Creating, distributing, and managing test data has become a bottleneck in the increasingly fast world of agile and DevOps. One way to manage test data management is with virtual data, says Kyle Hailey, technical evangelist at Delphix, who presented a session at Data Summit titled, "Double Developer Productivity With Virtual Data."
Virtual data provide a way of sharing one immutable copy of data among many clones of the data. If a clone modifies data, the new data is stored privately for that clone. Each new clone initially takes up no storage so many copies can be made for almost free. In this way, sharing and change tracking can enable data to be treated like code source control with branching, bookmarking, versioning, refreshing, and rolling back.
According to Hailey, today data management is not agile - 20% of software development lifecycle (SDLC) is lost waiting for data, and 60% of dev/test time is consumed by data tasks. Data is the constraint. There are not enough resources; bad test data leads to buys, as well as slow environment builds.
While application development is the sweet spot for virtual data, it is also useful for security and cloud migration.
Hailey said virtual data can support development and QA with a dev throughput increase by 2X, for security, data can be masked once and cloned many times, and it supports cloud enablement with compressed encrypted data, and active/active replication.
Data Summit is an annual 2-day conference, preceded by a day of workshops. Data Summit offers a comprehensive educational experience designed to guide you through all of the key issues in data management and analysis today. The event brings together IT managers, data architects, application developers, data analysts, project managers, and business managers for an intense immersion into the key technologies and strategies for becoming a data-informed business.
Many presentations from Data Summit 2016 have been made available for review at www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2016/Presentations.aspx.