Big Data Fusion is the data layer underneath everything else in Aleria. It brings data together from your systems, such as databases, business applications, files, and event streams, and lets you clean, join, and reshape it at real scale. What you build in Fusion feeds chat, Workflows, and Boards. It is the single source of truth those features run on.
What Fusion does
Three things:
- Connects to your data wherever it lives, such as cloud warehouses, transactional databases, business applications, file stores, and event streams.
- Transforms that data by joining, cleaning, enriching, deduplicating, and splitting it, in pipelines you can edit and version.
- Serves the result as clean tables other tools can query, as files in the workspace, or as inputs to workflows and boards.
Most teams that use Aleria heavily rely on Fusion for the messy parts. Chat answers are only as good as the underlying data, and Fusion is how you make the data good.
Data sources vs connectors
It is worth being clear about two different things that both "connect" Aleria to the outside world:
- Connectors are the everyday tools you use from chat, such as Slack, Gmail, SharePoint, and Jira. See Connectors.
- Fusion data sources are the large business systems your data lives in, such as warehouses, databases, and enterprise applications. Fusion can pull from a very wide catalog, more than 400 systems, including SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and the major cloud platforms.
You reach both from your workspace, but Fusion is the one built for moving and reshaping data at scale.
What Fusion can pull from
- Warehouses and databases: the major cloud warehouses and the transactional databases most teams run.
- Business applications: CRM, billing, accounting, support, HR, and project management.
- Cloud storage: the major object stores and file platforms.
- Streams and events: message buses, webhooks, and change feeds.
- Aleria's own databases: the databases you create inside Aleria in seconds, which Fusion reads and writes just like any external system. See the Sources section of Workspaces.
If a specific system is not in the catalog, your team can add one through a generic connection or a custom one. The up-to-date list is shown in your workspace.
Sources are read-only by default. Writing transformed data back into a source requires explicit setup and elevated permissions, because read-only is the safer default.
Build a pipeline
A Fusion pipeline is a sequence of operations on data, built on a visual canvas:
- Sources: pick one or more connected sources as input.
- Transforms: filter, join, aggregate, combine, pivot, enrich, deduplicate, or clean.
- Outputs: write the result to a table or a file, or keep it as a live view for other Aleria features to query.
Every step is previewable, so you can see the rows flowing in and out at each stage. That makes it easy to spot where something went wrong.
Built for scale
Fusion is designed for enterprise data volumes. Pipelines process very large datasets quickly, and they run at full scale by default, so you do not need to choose a sample mode. Behind the scenes, Fusion pushes work down to the source where it can (for example, running a join inside your warehouse) and uses Aleria's own compute for the rest.
Governance and lineage
Every column in a pipeline carries its lineage: which source it came from, which steps it went through, and who changed the pipeline and when. You can trace any value in any output back to where it started.
This is what makes Fusion suitable for regulated work. When compliance asks "where does this number come from?", the answer is a clear path you can show, not a search through email threads.
Fusion is also built to respect the access rules of your data:
- Row-level permissions carry through from the source, so people only see rows they are already allowed to see.
- Sensitive columns can be masked so personal data is hidden wherever it flows.
- Access and changes are tracked. The exact controls and logging available depend on your deployment, so confirm specifics with your account team. See Deployment and security.
How Fusion fits with the rest of Aleria
Fusion is the data layer, and everything else sits on top:
- Chat queries Fusion tables when a question is about your data.
- Boards use Fusion views as the data behind their panels.
- Workflows pull from Fusion for inputs and push results back into it.
- Skills can read from or write to Fusion tables.
You do not always need Fusion directly. For light data work, such as a spreadsheet, a CSV, or a single connected database you want to ask questions about, chat and boards handle it without a pipeline. Reach for Fusion when the data is messy, the joins are complex, or you need the output to be governed.
What teams do with Fusion
- Customer 360: join your CRM, billing, support, and product data into one clean customer table.
- Regulatory reporting: assemble exactly the view a regulator wants, with full lineage for the audit trail.
- Mergers and acquisitions: pull financials, contracts, and HR data out of a target company, clean them, and stage them for due diligence.
- Operational reporting: feed a daily-refreshed dataset that the whole organization queries for day-to-day decisions.