Heterogeneity

Heterogeneity refers to the state of being diverse or different. Heterogeneous data is data that comes from different sources, formats, or structures. Heterogeneous data environments are simply different environments, often referring to storage. Heterogeneous data can include:

• Structured data: Highly organized data residing in relational databases, often adhering to predefined schemas.
• Semi-structured data: Data with some organizational structure but not strictly adhering to a rigid schema, such as JSON or XML files.
• Unstructured data: Data without a predefined format or organization, like text documents, images, audio, and video files.

This diversity poses challenges for data management and analysis, as different data types require different handling and processing techniques and data of different types often sits in siloed storage environments.