The process of consolidating data from multiple applications and creating a unified view of data assets is known as data integration. As companies store information in different databases, data integration becomes an important strategy to adopt, as it helps the business users to integrate data from multiple sources. For example, an e-commerce company wants to extract customer information from multiple data streams or databases, such as marketing, sales, and finance. In this case, data integration would help consolidate the data arriving from various departmental databases and use it for reporting and analysis.