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Difference between data integration and unification is best to analyze through Data Warehouse. Data Warehouse is widely used technology and it is quite often being treated to help company with reporting speed and storage issues. Data unification is something what Data Warehouse does with ease since it is constructed to gather information from many sources with purpose to speed reports and to store data. All data are at same place and customized for reporting processes.
Just pulling all data from source systems and placing it into Warehouse does not necessarily mean business logic can be easily restored. Restoration and quantification of business logic means data is also integrated, not only gathered at one place as data unification or single point of truth. It is not easy to restore business logic within data set since data flow on production systems is usually not big enough to describe processes for reporting purposes. Inadequate data flow and missing data are main reasons why Data Warehouse cannot by default provide integrated data but only unified. Business side usually misinterprets two terms and considers implementation of Warehouse will solve all problems in reports. Core reporting problems lie on production level with too little data exchange between systems which Warehouse cannot resolve. “Garbage in” means also “garbage out”.
Example of integrated data is presented with following case. Number of customers have bought marketing package A. Total number of currently sold marketing packages A should be tightly related with difference between current and last month of newly connected and disconnected packages. Total number of packages should be integrated with newly sold and packages that are not any more in use, so called churners. If production systems and billing are only setup for processes, it could mean that company will bill service correctly but perhaps will not report service reliably. Production systems are usually set for processes not for reporting. If reports are not immediately implemented during production systems deployment phase, additional implementation of reporting procedures into live production system will be far harder. Integration is not same as unification.
It is deeper and harder to achieve integration then simply implement Data Warehouse and make data unification.
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Source by Bozidar Kralj
