16/01/2024

A tool for data integration facilitates the tasks of IT professionals in accessing, duplicating, transferring, and coordinating datasets across various data repositories, thereby improving information accessibility and data availability across an entire organization. Initiatives in data integration include activities such as extracting, transforming, consolidating, and disseminating different types of data to and from various applications and systems, including databases and data warehouses.

An adaptable and high-performance data integration tool empowers data engineers, ETL developers, and database administrators to effortlessly gather and process data from diverse platforms, enabling the provision of fresh and accurate data to business users at a faster pace. When equipped with an appropriate data integration tool, companies can streamline data preparation processes and enhance the efficiency of data delivery teams.

Use Cases for Data Integration Tools

Data Engineering involves the creation, administration, and operationalization of data pipelines to meet various analytical needs, including analytics, business intelligence (ABI), and data science. This is achieved by adhering to established architectural patterns, tools, and methodologies. Examples include assisting data science teams in identifying and testing high-value use cases and, in some instances, overseeing the management of data products

Master Data Management (MDM) involves leveraging data integration tools to facilitate and uphold the development, upkeep, and administration of master data. This includes tasks associated with data hubs, as well as activities related to data quality, and functions of data governance, such as the enforcement of business rules, hierarchy management, and policy implementation.

Cloud Data Integration entails the migration and modernization of data workloads in the public cloud, employing an architecture that spans on-premises and one or more cloud ecosystems (such as hybrid, multi-cloud, or intercloud). This approach allows for the optimal utilization of cloud resources. 

Support for Data Fabric Design involves the provision of data integration tools to address use cases associated with the evolving data fabric design. This facilitates quicker access to reliable data across dispersed landscapes by making use of active metadata, semantics, and machine learning (ML) capabilities.

Operational Data Integration supports use cases related to operational data integration, such as reverse extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) from data to applications, data acquisition and sharing, application data access and delivery, partner data sharing, and the consolidation of data associated with critical business processes.

Qlik typically provides the following functionalities within the realm of data integration tools:

Bulk/batch data movement: The capability to retrieve, transform, consolidate, and deliver data in bulk or batch mode, employing technologies such as ETL, ELT, or a combination of both.

Data API services: Data provided as a service through API design capabilities for:

• Establishing and overseeing outbound API endpoints utilizing existing data assets.
• Managing inbound API consumption for the intake of internal and external data.

Data virtualization: The capability to execute distributed queries across diverse data sources that are virtually integrated. This necessitates adapters for data sources, a metadata repository, and a distributed data query engine that can present results in various formats (e.g., API, JDBC, and SQL) for downstream utilization.

Data replication and synchronization: The ability to establish connections, access, ingest, and integrate data from databases, files, and events in almost real-time using data replication technologies, including log-based change data capture (CDC). It also offers the capacity to synchronize data after replication in target data stores.

Advanced data transformation: Features that facilitate and endorse advanced data transformation and processing tasks, including rectifying outliers, intricate parsing, data modeling, scripting, propagating changes, and constructing reusable transformations.

These standard capabilities facilitate innovative applications through distinctive functionalities, which include:

Self-service data preparation: The adaptability of data integration tools to cater to a variety of business roles (e.g., citizen integrators and business analysts) for self-service data integration. The focus is on empowering non-technical personnel who utilize a range of techniques, such as low/no-code access, profiling transformation, wrangling, filtration, enrichment, issue and outlier resolution, and basic modeling.

Data governance assistance: Features that support data governance requirements (e.g., data quality, data lineage, policy enforcement, masking, and annotation) while managing data to fulfill specific use cases (e.g., master data management and operational data sharing).

Metadata assistance: Features that facilitate the thorough exploration, accessibility, utilization, and distribution of technical metadata (e.g., usage data, transaction logs, and system workloads) and business metadata (e.g., glossary). This is frequently accomplished through embedded or seamlessly integrated data catalogs, aiming to automate or enhance tasks related to data integration and operations.

