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While some data in both systems is identical, some is other data may be similar but not the same.
With small organizations, it can be straight-forward straightforward to keep just a few systems up to date. As But as an organization brings more systems online, their business data often gets increasingly duplicated and the problem of , which poses a problem when keeping all of the systems up to date becomes problematic. The process of keeping data up to date between disparate systems is called Data Integration (DI).
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As customer information changes over time (i.e. customer address addresses or phone numbernumbers), keeping all the systems up to date becomes exponentially more difficult.
Considering Consider the diagram above:
- Where is the truth?
A customer's email address would may be stored on several systems and there may be , which may result in conflicting values. If this is the caseso, which system holds the true/correct value?
- Which system gets notified of a change and what data elements do other systems need?
In the example above, if the Credit Card Processing system receives updated customer address, which of the other systems also need to have that data? The Accounting and Distribution systems. If only the street address changed, but the city, state, and zip code information remain the same, then only the street address data element of the customer's address data record needs to be updated in the other two systems.
If all systems need to be updated, then each system needs to know how to transform the data to be consumed by each of the other systems. This requires programming many transformations. In an extreme case, the example above could take five transformations for each of the six systems, requiring 30 transformation modules or adaptors.
Note: An adaptor is software located within a system that connects to, and shares data through, the YOUnite Data Hub. The adaptor focuses on Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) functions, ensuring any system "outbound data" meets defined format requirements before it gets transformed into an "inbound data" format that another system requires. The YOUnite Data Hub sits between the various systems, routing data between them based on which systems have access to which data (data governance).
scaleable web application that handles the api and message broker requests that adaptors and the YOUnite api consumers communicate through.
- Are changes handled in real time or in batch?
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