Analyst Perspectives

Although the terms data fabric and data mesh are often used interchangeably, I previously explained that they are distinct but complementary. Data fabric refers to technology products that can be used to integrate, manage and govern data across distributed environments, supporting the cultural and organizational data ownership and access goals of data mesh. Data fabric and data mesh are also both related to logical data management, which is the approach of providing virtualized access to data across an enterprise without the requirement to first extract and load it into a central repository. The popularity of data fabric and data mesh has highlighted the importance of software providers, such as Denodo, that utilize data virtualization to enable logical data management.

Denodo was founded in 1999 and originated as a research project, led by Denodo’s founder and CEO Angel Vina at the University of A Coruna in Spain, that was focused on the challenges of managing increasing volumes of data generated and persisted by an increasingly disparate set of applications and data platforms. Rather than the traditional physical data management approach of replicating and integrating data into a centralized repository, Denodo was created to deliver logical data management, which is focused on providing virtualized access to data without changing its physical location. In addition to avoiding the cost and complexity of data movement, proponents of logical data management argue that it also encourages a focus on applying business context to the data by abstracting it from the physical environment in which it resides. This is said to help diminish challenges related to silos of data that limit data sharing and data-driven decision-making. Data silos are a perennial data management problem for enterprises, with almost three-quarters (73%) of participants in ISG Research’s Data Governance Benchmark Research citing disparate data sources and systems as a data governance challenge. Denodo remains a specialist data management software provider and in September 2023 announced that it had received a $336 million investment from asset management firm TPG. More recently, the company announced the launch of Denodo Platform 9, enhancing its massively parallel processing engine as well as adding support for natural language queries and query recommendations driven by artificial intelligence (AI).

At the heart of the Denodo Platform is a data virtualization access layer that provides a virtual representation of physical data sources, including operational and analytic data platforms, applications, file systems and application programming interfaces. This logical abstraction of physical data sources enables enterprises to share access to and gain insight from data that might otherwise be limited to individual applications or business units. Denodo also offers query optimization and acceleration capabilities to deliver high-performance analytics, as well as support for business semantics and security and access controls. The ability to discover and access data via Denodo Platform is enabled by Denodo Data Catalog, which provides a search-based interface for finding data sources based on metadata or content, as well as metrics related to data popularity and usage. The company added a variety of new features with the launch of Denodo Platform 9 in June, designed to address requirements for intelligent applications and AI-driven integration.

Among the new features in Denodo Platform 9 is support for natural language queries via integration with ChatGPT, Amazon Bedrock and other generative AI (GenAI) services, along with AI-driven query recommendations and support for retrieval augmented generation. Denodo Platform 9 also includes enhancements to its massively parallel distributed SQL query engine, based on the Presto open-source project, including support for Delta Lake and Iceberg tables to enable accelerated analysis of data in data lake environments. With Denodo Platform 9, the company also added enhanced federated governance support to enable the creation, management and reuse of data products by different business units and teams. Federated governance is a common element of data fabric and data mesh, alongside self-service data access. Both data fabric and data mesh are driving interest in logical data management and Denodo. Data fabric is a technical approach to automating data management and data governance in a distributed architecture, while data mesh is an organizational and cultural approach to distributed data ownership, access and governance. I assert that by 2027, three-quarters of enterprises will adopt data fabric technologies to facilitate the management and processing of data across multiple data platforms and cloud environments.

While data virtualization is central to Denodo’s logical data management proposition, the company also offers flexibility to adapt to a variety of use cases and data integration requirements. For example, to support selective materialization of data from the source platform to accelerate queries via caching, full replication using extract, transform and load or extract, load and transform patterns, and streaming integration. The breadth and depth of Denodo Platform’s functionality is illustrated by its designation as a Leader in Capability in our 2024 Data Integration Buyers Guide. As such, I recommend that enterprises considering new data management providers include Denodo in their evaluations, especially—although not only—if the use case requires data virtualization.

Regards,

Matt Aslett