What’s new in version 3.2

Our second release in this year comes with a number of new features with a special focus on Smart Subsetting and Visual Studio 2015 upgrade.

What is Smart Subsetting? 

Extracting a subset of data is designed to ensure realistic, referentially intact test data from across a distributed data landscape without added cost or administrative challenges. In this way, obtaining a subset creates realistic test databases that are:

• small enough to support rapid test runs,
• large enough to accurately reflect the variety of production data and that
• save cost in terms of storage, infrastructure and processing power.

Smart Subsetting feature enables users to define entry-level criteria (seed) for subsetting. If you have, for example, a production database containing US customers data, and want to create a test database that contains customers only from the New York City then you would use smart subsetting feature with this criteria, i.e. seed. Smart subsetting algorithm would start filtering data by taking into account only customers from NY in the ‘Customers’ table and copying records (from the production to the destination DB) from all tables associated to the ‘Customers’ table that relate to the selected customers (‘seed records’). In addition to that, users would have a variety of options to control the subsetting process to prevent data volume explosions or to enable application level constraints.

Seeding options include:

• First N records
• Filter criteria
• Key lists
• Complex query
• Sampling/distribution

Performance-wise, Smart Subsetting delivers exceptional results with a standard server hardware. It manages to process up to 100.000 records/sec on databases with medium complexity and size (up to 3 TB / 1000 tables).

Visual Studio 2015 upgrade

BizDataX Designer supports the newest Microsoft Visual Studio version. This upgrade solved some of the issues we had with the older Visual Studio versions  and helped making Designer more robust in more complex scenarios. We still support Visual Studio 2012, but recommend our users to upgrade their BizDataX workflows to the new version.

Debugging workflows

There is no better way of testing workflows and the data transformation process as a whole then debugging it in a real time. BizDataX is one of a kind in that respect on the market, offering now even better debugging support for workflows. Users can set breakpoints on data masking activities and check the original and new value for any object (record) during the workflow. Debugger offers the option to mask ‘first N records only’ saving debugging time during the lengthy masking processes. Many other features (we will blog soon about them) ensure the implementation phase will be as short as possible.

Additional DBMS supported

BizDataX supports now PostgreSQL 9.x versions.

Additional improvements in data masking (anonymization) and synthetic data generation workflow activities
New logging capabilities during the package execution introduced. Many Designer toolbox activities have been improved in terms of usability and performance.