Data Fabric as Modern Data Architecture

Chapter 2. What Is a Data Fabric?

Let’s start with what a data fabric isn’t. It is not a single product or even a single platform. You can’t buy and deploy it overnight. It is an architecture. And a journey.

The good news is that you don’t have to rip and replace your existing technology. A data fabric encompasses the data ecosystem you have in place. Neither do you need to be beholden to a single vendor. You can choose best-of-breed solutions and—in theory at least—they should all work together within your data fabric.

To summarize what we discussed in Chapter 1, with a data fabric your users will get to spend more time analyzing their data than wrangling with it. And other consumers of data—think systems and applications—will get access to integrated data. It’s as simple as that. The data fabric is there to make it easier to find data in a way that’s trusted and gives access to anyone. This is the frame for our entire data fabric discussion: that a data fabric will drive the old 80/20 rule (now 70/30) to increasingly favorable proportions.

Some people call it data intelligence rather than data fabric, because it makes it easier for users and systems/applications to intelligently find, work with, and clean data, and apply AI models to it.

So what is a data fabric?

A data fabric is a modern, distributed data architecture that includes shared data assets and optimized data management and integration processes that you can use to address today’s data challenges ...