Roger Nolan
Even ‘The Most Interesting Man In The World’ Won’t Do This…
“I have taken risks in my life………but I always validate my data before updating my production systems. Stay employed my friends!”
I am hearing an increasing number of customers tell me that they either do not have time to do data validation or reconciliation testing on their
nightly updates to production systems, or that they can only test a part of the data. In the latter case, they have to “guess” which parts of the data have the most business risk and therefore deserve their testing time and resources. It doesn’t have to be this way. Informatica Data Validation can be used in production environments. The really good news is that data validation testing can be run at night from a command line script or in a workflow. The load of data into production systems can be made to be conditional on successfully passing all the tests. Customers can also build in automatic notification of the test results so that they know the status of their production systems.
Validating Data for Production Environments
The BBC published a news story where a teacher in India looked at his bank account expecting to see a balance of $200 only to find that the balance shown was $9.8 billion (480 billion rupees). Imagine that surprise!
These types of stories appear in the news on a regular basis, and the question they raise is this: How could an error of this magnitude have happened and what could have been done to prevent it? (more…)
Using Metadata To Manage Data Integration Change
Last week, a long-time Informatica customer told me about how he is managing change in his data integration environment on a truly massive scale. The story he told reminded me of someone doing a heart transplant on themself while running a marathon. … blindfolded.
- First, he is delivering several innovative new applications. One to improve customer service. Another, proactively monitors operational performance and suggests where the business needs to invest more to improve their capacity and service levels.
- Next, he is rolling out new systems that will collect customer sentiment analysis from social media sources (Big Data) and integrate that with ongoing campaigns and company planning. (more…)
Who Needs Metadata?
Consider this situation: Would you try to ride a bicycle blindfolded? You could probably pump the pedals and steer without trouble, but you would be lacking the visual feedback that the changes you are making in direction and velocity will keep you on your intended course and avoid harm.
This question undoubtedly sounds crazy, but people are making changes to their data integration environments every day without the tools in place to visualize the environment and to tell them the impact of proposed changes.
There are good tools available today to help with this problem.
Metadata Management
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