Data Federation is an approach that lets users query and work with data from multiple, separate sources through a single access layer without requiring the underlying data to be physically combined. A federation system connects to different databases, warehouses, APIs, or other repositories and retrieves the required information when a query is made.
This approach is useful when data must remain in its original systems because of ownership, architecture, or operational requirements. For example, an organization can combine customer records from one database with transaction data from another to produce a unified analysis without moving both datasets into a central repository. Data virtualization and distributed query engines are commonly associated with Data Federation.
