What Is a Single View?

MongoDB is a NoSQL database that allows data to be stored in a more adaptable format. This means it can easily accommodate data from diverse sources without forcing it into a rigid structure. It handles non-standardized schema from legacy systems and can easily store custom attributes. Its data models allow related information to be stored as nested documents, simplifying the structure. Different data types and formats can coexist within the same MongoDB collection, making it much easier to integrate data from various systems, such as customer logs, transactional data, or social media interactions.

Unlike SQL databases, where data is inserted one row at a time, MongoDB eliminates the need for complex join queries. It is built to handle data insertion quickly. With the special insertMany() function, MongoDB allows you to add a lot of data at once, focusing on speed.

A single view relies heavily on effective data aggregation, and Mia-Platform Fast Data simplifies this process. It allows you to decouple data from multiple sources, known as Systems of Record (SoRs), and aggregate them into a single, queryable MongoDB collection. With Fast Data, data is aggregated in real-time or based on changes, and the source can range from a MongoDB collection to other databases, CSV files, or virtually any other data source. 

Why is a single view important?

As customers interact with companies across multiple touchpoints—through a website, social media, customer service, or in-store—the data can become fragmented across various systems. This is why getting a comprehensive view of all relevant information is invaluable. A single view is essential for modern businesses across various industries.

Single Views in Financial Services

Banks and financial institutions handle massive customer data, from transaction histories and credit scores to personal details and service interactions. When this data is siloed across different departments, getting a clear view of a customer’s financial profile is nearly impossible. With the single-view approach, these institutions can gain a deep understanding of customer behavior, preferences, and financial needs to improve their experiences. They can also use a single view to gain a firm-wide perspective on assets and assess risk exposure in real time, improving audits and decision-making.

Single Views in Government 

Government institutions often handle massive amounts of data related to citizens, including healthcare, education, social programs, citizen tax records, and much more. With a single view, governments can get aggregate data on their citizens from these different government agencies to improve efficiency, simplify audits, and facilitate data sharing between departments. By integrating data from various sources into a comprehensive view, governments can better understand their populations, allocate resources more effectively, and ultimately improve the quality of services provided to citizens.

Single Views in Technology

In the technology sector, engineering teams and organizations can use a single view to gain comprehensive insights into system logs, customer data, and product interactions. By studying this consolidated data, engineering teams can quickly identify patterns, diagnose system issues, and improve their systems’ reliability. Beyond engineering, companies can also use a single view to monitor customer activity data from various products and logins to gain valuable insights into purchasing patterns, interactions with technology, and future desires.

Single Views in Retail

Data in a retail company often comes from different channels—online, in-store, marketing channels, or mobile apps. Using a single view, organizations can better understand their customers and personalize their experiences. This makes it easier to analyze customers’ profiles, habits, customer behavior, preferences, and purchase history. The aggregated data provides real-time visibility into customer demand patterns and supply chain performance, enabling them to focus on targeted marketing campaigns and personalized recommendations.

The concept of a single view is essential across various industries and, when applied, ensures businesses make better decisions, increase efficiency, and improve customer experiences. 

Business benefits of a single view

Whether an organization is strategizing for a new product launch, implementing new features, or assessing market risks, having all the data at your fingertips means you can make decisions faster and with greater confidence. Some business benefits of adopting a single view include:

• Enhanced data security: Data security is one of the most critical concerns for any business. Single view helps organizations tackle the risk of breaches or unauthorized access by consolidating data into one place where it can be better protected. Businesses can effectively manage who has access to what, apply uniform security measures, and ensure compliance with industry regulations. 
• Improved data accuracy and accessibility: Data stored in multiple systems often leads to inconsistencies—the same customer could be listed with different information across different databases, or data could be out of date in one place while current in another. A single view eliminates these discrepancies, providing a single source of truth. This means more accurate information, which translates into better decision-making, more personalized customer interactions, and fewer errors in operations. 

• Reduced costs and improved efficiency: Managing multiple databases, systems, and platforms often results in high costs—both in terms of money and time. With a single view, an organization can significantly reduce costs by aggregating all its data into a unified system. By doing so, businesses can streamline operations, reduce redundant efforts, and reduce the resources that would have been spent maintaining multiple systems. The end result is greater efficiency across the board, from IT operations to customer service.
• Competitive advantage: In an era where businesses are constantly looking for ways to stand out, a single view offers a powerful competitive edge. It can help an organization respond faster to market changes, anticipate customer needs, and optimize operations. When teams have real-time access to accurate data, they can resolve issues faster and work more productively, ultimately driving business growth.

Challenges with creating a single view

Adopting a single view concept into an organization’s data management system is an appealing goal for many businesses, but in practice, it can be incredibly challenging, especially when relying on traditional relational databases. Here’s why:

-> No solution for data variety

Relational databases were designed with rigid schemas, making it difficult to handle the siloed data formats modern businesses rely on. Centralizing these structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data from different systems into a relational database is hard and, in many cases, simply impossible. Organizations struggled to bring such varied data from various sources into a single, unified system without extensive and complex transformations. However, with Connectors in Mia-Platform Fast Data, you can accept and connect any data source, regardless of the format or source, without having to define or enforce a schema.

-> Stalled progress and lack of agility

The traditional relational database architecture leaves architects, developers, and database administrators powerless to move quickly and adapt to the changing needs of modern businesses, where today, you’re pulling in data from legacy customer service systems, and tomorrow, you urgently need to incorporate customer sentiment analysis. Instead of being agile and iterative, teams often find themselves tangled in months—or even years—of battling data ingestion, transformation, and schema management. The Mia-Platform Single View Creator plugin allows you to simply update the single view anytime a new projection changes. Teams now spend less time prepping data for the database and more time innovating.

-> High costs and resource drain

The complexities of working with relational databases in such scenarios lead to a significant resource drain. Large teams of architects, developers, and database administrators are tied up for extended periods, leading to high labor costs. Beyond human resources, businesses often face high expenses related to proprietary software and hardware, which further inflate the cost of a project. With so much time and money invested—and little to show for it—the business case for a single view becomes increasingly difficult to justify. With Mia-Platform, you can easily leverage the marketplace to enable your own data decoupling system in no time, facilitating adoption and generating a return on investment in no time.

In the end, though the benefits of a single view are undeniable, achieving them with traditional relational databases is often accompanied by numerous obstacles. The lack of flexibility, agility, and high costs make these projects difficult to execute and maintain. That is why many businesses are moving on to alternatives, like the Mia-Platform Fast Data, as a more agile solution when building a single view.

Conclusion

Today, companies are managing more data than ever, with vast amounts of information coming from multiple systems of record. The single-view approach is one way businesses struggling with siloed data can manage these complex data events, streamline operations, and gain a competitive advantage. 

If your business is struggling with data integration, Mia-Platform offers a robust solution that simplifies the process and accelerates your path to a unified view. Discover how Mia-Platform can help you streamline data management, create a functional Event Platform and drive innovation across your organization in this demo.