Transforming data is a common practice when manipulating data within the virtual data environment. For more details on transformation, see the TDV User Guide.

The inventory and orders data sources contain tabular data (that is, relational tables), so they are ready to be queried in TDV’s modeling environment. But the XML data source (produtCatalog.xml) contains hierarchical data in XML format, so it must be transformed (or, flattened) into a table so you can use the data in your modeling.

For a working example of the transform that we are recreating with these steps, you can open Examples >productCatelog_xform. The steps to recreate the transform include: