There is a lot of talk about using data federation, Enterprise Information Integration (EII) or data virtualization to deliver new data to the business, on-demand. However, do existing approaches cut it?

I have been following the data integration space for many years now, and like many of you, I have wondered about the viability of data federation as a data integration approach. Not because it does not hold promise – it does – it has many advantages as a fast, flexible and low cost approach to integrate multiple and diverse data sources in real-time, without the need for physical data movement.

However, according to the numerous architects that I have had the pleasure of  meeting with on the Informatica 9 World Tour, simple or traditional data federation has not been able to live up to its immense promise. And why is that I asked – the reasons were many…

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