Discover the meaning of your data with Ab Initio’s advanced data discovery capabilities.
Ab Initio’s semantic discovery uses advanced algorithms and machine learning to scan your data and automatically create an inventory of its content. This discovered information helps you understand the characteristics of the data and its relationships to other data in the company. Relationship types include a foreign key relationship, a calculation relationship, and relationships to important business concepts such as credit card number, customer name, and country identifier. These automated capabilities can reduce project time by up to 90%, reducing a years-long effort for a large data cataloging project to mere weeks.
Because all Ab Initio products are built on the same fundamental technology and are tightly integrated, our semantic discovery capabilities drive automation across multiple products and use cases. For example, semantic discovery enables the autogeneration of data quality rules, provides a foundation for protecting personal data, enables self-service data ingestion, and much more.
Migrating decades of development from on premises to the cloud could involve years of work. Or it could be done with Ab Initio.
A major US credit card provider built one of the world’s most innovative Business Intelligence environments using Ab Initio software. After decades of on-premises software development and operations, they decided to take advantage of new technologies, eliminate local data centers, and move to the cloud.
Moving a system that had been developed over a span of 20 years is not an easy prospect. The data was stored in a very large, expensive data warehouse. There were over 100,000 lines of SQL, including vendor-specific SQL. There were thousands of Ab Initio graphs. They did not have detailed information on exactly which graphs were running, how often they ran, and which parameters they ran with. That information was buried in the job scheduling system and in the shell scripts that launched the jobs, and it needed to be unearthed before proceeding with the migration.
Because automation was the key to this migration effort, they worked with Ab Initio to build the automation machinery. In some cases, Ab Initio provided out-of-the-box automation tools and translators. In other cases, the two teams worked together to build custom automation tools. Automated translation of Ab Initio–based application logic is possible because of Ab Initio’s unique structure and metadata-driven processing model. Ab Initio’s analysis tools automatically documented the various job and data dependencies. Ab Initio–developed tools also analyzed hundreds of thousands of runtime log files.
This migration took 18 months, a remarkably short time for a project of this magnitude. Working with Ab Initio, the credit card provider ended up with a more resilient system capable of taking advantage of the latest technologies, and they saved millions of dollars.