Database Metadata Information Leverage

11 Aug 2008 by Chetan Shah.

Cannot stress the importance of an upto date database metadata information for an application or a suite of applications which exchange data amongst each other.

Metadata information can be leveraged in following ways :

- Impact Analysis
Application sourcing data from upstream application and/or sourcing data to downstream application can hugely benefit by having a metadata repository. It will enable the application owners to easily identify the producers and consumers and hence enable them to perform impact analysis.

- Data Reuse
As a byproduct of meta data harvesting exercise, the application owners will easily be able to identify redundant data (data which is sourced more than 1 once for a suite of applications)

- Documentation
Rather than dedicating time to create database documentation, any metadata tool will enable you to export html and publish it on your intranet possibly on sharepoint or wiki site which are easily searchable.

- Consolidation of Load Process
In an organization having a suite of applications, more often than not there are disparate data load batch processes executing to fetch data (from data warehouse let’s say). Metadata harvesting exercise will enable the application owner to identify and potentially consolidate the batch process on a single platform (etl tools like informatica)

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