Data Blending andIntegration

These terms are the core of the Data Pipeline and are normally confused by each other.

Data Integration is to connect with one or more source systems to pull data whereas Data Blending is to merge all datasets into one viewable and understandable presentation view to answer business KPIs. In other words, Data Integration is the prerequisite process for Data Blending, if you can't get data from source systems, you can't blend it to present management for decision making.

Don't forget either Data Science, Business Intelligence or any kind of Analytics all work toward ONE BIG FAT REALITY, to achieve one or the other Business KPI(s).

Coming back to blending and integration. Don't forget in an organization, we have many systems with different objectives where any ONE kind of data could be residing in different patterns in different systems. For example, a product can be sold via multiple channels like from a shop or an online website or maybe from a mobile application etc. When product data is pulled from all these systems in one Data Warehouse solution to report product selling behavior, it's of utmost importance to gather all product selling transactions from all systems into one system which in our example is a Data Warehouse.

Now, it's not a simple task to load/ populate product transactions from all systems into one target table as different systems might have different ways of storing transactions. Here comes the Blending process, the development team will create joins, unions etc. or all kinds of transformation logics to convert or in our case to blend all types of products selling transactions in one standardized list.

So, in a nutshell, the blending process will assist in presenting standardized data in Dashboards and Reporting for Business Users for decision making.

In this era, data can come from social media, Videos, Audios, PDFs, Emails etc. and with the introduction of Data Lakes now all kinds of data either structured, semi or unstructured can be blended into one comprehensive view to target any given Business KPI.