Physical federation, as the name implies, involves physically moving data from its target data source into an Oracle Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) system, Data Warehouse (DW) or Operational Data Store (ODS). The data movement may take place using bulk file transport, data streaming through ODBC or JDBC, a messaging system, reading of database log files or any information integration mechanism.
Traditionally, physical federation has been associated with enterprise data warehousing. Master Data Management and data hubs have moved physical federation from being a read-only database (such as a data warehouse or data mart) to a component of a company's OLTP infrastructure. This complicates the situation as solutions like Change Data Capture (CDC), bi-directional replication, and data write back to the source may be required.
Since we are pulling data in many cases from legacy environments, non-Oracle databases, or consolidating information that may have duplicate...