The Secret to Making Data Fabric Work for You!

One of my more controversial newsletters was on data mesh, where I shared a joke that - data mesh is a data fabric with holes poked in it.?

Amusing as it may be, it isn’t a true picture.?

While both Data Mesh and Data Fabric address the centralized data/team chokepoint, they come at it from two very different perspectives.

Data Mesh is an organizational approach of creating & providing data products. Whereas, Data Fabric is an architectural pattern to get data from federated sources without the expense of a data warehouse.

Today, let’s talk about Data Fabric.?

To extract value from data, we need to combine data from multiple sources.?

But building traditional data warehouses can be time-consuming and costly, often resulting in bottlenecks.?

By the time they are complete, the original use-case often changes.

Data Fabric deals with this challenge by providing an architectural framework that enables the integration of metadata from different silos in real time, to the point where decisions can be made.

All this without having to move the data, transform it into the consistent format, or analyze it in a minute detail to understand how different datasets ought to be connected (aka finding common keys for the data geeks in the audience).

On paper, it’s a great idea.

If you have exceptional business and technical metadata on your operational databases along with an overarching semantic model for the whole company - it can work wonders.

Unfortunately, most companies don't have either and both of them are some of the most difficult data capabilities to establish, not because of the technical challenges but cultural ones.?

Here are the two possibilities for using data fabric successfully:?

#1 - Have a detailed metadata and an overarching semantic model.

OR

#2 - Implement data fabric on top of already curated data warehouses.?

A lot of companies have business data warehouses with enough business metadata and common keys information and that serves as a great starting point.?

The tallest skyscrapers in the sky have the strongest foundations.?

Build data fabric on top of already curated data-sets. That is your quickest path to success.

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