Organizations are dealing with unprecedented amounts of data, and while this data has the potential to help drive more informed business decisions and facilitate AI projects, data silos can arise and prevent companies from realizing the true potential of their data.
“Integrating diverse data sources requires not only bridging differences in data models and protocols but also enforcing consistent security controls and without these, organizations risk exposing sensitive information and fragmenting their data landscape,” said Kumar Vikesh, senior technical product manager at the data connectivity company Progress.
One solution to this challenge is Microsoft Fabric, a platform that allows data from multiple different sources to be unified in a single data lake where it can be connected to different analytics and reporting tools, like Power BI.
Under the hood, these connections are made possible by the Synapse Endpoint, a connection interface for querying data with SQL in OneLake, Fabric’s unified data lake. “This makes it easy for developers, analysts, and data engineers to interact with structured and semi-structured data without needing to learn new query languages or switch platforms,” said Vikesh.
To make the Fabric ecosystem even more accessible, Progress offers a DataDirect Connector that allows organizations to connect applications to the Synapse Endpoint, offering a number of distinct benefits over Microsoft’s native tooling.
DataDirect is the company’s tool for connecting up different data sources. “It offers high-performance connectors and integration tools designed for secure, reliable, and scalable access to data across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments,” Vikesh said.
Its benefits over Microsoft’s native tooling include multi-platform support (Linux, AIX, and Solaris vs. Windows only), enterprise-grade security, cloud-to-cloud and hybrid connectivity, support for OData v4, and custom enhancements that improve usability and provide more control over exposed data.
The DataDirect Connectors also help facilitate many different analytics use cases. This includes connecting to BI and reporting and ETL tools to data, allowing these integration applications to ingest, transform, and sync data between Fabric and other downstream systems like Snowflake, Redshift, or on-prem databases. The DataDirect Connector also allows lightweight web and mobile apps to easily connect to Fabric using SQL with the ODBC or JDBC standards.
In addition to these traditional data analytics use cases, it is also designed to be AI-ready. According to Vikesh, the OneLake architecture centralizes data so that AI models can access diverse datasets, and makes it easier for data scientists to prepare training data using familiar tools.
“Together, Fabric and DataDirect empower organizations to unlock the full potential of their data for AI, without compromising on performance, security, or flexibility,” said Vikesh.
Beyond the Microsoft Fabric DataDirect Connector, Progress offers a number of other products within the DataDirect umbrella, including its Hybrid Data Pipeline for connecting SaaS applications to on-premise data, an SDK for creating autonomous REST connectors, a toolkit for building drivers that expose proprietary data sources, and ready-to-use ODBC, JDBC, and OData Connectors.
