What is the Difference Between Data Integration and Data Migration

The main difference between data integration and data migration is that data integration combines data in different sources to provide a view to the user, while data migration transfers data between computers, storage types, or file formats.

Generally, data is an important asset for small scale organizations to large enterprises. Data integration and data migration are two processes involving data.

Key Areas Covered

1. What is Data Integration
     – Definition, Functionality
2. What is Data Migration
     – Definition, Functionality
3. Difference Between Data Integration and Data Migration
     – Comparison of Key Differences   

Key Terms

Big Data, Database, Data Integration, Data Migration

Difference Between Data Integration and Data Migration - Comparison Summary

What is Data Integration

Data integration is the process of combing data from multiple sources and providing a view to the user. It can happen in different situations, such as in commercial and scientific applications. For example, two companies might require merging their databases. Similarly, it might be required to combine research results into a single storage.

Difference Between Data Integration and Data Migration

With the improvement of the business processes and the functional units, the amount of data has increased. Thus, this kind of large quantity of data is called big data. And, data integration is used to share this big data among multiple systems. Also, data integration allows internal team members and external users to share data.

What is Data Migration

Data Migration is the process of transporting data between computers or storage devices and involves various types of migrations such as storage, database, application and business process migration.

There are various reasons for data migration. Some of them include the replacement of storage devices or their upgrading, server maintenance, website merging, disaster recovery, and data centre relocation. However, organizations need to have effective planning and validation mechanism to minimize the impact of data migration on compatibility and performance issues.

In the above aspect, automated data migration is useful in reducing human error. Moreover, it also minimizes the application downtime and increases the migration speed. Moreover, data migration documentation helps to minimize future migration expenses and risks. After completing data migration, the organizations need to validate statistics to check the data accuracy. Besides, data cleansing helps to increase data quality by removing unnecessary and duplicated data.

Difference Between Data Integration and Data Migration

Definition

Data integration is the process of combining data residing in different sources that provide users with a unified view of them while data migration is the process of selecting, preparing, extracting, and transforming data and permanently transferring it from one computer system to another. Thus, this explains the difference between data integration and data migration.

Usage

Moreover, data integration helps when upgrading the existing system or replacing them while data migration helps to combine applications of two organizations or to consolidate applications within the same organization. Hence, this is another difference between data integration and data migration.

Tasks

Data integration involves combining data from several disparate sources, which are stored using various technologies while data migration involves selecting, preparing, extracting and transforming data.

Conclusion

Generally, data integration and data migration are two processes associated with the data of an organization. The main difference between data integration and data migration is that data integration combines data in different sources to provide a view to the user while data migration transfers data between computers, storage types or file formats.

References:

1.“Data Migration.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 21 Apr. 2019, Available here.
2.“What Is Data Migration? – Definition from Techopedia.” Techopedia.com, Available here.
3.“Data Integration.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 11 May 2019, Available here.

Image Courtesy:

1.”KAFKA-Data Integration” By Carlos.Franco2018 – Own work (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Commons Wikimedia

About the Author: Lithmee

Lithmee holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Systems Engineering and is reading for her Master’s degree in Computer Science. She is passionate about sharing her knowldge in the areas of programming, data science, and computer systems.

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