Oracle Rises to the Challenge for Metadata Management

Five Ways Big Data Can Turn Health Data into Actionable Insights

In an effort to simplify the management of all the data strewn across the enterprise, Oracle has launched Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management 12c.

Jeff Pollock, vice president of product management for Oracle Data Integration, says Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management 12c was designed to aggregate operational metadata to enable organizations to then expose actionable information for database administrators and business users.

Oracle accomplishes that goal, says Pollock, by making available different types of user interfaces for accessing Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management 12c based on the role a particular individual has within the organization.

By deploying Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management 12c, Pollock says that Oracle is trying to solve both the data stewardship and data quality issues that have plagued IT for years. As part of that effort, Oracle has developed three user interfaces for Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management 12c. The first is aimed at database administrators (DBAs) that need to be able to access information such as entity relationship diagrams. The second is for compliance officers and auditors that need to understand data flows across the organization. A third user interface is aimed at business executives to allow them to make data-driven business decisions by giving them access to both higher quality structured and semi-structured data that has been aggregated from relational databases and platforms such as Hadoop.

Based on Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Data Integrator software, Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management 12c can aggregate data from both Oracle and up to 50 different third-party applications and systems.

Compatible with the Common Warehouse Metamodel specification created by the Object Management Group (OMG), Pollock says Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management 12c leverages application programming interfaces (APIs) to aggregate metadata on a common platform. As such, organizations can either use Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management 12c to simply move data between applications or use it as a vehicle through which to profile, audit, transform, parse and match data, says Pollock.

In effect, Pollock says Oracle is now making it possible to harvest data regardless of the format it is in or where it is stored. More importantly, Pollock says that for the first time, it’s possible to identify which data flows are connected to certain applications and systems. That means instead of having a theoretical picture of an organization’s enterprise architecture, it’s now possible to dynamically determine what that actual enterprise architecture is.

Like it or not, most applications and systems in place today bear little resemblance to what enterprise architects think is going on inside their organizations. New applications and systems are often added without them being aware of it. Data flows, meanwhile, change almost daily as new business processes are created. Making sense of all the chaos is generally beyond the capabilities of most IT architects and administrators. They need a practical method to aggregate and organize all the metadata that the applications and systems generate in a way that can actually be understood and consumed by everyone across the enterprise.