“Data integration is the process of transferring data between different storage types and locations. This typically includes extraction, cleaning, loading into target data repository and verification.”
Anatella.com’s Data Integration page.
Whilst cross-referencing some data integration work that I was doing recently, I came across this great web-page with helpful icons and descriptions for the different types of data integration, as follows:
- Data Migration – transferring existing data sets into a new data repository
- Data Consolidation – brings multiple sets of data together into a singular repository
- Data Federation – brings data from many different sources into a single repository
- Data synchronization – different repositories contain the same information
- Master Data Management – processes / tools to manage data across multiple repositories
Before seeing this page I’d never even thought of classifying my data modelling / mapping exercises into different categories like this. The terminology does make more sense though, so this becomes my new terminology baseline for data integration.