Gartner describes the data fabric architecture as the means of supporting “frictionless access and sharing of data in a distributed network environment.” To make this architecture work, it is necessary to implement a means to understand and assembly heterogeneous data by providing it with business meaning and flexibly integrating sources of any structural type. This is challenging due to several reasons, starting from the constraints of the architectural alternatives, and ending with the complexity to understand and query the aggregated sources.
The available options haven’t changed much in the last decade: Consolidating data into a data warehouse or graph-structured database, federating reporting, and data federation. Each alternative introduces implementation and operational constraints that involve investments in infrastructure and maintenance and varied skill sets. Moreover, till now there hasn’t been an integrative solution that resolves both the architectural and the “last mile” usability challenges, that is, encapsulating the complexity of the solution so data consumers across the enterprise conveniently gain a 360° view of data and easily generate complex queries to deliver advanced analytics and reporting conveniently and fast.
Data virtualization solutions are a viable solution to this challenge but their use is costly because of the continuous maintenance required to maintain indexes and because of the lack of relationship-rich semantic capabilities which are key to reduce complexity for end users and speed up analytics that make use of dynamic data sources.
The semantic data fabric is a flexible, reusable layer and set of data services used as the single source providing universal meaning and context to data for the entire organization. The data fabric integrates on-premise and cloud data sources in use by the organization, handing them semantic capabilities to provide answers to complex queries and to facilitate understanding and use of data. It provides consistent capabilities across on-premises and multiple cloud environments to accelerate digital transformation. Timbr enables the fastest and most convenient implementation of semantic data fabric connected to your cloud and on-premise databases and business intelligence tools. Contact us to schedule a demo.
