Introduction to Data Platforms

Digital, cloud, and artificial intelligence (AI) have disrupted how we use data. This disruption has changed the way we need to provision, curate, and publish data for the multiple use cases in today's technology–driven environment. This text will cover how to design, develop, and evolve a data platform for all the uses of enterprise data needed in today's digital organization.This book focuses on explaining what a data platform is, what value it provides, how is it engineered, and how to deploy a data platform and support organization. In this context, Introduction to Data Platformsreviews the current requirements for data in the digital age and quantifies the use cases;discusses the evolution of data over the past twenty years, which is a core driver of the modern data platform;defines what a data platform is and defines the architectural components and layers of a data platform;provides the architectural layers or capabilities of a data platform;reviews cloud– and commercial–software vendors that populate the data–platform space;provides a step–by–step approach to engineering, deploying, supporting, and evolving a data–platform environment;provides a step–by–step approach to migrating legacy data warehouses, data marts, and data lakes/sandboxes to a data platform; andreviews organizational structures for managing data platform environments.

-- Anthony David Giordano