Consolidating data using data integration

Data integration is an important step in both the ETL and ELT modes of data processing. Data integration is the process of combining and blending data from different data sources to create enriched data that happens to represent a single version of the truth. Data integration is different from data ingestion because data ingestion simply collects data from disparate sources and brings it to a central location, such as a data warehouse. On the other hand, data integration combines those disparate data sources to create a meaningful unified version of the data that represents all the dimensions of the data. There are multiple ways to perform data integration, and a few of them will be explored in this section.

Data consolidation via ETL and data warehousing

Extracting, transforming, and loading data into data warehouses has been the best technique of data integration over the last few decades. One of the primary goals of data consolidation...