Discoverability enables self-service data preparation
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Tag: metadata
Data privacy and governance: No easy answers
.@philsimon advises to be wary of those promising obvious and facile solutions to increasingly challenging governance and privacy issues.
Governing data acquisition
As the application stack supporting big data has matured, it has demonstrated the feasibility of ingesting, persisting and analyzing potentially massive data sets that originate both within and outside of conventional enterprise boundaries. But what does this mean from a data governance perspective?
Importance of metadata – Bridging the gap (Part 4: analytical metadata usage)
In the previous three blogs in this series, we talked about what metadata can be available from source systems, transformation and movement, and operational usage. For this final blog in the series, I want to discuss the analytical usage of metadata. Let’s set up the scenario. Let's imagine I'm a
Importance of metadata – Bridging the gap (Part 3: operational metadata usage)
As I discussed in the first two blogs of this series, metadata is useful in a variety of ways. Its importance starts at the source system, and continues through the data movement and transformation processes and into operations. Operational metadata, in particular, gives us information about the execution and completion
Importance of metadata – Bridging the gap (Part 2: transformation and movement)
In the first blog of this four-part series, we discussed traditional data management and how we can apply these principles to our big data platforms. We also discussed how metadata can help bridge the gap of understanding the data as we move to newer technologies. Part 2 will focus on
Importance of metadata – Bridging the gap (Part 1: source system)
Traditional data management includes all the disciplines required to manage data resources. More specifically, data management usually includes: Architectures that encompass data, process and infrastructure. Policies and governance surrounding data privacy, data quality and data usage. Procedures that manage a data life cycle from creation of the data to sunset
What does security mean in the world of big data?
.@philsimon says that even seemingly useless information can be useful under the right circumstances.
The importance of a business glossary for data preparation
Lately I've been binge-watching a lot of police procedural television shows. The standard format for almost every episode is the same. It starts with the commission or discovery of a crime, followed by forensic investigation of the crime scene, analysis of the collected evidence, and interviews or interrogations with potential suspects. It ends
Who changed my SAS Visual Analytics reports and explorations?
In a couple of my previous blogs I discussed how to audit who made changes to data in a SAS environment. In the last couple of weeks I have been asked how to do the same thing for SAS Visual Analytics reports and explorations. The Visual Analytics administrator overview report
Data lessons from the library
Ever been stumped as you tried to find something in a huge, complex data environment that encompasses a hybrid of all types of internal and external data? It used to be that data systems were tactical, technically focused systems that provided point-to-point data access. In that era, it wasn’t so
Data strategy: Why a single, integrated view of metadata is so important
It’s obvious that an enterprise data strategy involves data – but we sometimes disregard the fact that it should also involve metadata. Why? Because it’s key to unlocking the value of data. Metadata shows you what data is available and how people can use it. It also reveals which data
Managing data beyond boundaries: Third-party metadata collection
I’ve faced the task of creating an integrated view of metadata across an enterprise, so I’m aware of the many hurdles it entails. First, metadata integration and analysis require you to access all the metadata sources available to you. But metadata comes in many different formats, and vendors often store
Is your data self-service?
I don’t know about you, but I'm asked every day where some type of data lives in our enterprise. I keep thinking that we have not done a good job of helping people learn to help themselves! A few things I have learned about corporate data assets are: The data
Tips for successful big data integration
Integrating big data into existing data management processes and programs has become something of a siren call for organizations on the odyssey to become 21st century data-driven enterprises. To help save some lost time, this post offers a few tips for successful big data integration.
Where is my stuff? Documenting what is stored in SAS metadata
In a SAS Environment there is a lot of metadata, metadata about configuration such as server definitions, users, groups and roles and metadata about content like data, reports and jobs etc. SAS Administrators often want to report on metadata. They want to know what reports have been developed and where they are stored, what
Data policies and data governance
In recent years, we practitioners in the data management world have been pretty quick to conflate “data governance” with “data quality” and “metadata.” Many tools marketed under "data governance" have emerged – yet when you inspect their capabilities, you see that in many ways these tools largely encompass data validation and data standardization. Unfortunately, we
The Meta Mistake
.@philsimon on the relationship between metadata and unstructured data.
Metadata presents data
‘Tis the season. While the season means different things to different people, its most common theme is people buying things for people. Things that become presents when they are covered in wrapping paper. Two retailers have been running television commercial campaigns this season about how presents are wrapped. One campaign
The snap, crackle and pop of data management on Hadoop
Data. It's everywhere. It can reside in many places through replication, accessibility needs or infrastructure costs. For reporting, that same data can be structurally changed (denormalized or aggregated) into additional reporting and analytic data repositories. Over time, new sources of enrichment of that data become available through traditional data sources
Data needs a Copernican Revolution
Data. Our industry really loves that word, making it seem like the whole world revolves around it. We certainly enjoy revolving a lot of words around it. We put words like master, big, and meta before it, and words like management, quality, and governance after it. This spins out disciplines
Husker du SAS grafik som noget fra halvfemserne?
I 90’erne og 00’erne sagde kursister, at SAS grafik kode var noget fanden havde skabt. De fleste trak deres data over i Excel og lavede grafikken der. Man skal altid lytte til kursister, så i 23 år har jeg undervist i alt det andet SAS, som kursister er glade for.
Using metadata to identify "my brother Darryl"
Recently, as I was driving in listening to National Public Radio (NPR), the topic of conversation was Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency (NSA), again. If you’ve been listening to any of this coverage, it seems the news media has a new catch word “metadata” that they are throwing
Managing metadata access – the easy way
SAS Environment Manager 2.1 (which was released with SAS 9.4 M1), has new features to make it easier to manage your SAS environment. For example, it now supports metadata clusters, and it has an improved method for handling access to the application. But the biggest change is in metadata access.
SAS metadata and third-party databases—an FAQ
In November, I resumed the “it’s all about the data” series, laying a foundation for helping SAS administrators understand how SAS stores and manages data for use in business intelligence and analytic applications. For this article, I culled our internal Thotwave knowledge base and queried our consultants who get questions
Master metadata management
In my previous post, I used a game show metaphor for one aspect of metadata management, namely making sure table definitions are not ambiguously labeled. In this post, I will use name tags as a metaphor to discuss an important intersection of metadata management and master data management (MDM), an
A data governance primer, part 2: minding your metadata
The second part of my data governance primer series addresses ways to "mind your metadata." I can just hear the collective groans, and perhaps a stifled yawn. Sorry, but metadata collection is one of those necessary evils that may not be fun, but having it available as a resource to
SAS 9.4 metadata cluster: what and why?
Over the past few releases, SAS has offered high availability for servers through various failover techniques. So I’ve been wondering how metadata clustering differs and why does SAS 9.4 provide it. The “why” is an easy question to answer. Today’s SAS software is used in a wide array of business-critical applications
How to connect to SAS libraries when the client application isn't metadata-aware
Based on my previous posts, we are almost done with the basics of SAS libraries and how the various clients can access them. Before we leave this topic and go onto third-party database engines, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about some best practices for making sure that
Pre-assign SAS libraries? If so, which method?
As we have seen my previous post "Seeing SAS data through metadata", there is a fundamental difference between accessing a SAS library using a physical reference or a metadata reference to that library. By now, you should now be an expert on the nuances of physical references to SAS data