Data fabric

▪ Data fabric? Is that some clever new fibre-channel technology?

Full marks for intuitive thinking, but data fabric isn’t a product. It’s not exactly an architecture either, nor is it a standard. It’s more of an organisational aspiration. You can think of a data fabric as a body of data and accompanying services all woven together in the optimal way for modern cloud or on-demand computing resources.

▪ Okay, I’ll bite: what would such an arrangement look like?

That’s the – see pcpro.link/312fabric – is a great start: published in 2018 by Big Data specialists MapR (now part of HP), it identifies 12 specific technical tests for defining a data fabric. In layman’s terms, the key is that your data isn’t structured or situated for any single purpose, so it appears equally complete and performant to all applications, no matter what they’re doing or where they’re located.