Augmented Data Integration: Features that enhance and optimize data integration operations (e.g., automatically addressing schema drifts and recovery) by extensively utilizing and analyzing metadata (e.g., usage data, transaction logs, system workloads), generative AI, and prepackaged ML algorithms. These elements can guide or automate tasks related to data ingestion, transformation, consolidation, and provisioning.

Data Integration Tools with Qlik and Talend

Qlik addresses a variety of scenarios through its data integration tools, including Qlik Catalog, Qlik Compose, Qlik Cloud, Qlik Enterprise Manager, Qlik Application Automation, and Qlik Replicate.

Following the completion of the acquisition of Talend in May 2023, the suite of data integration tools provided by Talend is also incorporated into the Qlik portfolio. These tools are the Talend Data Fabric – comprising components like API Services, Data Inventory, Data Preparation, Data Stewardship, Management Console, Pipeline Designer, Stitch, Talend Studio. Talend Big Data – along with the Talend Data Catalog.

Qlik Replicate

Enabling universal data accessibility

Qlik Replicate facilitates the replication, synchronization, distribution, consolidation, and ingestion of data across major databases, data warehouses, and Hadoop, both on-premises and in the cloud. Notable achievements with Qlik Replicate include:

• Enabling a large credit services organization to apply 14 million source changes to the target in just 30 seconds.
• Reducing nightly batch load time for a global insurer from 6-8 hours to under 10 minutes.

Accelerating data integration for analytics

Streamline the setup of data replication quickly and effortlessly through an intuitive GUI, eliminating the need for manual coding.

• Implement change data capture (CDC) processes for maintaining true real-time analytics with reduced overhead.
• Simplify the extensive ingestion of data into Big Data platforms from numerous sources.
• Efficiently process Big Data loads using parallel threading.
• Automatically generate target schemas based on source metadata.

Integrating data across diverse platforms

Qlik’s versatile software supports an extensive array of sources and targets, allowing the loading, ingestion, migration, distribution, consolidation, and synchronization of data on-premises and across cloud or hybrid environments. Some of the supported platforms include:

• Data Warehouses: Pivotal, Vertica, IBM Netezza, Teradata, Exadata, Snowflake, Azure Synapse
• Streaming Platforms: AWS Kinesis, Azure Event Hubs, Apache Kafka, Confluent
• RDBMS: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, SQL, DB2. Sybase
• Enterprise Applications: Salesforce, SAP
• Cloud Platforms: Google Cloud, Azure, AWS
• Cloud Service Platforms: Confluent, Databricks, Snowflake
• Mainframe: VSAM, RMS, DB2 z/OS, IMS/DB

A versatile platform for capturing data changes

Qlik Replicate provides a low-impact, real-time Change Data Capture (CDC) solution for various database systems, offering flexible options for processing captured data changes:

• Batch-optimized: Group transactions into batches to optimize data ingestion and merging into data warehouses, both on-premises and in the cloud. 
• Transactional: Apply transactions in the order they were committed to the source for strict referential integrity and minimal latency.
• Message-oriented data streaming: Record and funnel the data changes into systems like Apache Kafka that act as message brokers.
• Data warehouse optimized: Load data with native, performance-optimized APIs for Snowflake, Azure Synapse, and other EDWs using massively parallel processing (MPP).

Performance and scalability

Qlik’s universal software supports a wide range of sources and targets, enabling data loading, ingestion, migration, distribution, consolidation, and synchronization on-premises and across cloud or hybrid environments. Key features include:

• Massive scale: Replicate data across hundreds of sources and targets.
• Low impact: Reduce overhead from target performance and data source through zero-footprint, log-based technology.
• Centralized monitoring and control: Utilize a single interface to create data endpoints, design and execute replication tasks. Monitor thousands of tasks through a single console with user-defined alerts and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
• High throughput and low latency: Move data across the enterprise or hybrid environments quickly to meet real-time business needs.

