Introducing data integration

Data integration is a very widespread technique, or rather, consists of a range of techniques.

Under this umbrella terminology, there are a lot of different approaches aiming to consolidate, enrich, filter, and in general work on data, potentially in a range of different formats, to generate different results. Basically, while the integration techniques seen in the Digging into enterprise integration patterns section are about transient data (being part of a method call, as a web service, or an asynchronous interaction, such as a message), data integration focuses on data at rest, so when it's persisted on a data store, such as a database or a file. Better again, data integration starts and ends with data persisted (at rest), usually with a big amount of data (such as databases and .csv files).

I have to admit that this is not my favorite approach, and I advise against indiscriminate use, especially in greenfield applications. Indeed, data integration...