SmartData Fabric® Defined
WhamTech SmartData Fabric® (SDF) is a security-centric, transparent virtual distributed management system for data, master data and virtual graph data that plugs-and-plays in existing IT infrastructures, and complements and leverages existing systems, tools and applications. SDF complements and is agnostic to query engines, data sources, types, formats, locations or platforms, and runs from a cloud, on-premise or hybrid cloud. SDF’s unique use of indexes (aka EIQ Indexes), that do not generally store data, allows data, master data and virtual graph data management fundamentals to be addressed upfront while pre-processing data used to build and maintain indexes; before the data is queried and read, and without having to move or copy data, from sources. Data management fundamentals include data discovery, classification, security, governance, cleansing, transformation, standardization and relationships mapping, master data management and virtual graph database representation.
Best-of-Breed
SDF combines the best and overcomes the worst of the conventional approaches of data warehousing, federated data access and enterprise search by creating a hybrid approach combining the three together. Data can be accessed, queried and results read from any data source – structured, unstructured or semi-structured:
- Mainframes
- Legacy databases
- Office documents
- Web
- Social media
- Streaming
- Hadoop, Cassandra and other Big Data systems
- Elasticsearch, Solr and other search engines
- IoT devices
- Others – as long as data in sources can be read, it can be pre-processed, indexed and queried through standard drivers, and uniform APIs and SQL
Indexes and Adapters
SDF EIQ Indexes can be updated using 12 different methods of Changed Data Capture (CDC) to keep indexes in-sync with data sources. These methods range from near real-time (the most popular) to batch replace, and work either at the data schema-level or driver/API-level. Usually, initial indexing is a batch operation, then is switched over to an update operation that tends towards near real-time.
SDF EIQ Indexes can be used to monitor data source changes and event processing. WhamTech has realized success in combining event processing with REST APIs and BPM software (open source), and being able to write back to data sources. These are capabilities that can be used for use cases of interoperability, process automation/modernization and digital transformation/process reengineering.
SDF EIQ Indexes can be used to map relationships among designated entities in the the data, usually through a Standard Data View (SDV), to form Link Indexes™, which, in-turn, form the basis for Master Data Management (MDM) and virtual graph database and link analysis, and other capabilities.
SDF combines both index-based and conventional federated adapters that support:
- Standards such as ODBC, JDBC and REST APIs
- Uniform SQL and standard applications
- Reporting, BI and analytics tools such as Power BI®, Tableau® and QlikView® and potentially some of the newer tools such as Google® Looker®
- Graph/link visualization tools such as Cambridge Intelligence KeyLines®; a standard used by many prominent vendors