How often is the integration between analytics tools and data sources as inexpensive and easy as analytics vendors claim it will be? The answer, it seems, is not too darned often.That's the word from Business Intelligence Pipeline readers, at any rate. We asked you to chime in on the topic in our latest Voting Booth poll. The point of this (admittedly non-scientific) exercise was to get a read on how much, if at all, things have changed on the data integration front since last summer. The results of the poll, compared to the same question from last year, indicate that little is different from 15 months ago.

A full 82 percent of respondents this year said data integration is "rarely" or "never" as simple as analytics vendors' claims. Last summer, 80 percent of poll-takers said the same.

If there was a noticeable change, it's that even fewer BI practitioners now are willing to take vendors' integration claims in full faith. This year only 1 percent of respondents said data integration is as easy as software firms' claims "most of the time." That's down from 8 percent last year.