This post was originally published on Info World
What is data fabric?
Data fabric is a type of architecture that aims to provide unified access to the data stored in various places across your organization. The data fabric concept recognizes that most enterprises aren’t able or willing to consolidate every department’s valuable data into one huge data lake.
A data fabric instead serves as an abstraction layer that interacts with individual data silos, weaving together important information stored in everything from massive traditional RDBMSes to small departmental NoSQL databases. The goal is to automate data discovery and hide the details of CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) transactions from the user so they can treat your company data as one big store of information.
This is, as you can imagine, easier said than done, but valuable if you can pull it off. The term data fabric was coined in the early 2000s by an analyst at Forrester, but the folks at rival consultancy Gartner have been the ones pushing the idea of this architecture as a distinct category. The concept isn’t fully formed yet — there isn’t universal agreement on what data fabric architecture looks like, for instance, and vendor offerings billied as data fabric don’t
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