Federating Data: Easy, Hard, or Poorly Understood Until One Tries It at Scale?
March 8, 2019
I read two articles this morning.
One article explained that there’s a new way to deal with data federation. Always optimistic, I took a look at “Data-Driven Decision-Making Made Possible using a Modern Data Stack.” The revolution is to load data and then aggregate. The old way is to transform, aggregate, and model. Here’s a diagram from DAS43. A larger version is available at this link.
Hard to read. Yep, New Millennial colors. Is this a breakthrough?
I don’t know.
When I read “2 Reasons a Federated Database Isn’t Such a Slam-Dunk”, it seems that the solution outlined by DAS42 and the InfoWorld expert are not in sync.
There are two reasons. Count ‘em.
One: performance
Two: security.
Yeah, okay.
Some may suggest that there are a handful of other challenges. These range from deciding how to index audio, video, and images to figuring out what to do with different languages in the content to determining what data are “good” for the task at hand and what data are less “useful.” Date, time, and geocodes metadata are needed, but that introduces the not so easy to solve indexing problem.
So where are we with the “federation thing”?
Exactly the same place we were years ago…start ups and experts notwithstanding. But then one has to wrangle a lot of data. That’s cost, gentle reader. Big money.
Stephen E Arnold, March 8, 2019
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