February 12, 2006

Repositories for Metadata

To understand data and work efficiently with it, one has to grasp the idea of metadata. To put it simply, metadata is data about data, its context and semantics. Though the concept of a repository to store metadata sounds useful, it is theoretically hard to achieve. The metadata storage houses available today are complex, expensive and do not integrate well with modern tools as they tend to follow very formal processes and methods.

However, a few vendors like Xcalia, BEA Systems, Informatica and IBM are working on easy to implement, cost-effective metadata repositories. Xcalia is implementing an XML table-based metadatabase in its Intermediation Platform, which allows the creation of metadata-based transformation rules that allow services and data sources to interact consistently, in parallel with the data's context and semantics, while Informatica is using a metadata repository in its PowerCenter Data Federation data-integration platform.

--
Did you enjoy this post?

February 12, 2006 in Data Warehousing | Permalink




Comments

Post a comment






« Cognos BI for Supply Chain Solution | Main | Executive Dashboards »