Facilitating SAP analytics

Qlik Replicate is optimized for delivering SAP application data in real-time for big data analytics. With Qlik Replicate for SAP, users benefit from:

• Real-time integration: Utilize Qlik Replicate CDC to ingest live SAP data for real-time analytics in data lakes or other targets and generate live Kafka messages for streaming analytics.
• Flexibility: Move relevant SAP application data to any major database, data warehouse, or Hadoop, on-premises or in the cloud.
• Easy data access: Capture and translate complex SAP formats, then export data with an intuitive and automated interface designed for the SAP environment.

Optimizing data movement for cloud-native environments

• Secure data transfer: Implement advanced, NSA-approved (AES-256) encryption.
• Ensure high performance: Efficiently compress and transfer data through multiple paths over the wide area network (WAN).
• Enable full hybrid mobility: Move data across, into, and out of major cloud platforms and cloud service providers.

Flexible Deployment

Qlik’s data integration platform is vendor-agnostic, offering maximum choice and deployment flexibility for storing, transforming, and analyzing data:

• Qlik Data Integration – A client-managed solution that can be installed on-premises or as a virtual machine image in a location of your choice.
• Qlik Cloud Data Integration – Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (eiPaaS) managed by Qlik.

Qlik Compose

Accelerate Time to Analytics

Traditional methods of constructing and managing data warehouses are struggling to keep up with business demands. The extensive and error-prone effort involved in multi-month ETL development to establish a data warehouse—typically accounting for 60-80% of preparation time—often results in an outdated data model before the commencement of the BI project. Making modifications to these fragile data warehouses leads to further delays, ties up skilled resources, and hinders project return on investment (ROI).

To expedite the journey to analytics, it is crucial to streamline the data warehouse creation and management lifecycle wherever feasible.

Modern Approach to Data Warehousing

Qlik Compose for Data Warehouses presents a contemporary solution by automating and optimizing the creation and operation of data warehouses. Qlik Compose automates warehouse design, generates ETL code, and swiftly implements updates, all while adhering to best practices and established design patterns. Qlik Compose for Data Warehouses significantly diminishes the time, cost, and risk associated with BI projects, whether executed on-premises or in the cloud.

Agile Data Warehouse Automation

Markedly reduce the duration, expenses, and uncertainties of data warehousing projects.

• Lessen reliance on highly technical development resources.
• Automatically generate ETL processes to minimize time, costs, and risks.
• Incorporate best practices and templates for more efficient BI projects.
• Swiftly design, construct, load, and update data warehouses.
• Generate end-to-end workflows automatically, covering data ingested to report generation.

Intuitive and Guided Processes

Qlik Compose supports IT and helps with data warehouses in several ways:

• Simplify the generation of data warehouses and ETL processes, with auto-generated ETL code for populating and loading data warehouses.
• Enable the deployment of data marts without the need for manual coding, offering a range of options such as transactional, aggregated, or state-oriented data marts.
• Automate the design of data models and source mapping, allowing the creation or importation of data models that can be iteratively modified and enhanced.
• Facilitate the effortless loading and synchronization of data from sources, with real-time loading of source feeds employing change data capture (CDC).

Enhance the Efficiency of Data Warehousing

Key operational features include:

• Monitoring and Notification: Monitor the status of all auto-generated tasks and workflows, providing proactive status alerts.
• Data Quality: Configure and enforce pre-loading rules to automatically detect and address issues related to values, formats, data ranges, and duplication, while implementing exception policies.
• Lineage and Impact Analysis: Automatically generate metadata during design and implementation phases. Regenerate data lineage when changes are implemented.
• Workflow Designer and Scheduler: Execute all ETL tasks for data warehouses and data marts seamlessly as a unified end-to-end process. Schedule workflow executions to align with business and IT processes.
• Data Profiling: Validate data before loading by identifying and resolving format issues and discrepancies.

Qlik Enterprise Manager

A comprehensive replication control center for the enterprise

Qlik Enterprise Manager simplifies the administration of Qlik Replicate across the entire enterprise.

