As data volumes continue to skyrocket, organizations must govern and manage this information both in the cloud and on premise. To address these requirements, Oracle has expanded its data integration portfolio with the addition of Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management, a platform to help organizations govern data across the enterprise including structured and unstructured data, and across Oracle and third-party data integration, database, and business analytics platforms. “This is the first time that we have made a comprehensive offering in the area of metadata management,” said Jeff Pollock, vice president of product management for Oracle Data Integration.
A key component of Oracle’s Big Data Governance solution, Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management - together with Oracle Enterprise Data Quality, Oracle Big Data SQL, and Oracle Database Security - enables organizations to manage and control data stewardship, lifecycle management, data protection, auditing, security, and compliance. It also includes a business glossary to enable the linkage of business-friendly terminology to the operational metadata across enterprise systems such as Hadoop, ERP applications, data warehouses, and semi-structured data used for big data discovery.
Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management offers:
- Access to track data and metadata lifecycles across the third party and Oracle Data Integration and Business Analytics platforms, enabling customers to increase their security and audit measures to finer granularity from report to source, track lineage, and perform impact analysis.
- Transparency and analysis across third-party business intelligence, data integration, and database technologies so customers are not limited to metadata analysis within their product stack and can apply metadata management across their full data management platform.
- Stewardship collaboration through feedback and comment review boards, multimedia attachments, annotations, and tagging, and also offers semantic lineage through a business glossary.
- Data transparency including big data stores and reservoirs as a result of Oracle Data Integrator’s support for big data standards, including SQOOP, Hive, HBase, and JSON.
Business users – solving problems
The topic of data governance cuts across database, business intelligence, big data, and application customers and is crucial to users, said Pollock. Business users require information governance capabilities for two main reasons, he said. One is report to source data lineage for business users looking at a report and needing to drill backwards and inspect the data to understand what sources or applications were used to populate the report or dashboard.
In addition, there is a second emerging use case with the wave of new technologies around big data and Hadoop and many of the newer types of analytics and data discovery. A single data catalog where enables the business user community to find relevant sources of data that they may want to use downstream in future analytics or bi projects. Through harvesting of content and metadata from a variety of enterprise sources, the new solution can expose a searchable catalog of metadata that informs the business users about what type of information they can access for analytics.
IT architecture in support of regulatory and organizational compliance
Many organizations come from different industries and domains where regulatory and corporate compliance are an important part of what they look to achieve. These organizations need to be able to create a history of metadata that shows which systems the data was routed through as it was used to populate a report. If there is an audit that comes about many years in the future, they can actually go back to a point in time and understand which systems and which tables and columns were used to populate a particular report. To support this capability there are features that allow for do snapshotting and versioning and reporting, as well as the visualization of a graph or the diagram that shows how all the data has been connected.
Support for DBAs
DBAs are a third category of users that are supported with the new solution, with the ability to pull up a visual diagram of different schemas and models. The tool provides the ability to access logical as well as physical ER diagram and visualize data models. “We see this as a DBA led function where they can go to a single place and look at the data models that are being used across a wide variety of source systems and technologies,” said Pollock.
In total, the metadata management and business glossary capabilities cover wide span of requirements for enterprise customers that are looking for business user capabilities, IT architecture capabilities for compliance, and DBA capabilities to visualize data models, said Pollock. “Now, with this tool we are able to provide an Oracle-led solution. We believe we are on the cutting edge, providing the support around big data and fulfilling a capability around compliance.”