CHAPTER 1

Data integration and Talend Open Studio

There is nothing new about the fact that organizations’ information systems tend to grow in complexity. The reasons for this include the “layer stackup trend” (a new solution is deployed although old systems are still maintained) and the fact that information systems need to be more and more connected to those of vendors, partners and customers.

A third reason is the multiplication of data storage formats (XML files, positional flat files, delimited flat files, multi-valued files and so on), protocols (FTP, HTTP, SOAP, SCP and so on) and database technologies.

A question arises from these statements: How to manage a proper integration of this data scattered throughout the company’s information systems? Various functions lay behind the data integration principle: business intelligence or analytics integration (data warehousing) and operational integration (data capture and migration, database synchronization, inter-application data exchange and so on).

Both ETL for analytics and ETL for operational integration needs are addressed by Talend Open Studio.