• Design and execute batch loads and continuous change data capture (CDC) seamlessly across all sources and targets through a unified interface.
• Facilitate extensive management consolidation across numerous Qlik Replicate servers and potentially thousands of diverse endpoints.

Monitor, analyze, and oversee

• Access real-time dashboards featuring performance Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and historical charts, enhancing capacity planning and load-balancing decision-making.
• Simultaneously monitor hundreds of replication tasks in real-time across the environment to aid in troubleshooting and remediation for meeting SLAs.
• Automate the design and operation of replication tasks and integrate with enterprise dashboards using APIs.
• Supported APIs include REST, .NET, and Python.

Integration with Qlik Catalog

• Automatically catalog data assets produced by Qlik Replicate directly within Qlik Catalog.
• Track end-to-end data lineage to enhance compliance, governance, and trust in Qlik Catalog.

Qlik Cloud

Live Data Movement

Effortlessly replicate data from both on-premises and cloud sources into Qlik Cloud and other prominent cloud data platforms. Enable automatic and continuous data ingestion without the need for job scheduling or scripting. Keep your data consistently updated without manual intervention, empowering insights and actions during critical business moments.

• Support for leading cloud data platforms such as Snowflake Data Cloud, Azure Synapse, Google Big Query, and Databricks.
• Real-time movement from various enterprise sources, including relational databases, SAP, mainframe, and SaaS applications.
• Intuitive point-and-click data pipeline configuration for swift deployment.

Data Transformation

Transform raw transaction records into readily consumable data quickly through auto-generated, push-down SQL. Qlik’s no-code interface facilitates the creation of reusable transformation pipelines that intelligently conform data to dimensional models or custom formats.

• Simple transformations – Utilize the no-code interface for table-based transformation rules, such as column renaming, data filtering, and standardization.
• Advanced transformations – Utilize the data modeling interface to automatically generate star schema data marts in the target data warehouse.
• Custom SQL – Integrate your own SQL into the pipeline when custom transformations are necessary.
• Third-party data transformation – Data from third-party tools can be transformed or shared within data lakes or data warehouses.

Optimal Data Architecture

Qlik’s cloud integration platform offers several scalability, security, and maintenance advantages in comparison to traditional integration solutions and contemporary iPaaS offerings:

• Agentless data gateway – The data replication architecture guarantees no additional overhead or security attack vectors are added to your production data systems, unlike agent-based approaches.
• Secure point-to-point data transfer – The secure point-to-point replication architecture ensures low data latency and maximum data availability through Live Views.
• Data architecture agnostic – Create pipelines seamlessly integrable into any data architecture, such as hub, fabric, or mesh.

Qlik Application Automation

Drive Action from Insight

With Qlik Application Automation, you can establish dynamic processes that autonomously respond to business events, initiating informed actions in your most widely used SaaS applications. Now, when your analysis reveals positive responses from your highest-value customers to a new offer, your loyalty program is automatically activated, seizing the business opportunity.

Development without Code

The visually intuitive automation builder enables the swift assembly of blocks to construct intricate workflows. Its drag-and-drop interface is user-friendly for business users, while also offering advanced features like conditions, loops, lists, and error handlers for technical users.

Comprehensive SaaS Connectivity

Swiftly connect to leading SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more. Application functionality is presented as discrete blocks, encapsulating and simplifying the intricacies of low-level APIs.

Integrated with Native Qlik Cloud

Efficiently create automations within Qlik Cloud, utilizing robust APIs to automate analytics DevOps and integration processes. Operationalize tenant administration, streamline application development, intelligently respond to events, and enhance collaboration processes.

Dynamic Actions

Establish dynamic actions triggered automatically based on insights, exceptions, or defined variances in your data. For instance, a territory manager clicks a button on their dashboard to automatically reprioritize outstanding opportunities and shares the results via Slack with their team. By enhancing business processes with analytical and data insights, collaboration improves, the sales cycle accelerates, and the gap between insight and action is narrowed. Automations can be triggered by various dynamic actions, including application events, schedules, webhooks, or button clicks.

