Data Mesh

What is data mesh?

Data mesh is a relatively new term that was first used by Zhamak Dehghani in 2019 to describe the principles of a domain-oriented decentralized architecture for describing analytical data. This represents an alternative to the central architectures that have prevailed for a long time, such as Data warehouse or Data Lake Dar.

The idea behind this is to manage data within a company in a decentralized manner where it is generated. For example, teams from the finance department manage financial data accordingly. The decisive advantage here is that the responsible department has a structural knowledge of its own data and its structure, and understands the associated processes. A uniform standard is created for each team as to how the data is processed and provided. They must be able to use their data to provide the necessary information for all inquiries and perspectives.

The four principles of data mesh

Four pillars that Data Mesh is built on:

Benefits of Data Mesh

Data mesh has important benefits that can facilitate transformation into a data-driven company:

Implementation of data mesh in companies

Data mesh stands for decentralized data architecture, which is a promising alternative to Data Lake and Data warehouse represents. However, there are also challenges, such as building up technical know-how within the individual specialist departments. This is the only way to be able to implement the high requirements for the specification of a data mesh and to extract the right information from the data. In principle, however, the mesh approach is promising, as data is not considered valuable per se, but the information contained therein, which manifests itself in the form of a data product.