Breaking Down Data Silos with Foreign Data Wrappers
At the same time, developers are also facing added pressure to speed application delivery and respond more directly to line of business needs. This has given rise to ‘shadow IT’ efforts – a term used to describe IT systems and solutions built or used within an organization without the involvement of IT leadership
.. Integrating Foreign Data Types in Postgres
Postgres has a solution for this dilemma: a feature called a Foreign Data Wrapper(FDW), the first of which was developed four years ago by PostgreSQL community leader Dave Page and based on the SQL standard SQL/MED (SQL Management of External Data). FDWs provide a SQL interface for accessing remote and large data objects in remote data stores, enabling DBAs to integrate data from disparate sources and bring them into a common model under the Postgres database.
Through this, DBAs can access and manipulate data being managed by other systems as if it were within a native Postgres table. For example, using the FDW for MongoDB, database administrators can query the data from the document database and join it with data from the local Postgres table using SQL. Using this method, users can view, sort and group the data as rows and columns or as JSON documents. They can even write (insert, update or delete) data directly in the source document database from Postgres as if were a single seamless deployment. The same could be done with a Hadoop cluster or MySQL deployment. FDWs allow Postgres to function as a central federated database, or ‘hub,’ for enterprises
.. According to Gartner, “By 2017, 50% of data stored in NoSQL DBMSs will be damaging to the business due to a lack of applied information governance policies and programs.