The Benefits of Automated Metadata Change Detection and Notification

In the realm of enterprise data, changes are an inevitable part of the landscape. These changes can stem from various sources, including business transactions, customer interactions, inventory updates, application development, regulatory demands, and data integration and transformations. Metadata, as data about data, undergoes changes accordingly. Given that enterprises rely on metadata to enforce data governance and extract value from their data assets, it is imperative to automatically capture these metadata changes in a timely manner and promptly alert the stakeholders who may be affected by them.

Orion Governance’s Enterprise Information Intelligence Graph (EIIG) offers the capability for automated detection of metadata changes in near real-time, complemented by instant notifications of these changes.

Key Capabilities:

Comprehensive Metadata Ingestion and Change Capture: EIIG efficiently gathers metadata from over 70 technology sources, ranging from mainframes to Python, and intelligently weaves this information into a cohesive knowledge graph. Through repeated scans of the same data sources, EIIG enables enterprises to automatically capture detailed changes. These changes may encompass database system reloads, the addition or removal of tables, alterations or nullifications of column data types, modifications of view definitions, and adjustments to ETL transformations or lines of code.

User-Driven Monitoring: Data citizens have the ability to subscribe to specific assets by placing them under surveillance. This feature allows them to receive timely notifications about changes as they occur. For example, users can place a watch on a database schema, and if new tables are added or columns are altered, they will promptly receive a notification.

Key Benefits of These EIIG Capabilities:

Timely and Precise Reporting: EIIG identifies added, changed, or deleted entities (such as columns, tables, views, etc.) and traces their impact on various targets, including reports. When owners of these reports have set up watches, they receive notifications of these impact change events. This functionality streamlines the validation of data, ensuring critical reports are published without delay and enabling easier data quality testing.

Cost Savings and Operational Efficiency: EIIG’s automation of data validation for reporting accuracy eliminates the need for manual resource allocation, resulting in significant time and cost savings and an overall boost to operational efficiency.

Dynamic Data Lineage and Impact Analysis: EIIG maintains an up-to-date data lineage, illustrating how data elements are derived and transformed. It empowers enterprises to trace changes across this lineage, facilitating seamless impact analysis when necessary.

Enhanced Data Quality: Monitoring metadata changes provides early detection of data quality or integrity issues, allowing organizations to address them proactively, thus preventing disruptions to business processes and decision-making.

Improved Compliance and Auditing: EIIG captures metadata changes essential for regulatory compliance and auditing. Timely alerts instill confidence in compliance officers and internal auditors, expediting the implementation of compliance programs.

Robust Data Governance: Effective data governance depends on a thorough understanding of data usage, access, and transformations. EIIG enhances data governance by providing transparency into data processes, access control, and data stewardship activities.

Better Data Versioning and Change Management: EIIG simplifies the management of data versions with detailed metadata captures and notifications. Also, change management is simplified with EIIG since it helps enterprises document minute changes automatically and makes communication of such changes to relevant stakeholders effortlessly via instant notifications.

Accurate Mapping of Information Assets: In data integration projects, where data is consolidated from various sources, capturing metadata changes is essential to maintaining consistency and managing updates as source data evolves.

Active Data Cataloging: Changes in metadata often reflect new data assets or updates to existing ones. EIIG keeps data catalogs up to date with the most recent metadata changes, assisting users in locating the data they need and staying informed about critical data asset changes.

Accelerated Data Migration and Modernization: EIIG expedites the assessment of migration readiness and the modernization process by ensuring data consistency and alignment with business requirements, even as source data undergoes changes. It also provides detailed visibility into the latest state of the data landscape such as duplicate tables, ETL jobs, and reports.

Facilitated Collaboration: Timely metadata change detection and notification promote collaboration by helping different teams and stakeholders understand how data has been used and transformed. This is particularly valuable when multiple teams or individuals collaborate on the same data, as changes can be seamlessly communicated to all relevant parties.

In summary, enterprises require automated tools to proactively capture metadata changes and effectively communicate these changes to the relevant stakeholders. With EIIG, they have an all-in-one active metadata and data governance platform to accelerate their data-driven initiatives, whether related to cloud migration, cost optimization, or regulatory compliance.

About the Author: Niu Bai, Ph.D. is the Head of Global Business Development at Orion Governance, Inc. Connect with Niu on LinkedIn.