Talend adds observability, enhanced ETL to data fabric suite
Talend on Tuesday unveiled its latest data fabric platform update, which includes new data observability capabilities and updated extract, transform and load features.
None of the capabilities in the release are generally available yet, but each will become generally available over the next few months.
Based in San Mateo, Calif., Talend specializes in data integration. Its platform, Talend Data Fabric, is designed to enable its customers to discover and combine data from disparate sources into unified data sets that can then be used for data science and analytics tasks.
In January 2023, the vendor reached an agreement to be acquired by Qlik, a longtime analytics vendor that has added data integration capabilities over the past five years through a series of acquisitions. In addition to Talend, Qlik has acquired Podium Data, Attunity and Blendr.io to enhance its data integration platform.
The acquisition of Talend is expected to close sometime during the first half of this year.
Among other capabilities, the Winter ’23 update of Talend Data Fabric adds data observability to the platform and enhances Stitch, the vendor’s data ingestion tool. Data observability brings a DevOps/monitoring ethos to data quality versus the old batch approach.
As data volumes grow in size and complexity, both data observability and data ingestion are areas of emerging importance within data management and analytics, making them perhaps the most significant aspects of the Winter ’23 update, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research. “Data observability brings a DevOps/monitoring ethos to data quality versus the old batch approach,” he said. “Stitch, meanwhile, gained traction with the rise and popularity of cloud data warehouse platforms.”
Data observability is the process of monitoring data throughout the data management and analytics lifecycle to ensure its quality. When all data was kept on premises and organizations collected data from relatively few sources, it was a relatively simple undertaking. But with organizations now ingesting data from a growing number of sources and storing it in various cloud databases as well as keeping some data on premises, data observability is becoming more complex.
As a result, vendors such as Acceldata and Monte Carlo have made data observability their sole focus, while others — now including Talend — have added observability to their platform.
Talend’s new data observability feature is currently in all-access preview. Using the tool, customers can automatically and proactively monitor data quality over time to make sure their data is trusted — including use of Talend’s Trust Score — and usable to inform decision-making. “Organizations are constantly blending and enriching data and creating entirely new data sets,” Henschen said.
What’s more, data changes can have a ripple effect across multiple constituents. The observability approach recognizes that data quality is an ops-style, iterative challenge and a team sport that supports multiple stakeholders.
