For running a successful application, knowing your customer is a must. And the only way to know customer is to study them. This means you need to collect a lot of information about them. How would you deal with this data? Application developers are constantly looking for solutions to easily manage this mammoth amount of information. You would want all your data to be stored in such a way that you can retrieve them easily and swiftly. Now this is quite a challenge. Imagine if you want to know a particular customer’s age. First you have to find that customer’s details from a database with tens of thousands of customers. Then you have to sort through tons of information about him and find that particular detail. And more importantly this entire process must be completed in a fraction of a second. Data Virtualization and Data Federation are both database storage techniques which allow you to virtually bring together diverse information.
Data Virtualization
Data Virtualization offers the database users an interface where all required components of the data come together, without forcing the user to deal with the technical issues like location and structure of stored data, APIs, storage technology and so on. It can be thought of as an abstraction layer through which you can access data consistently.
Data Federation
Data Federation is a form of data virtualization, where data from different repositories are combined under a single view allowing you to use it easily. This approach improves the agility and allows you access data in near real time efficiently. This method is superior because it allows you to utilize the processing power of each data engine separately and maintains the highest query performance across the diverse databases. The fact that is easy to setup, maintain and administer is an added advantage. It allows the integration of ‘Big Data’ (Multi-Structure Data) and Structured data. It also supports query processing across cloud and data center sources.
Before you actually build an application you must decide what kind of data managing model you want to implement. Going into application development with your eyes closed might force you to undo and redo a major part of your application. If you are hiring a third party to build your application, ensure you discuss these issues with the app developers and formulate an action plan before hand. Hire the best iOS and Android application developers in the business and watch your dream app go viral.
