Ovd question

Question

I would like to use ovd to consolidate data from different sources and have the following questions:
Is it possible to join data which is stored in different sources with different encodings?
e.g. Convert all to UTF-8.
Do we have to do this by ourselves or is this done automatically?
How can we handle conflicts? If e.g. two sources have two titles and sometimes is S1.title correct, sometimes S2.title is correct.
Is it possible to have user interaction when consolidating? If this is not possible is it possible to report all that S1.title != S2.title with simple Join adapter or we have to write custom join/mapping for this?
Tnx in advance.

Answer 1

Hi,
I am Mark Wilcox - the product manager for OVD.
Q1 -- "Is it possible to join data which is stored in different sources with different encodings? "
[MEW] -- Yes - OVD treats all data as UTF-8
Q2 -- "How can we handle conflicts? If e.g. two sources have two titles and sometimes is S1.title correct, sometimes S2.title is correct."
[MEW] -- The answer depends upon how you want to handle this. For example if you want to have it so that some applications only see S1.title and others see S2.title - you can do that via configuration. Or if you are doing a join and they are duplicate values - OVD will only return a single value. If you have to make a business logic decision (e.g. only show S2.title if S1.title is empty) that must be done via a custom Java plug-in, but is simple to do (probably can do it in less than 10 lines of code).
Regards,
Mark