Data virtualization is an approach to data management that allows an application to retrieve and manipulate data without requiring technical details about the data, such as how it is formatted at source, or where it is physically located,[1] and can provide a single customer view (or single view of any other entity) of the overall data.[2]
Unlike the traditional extract, transform, load ("ETL") process, the data remains in place, and real-time access is given to the source system for the data. This reduces the risk of data errors, of the workload moving data around that may never be used, and it does not attempt to impose a single data model on the data (an example of heterogeneous data is a federated database system). The technology also supports the writing of transaction data updates back to the source systems.[3] To resolve differences in source and consumer formats and semantics, various abstraction and transformation techniques are used. This concept and software is a subset of data integration and is commonly used within business intelligence, service-oriented architecture data services, cloud computing, enterprise search, and master data management.