2013 PNEC Data Integration, Houston—Part II

摘要

Our best paper award for the 2013 PNEC goes to Martha Gardill for her presentation of Pioneer's four year journey to data virtualization. Pioneer's activity in unconventional exploration has seen the deployment of multiple 'best of breed' applications leveraging different architectures and data integration mechanisms. The downside of best of breed is that the onus falls on the operating company to bring it all together. This can be tricky as the authoritative source of data may not be evident and there may be overlap in application capability. At the start of the program in 2009 Pioneer evaluated three options—direct access to data stores, build a data warehouse, or develop a 'self service' data system. The latter was chosen partly because of application scalability issues and also concerns over compliance issues with multi-user access to data. The solution, Pioneer's 'self serve data system' (SSDS) leverages Composite Software's data virtualization engine alongside Tibco's ActiveMatrix Business Works business automation platform. SSDS has democratized data access for Pioneer's users. Power users can develop views, access applications and use reporting tools. Most use cases are for read-only access but the Tibco messaging bus also allows for update. In the Q&A, Gardill revealed that the biggest challenge was finding the right data virtualization tool.