Data Management and Migration Overview
DataMigrator management and migration is the process
of extracting data from one or more data sources and moving that
data into one or more data targets.
- A data source often
contains operational data, such as sales, orders, customers, invoices,
and inventories. The data source is designed for online transaction
processing and high-speed updates. Systems that maintain these data sources
are often highly volatile and mission critical. Within a company,
there may be many such systems containing related information with
no means for cross-structure comparison.
- A data target,
referred to as the data warehouse, data mart, or another type of
target, is often relational and is generally located on a machine
with optimal performance and availability. This data target typically
stores information historically, and is geared for high-performance
online analysis.
Often, the process of ETL management involves data cleansing,
such as numeric aggregation, improvements to cryptic names, or the
calculation of new columns. This process yields many benefits, including:
-
Ease of use. The
data warehouse may be optimized for analysis, and the data cleansing
process ensures that data is stored in a more readable format.
-
Reduced load on legacy systems. Since
your analysts are no longer accessing your operational data sources,
production systems are not impacted by complex queries.
-
Better response time. The
data warehouse can be situated on a local department machine. You
no longer have to search the network to find your data.
-
Ownership. Many
departmental data warehouses can be created, each one containing
summary information for that department only.