I’m a datum, tra-la, tra-la, just humming along, happier
than most of my colleagues, now that Data Virtualization has come to my
life. I’m what they call a Master data, or
rather a source of record, which has been quite a challenge, since I used to
get cloned over and over, morphed, and turned upside down. That took lots of time and seemed to be
necessary because they couldn't quite get to ME, the original: unvarnished, and
clean as a whistle. My colleagues still deal with this and are copied to
staging databases all the time, leaving many places where versions reside.
There is a constant complex of synchronization and updates across all the
databases. Just imagine all the time to build all the comings and goings! Often it’s not even clear what the original, real value is or where it
all began. Of course, this is done through such a gallimaufry of tools and
custom coding that the information they convey is old by the time it is used.
And everyone knows the greater the gallimaufry rating, the higher the tech debt
accumulation. Bad stuff.
With this new Data Virtualization approach, I get to stay
right where I am, and whenever called upon, I send a fresh virtual ME instantly. I say
“virtual” because there’s no copy made of me, only a ghost of me is transmitted,
aligned with other data, usually to a browser or to feed some analytics
algorithm. Here’s where my psychiatrist has to get involved, because I have
this existential dilemma. Does the ghost that’s passed forward actually exist? Does
a datum exist if it’s passed virtually? Well, at least it can’t be stolen like
copies of data can. I stay up nights worrying about my colleagues who have to
be physically copied, or moved altogether, sometimes getting a little beat up, to some cloud in order to be used by
a SaaS application. I never have to move because my ghost is passed directly to
the cloud when it’s needed, never taking residence there. And one of the really
cool things is that if a user of the browser decides that my value needs to be
updated, they change it in the browser and send the ghost back to me with the
new value, assuming they have permissions to do that.
Sometimes when I’m needed virtually, there are too many
calls for ghosts, and the phantom of the opera sings one note too high and
crashes my host software system. Fortunately, the masters at Stone Bond, with
Enterprise Enabler®, not only have the speediest development environment on the planet, they also have a way of caching my ghost along with others in memory
since I really don’t change that often. In the background, the cache gathers
fresh ghosts whenever needed. When my call comes in, my ghost flies from the
cache of ghosts and finishes the journey, combined with some other ghosts
coming live from other systems. The phantom just hums along and the host system
lives happily ever after.