Data Federation Example 2
Previously we wrote about data federation and then added a healthcare example of data federation in practice. In our Data Federation Example 2 article we will give a second example of data federation in healthcare. The example is based on a company, which offers a single product to its customers. The company has been providing this product for many years and uses a large amount of technology, in particular, its employees use in-house developed software applications to produce the end product.
The data sources and technologies underpinning the custom software applications have gone through many iterations over the years, including a number of rewrites for many or all of the applications. Each of the custom apps connects with a number of different databases. A typical application will use a single database for storage of its specific data and a number of databases providing additional data.
For the most recent version of application rewrites, the company decided to create a federated database using GraphQL. All of the next gen in-house apps will leverage the new federated database, which is built to normalize access to myriad internal databases. The long term vision is to use GraphQL to front all of the in-house APIs as well. Once complete, all data sources, including databases and APIs, will be available from this single interface, greatly simplifying application design and development.