I need a single version of the truth. We hear that all the time. This is symptomatic of the growing amount of data on an ever-increasing number of platforms being managed by many different applications, database engines, and hardware infrastructures.
In this chapter, we will lay down the groundwork for the hands-on chapters that follow. Before we do that, we need to introduce some concepts and products to support the notion of data consolidation, what is driving it, and an approach to solving these problems with Oracle products. We will explore this from an application perspective with Oracle Master Data Management (MDM) strategy, as well as core technology products like RAC, TimesTen, and Coherence. Also, we will cover some topics regarding Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), data archiving and what that means for heterogeneous data sources. Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing are growing in momentum and we will discuss some...