By krbaker@hubspot.com (Kristen Baker)

A scaling business is bound to have data stored across multiple sources (e.g. databases, files, live data feeds). Even individual teams within a department — such as Content Marketing, Brand Strategy, and SEO — likely use multiple data sources simultaneously.

It’s important to ensure you have a way of viewing, visualizing, and analyzing all of that data at once. This gives you a complete picture of the health of everything related to your business, from small projects to team projections to overall business success.

Data ingestion is the process that can efficiently get all of your data in one place.

Data Ingestion

At a high level, data ingestion prepares your data for analysis. In this blog post, we’ll cover the definition of data ingestion in greater detail, describe its importance, review the data ingestion framework, and highlight a few tools that will make the process simple for your team. Let’s dive in.

What is data ingestion?

Data ingestion prepares your data for analysis. It’s the process of transporting data from a variety of sources into a single location — often to a destination like a database, data processing system, or data warehouse — where it can be stored, accessed, organized, and analyzed.

This process allows businesses to get a holistic view of their data in order to leverage and apply resulting insights and findings in their strategies.

Why is data ingestion important?

You may be wondering why data ingestion is so important and why your marketing team — and business as a whole — should leverage it.

As mentioned, data ingestion provides a single view of all of your data. Without the ability to access, review, and analyze all of your data at the same time — versus having to check multiple data sources which visualize your data in different formats — you wouldn’t have a clear or accurate picture of what’s doing well and what needs to be improved upon.

Data ingestion tools exist to make this process even easier by automating the process of integrating all of your data from various sources. This way, anyone on your team can access and share that data in a format and via a tool that are universal among your organization.

Data Ingestion Framework

The data ingestion framework is how data ingestion happens — it’s how data from multiple sources is actually transported into a single data warehouse/ database/ repository. In other words, a data ingestion framework enables you to integrate, organize, and analyze data from different sources.

Unless you have a professional create your framework for you, you’ll need data ingestion software to make the process happen. Then, the way that the tool ingests your data will be based on factors like your data architectures and models.

There are two main frameworks for data ingestion: batch data ingestion and streaming data ingestion.

Before we define batch versus streaming data injection, let’s take a moment to decipher the difference …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron