision-making because they had the detailed data to support action. As the business/data environment matured, the need for more diverse detail and increased delivery speed only grew. The data lake became a successful mechanism for delivering data from diverse systems in a timely manner.

To ensure that the third-party verification activities undertaken by companies are broadly comparable, CDP requires verification to be completed in accordance with recognised verification standards. In this webinar, gold CDP-accredited solution provider, Greenstone outlines 5 key software tools for preparing your CDP data for verification.