Ab Initio’s metadata environment unites metadata from a huge array of sources under a single, coherent interface that provides a full picture of your enterprise systems and how they work together.
Business metadata is the glue that binds your enterprise systems together — it captures the business intelligence necessary to make sense of the systems and their data. But enterprises usually have many different systems, each with its own idiosyncratic “features.” Ab Initio makes it possible to have a consistent metadata environment — one that encompasses all your diverse systems.
Ab Initio’s metadata environment imports metadata from a huge variety of sources: databases of all kinds, business reporting tools such as MicroStrategy or Tableau, modeling tools such as ERwin or PowerDesigner, business management tools such as SAP or Salesforce, and more. All this metadata is then enriched with business terms and linked with technical metadata to compute a full picture of your enterprise systems and how they work together.
Our user-friendly metadata portal gives a simple and coherent view of these systems and their metadata. In the portal, metadata can be displayed in a tabular or graphical format. For example, semantic relationships in a business glossary can be listed in a report or shown as a diagram, with interconnected business terms as nodes, and relationships as labeled arcs. The portal’s business glossary reinforces a common language across systems and departments, and the lineage diagrams provide end-to-end visualizations of how data flows through your organization. Views of logical models display business practices and workflows, while sophisticated tracking and notification features allow you to incorporate new metadata, approve changes, and implement new workflows.
A global retailer developed their software at multiple locations around the world. Unfortunately, creating valid, anonymized datasets for testing was becoming a major headache.
A global retailer’s large software development projects involved development teams from around the world. Software testing requires valid data, and they had to test against the content of their databases — that’s the data that they’ll be running against in production. However, that data could contain personally identifiable information (PII). Transmitting customer PII around the world would quickly run afoul of many countries’ privacy regulations — this problem can really complicate the testing process.
This is where Ab Initio came in.
The standard solution to handling PII is to anonymize the data used for testing, which isn’t as simple as it sounds. Sure, it’s possible to simply overwrite customer names with “X” or insert random numbers in place of an ID number, but the end result is no longer valid data. Without valid data, it’s not possible to fully test the new software. Even replacing customer names with fake names is tricky: if “John Smith” maps to “Fred Block” in one location and “Ivan Tadeov” in another, joins on customer names can’t be tested. Even the fact that one obfuscation maintains the same number of letters and one does not can mess up the testing process.
The retailer was already using Ab Initio software to integrate different systems and platforms, including RDBMS from multiple vendors, software applications from third-party providers, and different real-time messaging technologies. It was a small step to take advantage of Ab Initio’s anonymization and test data management capabilities. Ab Initio software allowed the data to be anonymized yet remain valid for testing. No matter which team was doing the work, “John Smith” would always be “Fred Block.”
With Ab Initio software, the company anonymized their entire multi-terabyte data warehouse in a stunningly short time. They then created meaningful small (250-GB) subsets that could be easily and quickly transmitted to development teams worldwide.
Thanks to Ab Initio, the retailer could develop, test, and run their software anywhere in the world — and effortlessly maintain full customer confidentiality and anonymity of personal information.