Centralized Management

Automations are centrally cataloged, managed, and monitored from a unified location to optimize productivity and efficiency.

Qlik Catalog

Consolidate Your Content for Seamless Accessibility

Aggregate data and content from diverse origins into a unified and easily accessible repository. Robust data onboarding allows for the swift simplification and scalability of describing and comprehending the contents of datasets, applications, automation workflows, business terminologies, and other assets.

Qlik’s integrated catalog including technical, operational, and business metadata, empowers individuals to effortlessly search and promptly utilize trusted, relevant data.

Instill Confidence in Every Dataset

Qlik automatically identifies and documents relationships between datasets and various BI tools. This lineage offers visibility into the source and journey of each dataset.

Users can rapidly grasp the origin, evolution, and significance of the data. Data engineers can more effectively troubleshoot issues such as potential duplications, thereby optimizing data quality. This instills trust in your data and analytics, enhancing usage and confidence in subsequent insights and actions.

Boost Analytics Utilization. Effortlessly Locate, Utilize, and Share Data.

When individuals have on-demand access to trusted analytics-ready data, they can address more inquiries, make better decisions, and act on informed insights more expeditiously. With Qlik, users can effortlessly discover, preview, and select the content they need through robust search functionality across all their datasets, applications, notes, and additional content. This content incorporates a business glossary, ensuring a shared language for key business terms across the organization.

With a unified catalog, you can eliminate silos, ensure consistency, and promote collaboration and reuse, unlocking greater value from your data.

Talend Data Fabric

Ensure Data Relevance, Not Just Accessibility

Gathering the right data from various sources can pose a challenge, especially when the demand for speed in business operations is high. Talend offers a cohesive strategy that merges swift data integration, transformation, and mapping with automated quality checks to guarantee dependable data at every stage.

An Integrated Approach to Data Integration

Whether it’s swiftly ingesting data into a data warehouse or managing intricate multi-cloud projects, the cloud-native Talend Data Fabric is equipped to address your requirements. User-friendly tools for ELT/ETL and change data capture (CDC) simplify the integration of batch or streaming data from nearly any source. Additionally, integrated preparation functionality ensures that your data is ready for use from the outset.

Talend Data Catalog

Establish and Govern a Central Data Catalog

Transform data governance into a collaborative effort with a secure central hub where teams can collaborate to enhance data accessibility, accuracy, and business relevance. Support data privacy and regulatory compliance through intelligent data lineage tracing and compliance tracking.

Discover and Share Trusted Data Efficiently

Empower data consumers to swiftly access the right data. Data Catalog streamlines the search and retrieval of data, allowing users to verify its validity before sharing with peers. Information about the business glossary or metadata can be contributed by anyone with the framework of collaborative user experience.

Data Integration Tools from Microsoft

Function	Application
Establish secure messaging workflows by connecting on-premises and cloud-based applications and services	Logic Apps
Establish secure messaging workflows by connecting on-premises and cloud-based applications and services	Service Bus
Safely publish APIs for internal and external developers to utilize when linking to backend systems located anywhere.	API Management
Utilize a fully managed event-routing service with a publish-subscribe model to connect supported Azure and third-party services, streamlining event-based app development	Event Grid
Address intricate orchestration challenges with an event-driven serverless compute platform.	Azure Functions
Streamline data transformation by visually integrating data sources, constructing ETL and ELT processes, and expediting the process with over 90 pre-built connectors designed to manage data pipelines and support enterprise workflows.	Azure Data Factory

What Technoforte Can Do For You

Technoforte is a data analytics services and consulting company, including data integration services. We have 21+ years of Business Intelligence implementation experience using cutting edge tools such as Tableau, Microsoft BI, Qlik and Snowflake. Besides data integration services, we offer the following services:

• Data Warehousing
• Data Analytics & Design
• Predictive Analytics
• Big Data
• Data Integration and Data Migration
• Data Governance

Speak to our experts today to get a quote. Learn more here!