Schemas – Get the Data You Need from Cloud Applications

Grazed from Business2Technology.  Author: Matthew Eager.

OK, so you’ve got data spread across a number of cloud applications and you have decided to bring that data together to understand your business better. Great. But you have customer information over here and order information over there, invoices in this system, and inventory in that one. When it comes to lining up the data, how does that work, really?

In part one of this article, I will describe how to go about matching data across cloud apps. Be sure to read part two on data schema challenges related to getting the data you need from a particular app…


What you have is a schema problem. Each cloud app defines it’s own schema — a format for categorizing and storing data, sort of like the rows and columns in a spreadsheet. Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system will have detail about your customers organized one way, and your billing system will have lots of information about your invoices organized another. In order to bring that together, you need to match the customers in the one with the bills in the other…

Read more from the source @ http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/schemas-get-the-data-you-need-from-cloud-applications-01247594