Data and Metadata

Data - The actual data that is stored in the database.

Business Metadata - The information of the data related with business and this
data is used by functional team (business analysts, smart management experts,
business managers etc).
Technical Metadata - The information about the data related with technology
and this data is used by the technical team (Developers, DBAs) etc.
Popular Metadata Tools
Tool Name

Company Name

Rochade

ASG

Metatrieve

Metatrieval

Datamapper

Exeros

Metacenter

Data Advantage Group

Meta Data Integration Framework Info Librarian

SuperGlue

Informatica

Metastage

Ascential

MetaData
Metadata is data about data. Metadata comes into picture when we need to know
about how data is stored and where it is stored. Metadata tools are helpful in
capturing business metadata and the following section explains business
metadata.
Business MetaData:
In IT, Business Metadata is adding additional text or statement around a
particular word that adds value to data. Business Metadata is about creating
definitions, business rules. For example, when tables and columns are created
the following business metadata would be more useful for generating reports to
functional and technical team. The advantage is of this business metadata is
whether they are technical or non-technical, everybody would understand what is
going on within the organization.
Tables Metadata: While creating a table, metadata for definition of a table,
source system name, source entity names, business rules to transform the
source table, and the usage of the table in reports should be added in order to
make them available for taking metadata reports.
Columns Metadata: Similarly for columns, source column name (mapping),
business rules to transform the source column name, and the usage of the
column in reports should be added for taking metadata reports.

Business Metadata Example:

Technical Metadata:
Technical metadata describes information about technology such as the
ownership of the database, physical characteristics of a database (in oracle, table
space, extents, segments, blocks, partitions etc), performance tuning
(processors, indexing), table name, column name, data type, relationship
between the tables, constraints, abbreviations, derivation rules, glossary, data
dictionary, etc., and is used by the technical team. In Technical metadata,
derivation rules are important when formulae or calculations are applied on a
column.

Technical Metadata Example:

Role of Metadata in ETL

When you deal with a data warehouse, various phases like Business Process
Modeling, Data Modeling, ETL, Reporting etc., are inter-related with each other
and they do contain their own metadata. For example in ETL, it will be very
difficult for one to extract, transform and load source data into a data
warehouse, if there is no metadata available for the source like where and how
to get the source data.
Let us explain the role of metadata in the ETL process with the help of an
example table shown below which contains information about an organisation's
employees.
Employee
Employee Age Employee Salary
Employee Title
Name
John Hick
36
$3000
Informatica Specialist
In the above table, the second row, containing information like John Hick, 36,
$3000, Informatica Specialist are known as Data. Whereas the first row, (i.e)
table header containing headings like Employee Name, Employee Age, Employee
Salary, Employee Title are called as Metadata for the above said data.
An organization may be using data modeling tools, such as Erwin, Embarcadero,
Oracle designer, Sybase Power Designer etc., for developing data models.
Functional and technical team should have spent much time and effort in
creating the data model's data structures(tables, columns, data types,
procedures, functions, triggers etc.,). By using matadata capturing tools, these
data structures can be imported into metadata repository which we call it as
metadata.
For example when you work with Informatica's MetaData Exchange, it captures
the metadata present in these tools and loads into the repository. There is no

need for informatica developer to create these data structures once again since
metadata(data definitions) have been already captured and stored. Similarly
most of the ETL tools have that capability to capture metadata from RDBMS,
files, ERP, Applications etc.
In ETL, Metadata Repository is where all the metadata information about
source, target, transformations, mapping, wokflows, sessions etc., are stored.
From this repository, metadata can be manipulated, queried and retrieved with
the help of wizards provided by metadata capturing tools. During the ETL
process, when we are mapping source and target systems, we are actually
mapping their metadata.
In any organization, a useful metadata often stored in a repository can be a
handy resource to know about the organization's information systems. Assume
that each department in an organization may have a different business
definitions, data types, attribute names for the same attribute or they may have
a single business definition for many attributes. These anomalies can be
overcome by properly maintaining metadata for these attributes in the
centralized repository.
Thus metadata plays a vital role in explaining about how, why, where data can
be found, retrieved, stored and used efficiently in an information management
system.
Metadata Reports
Metadata stored in a repository can be produced in the form of reports for easy
understanding and these reports are very useful in explaining about the various
objects or data structures and the relationship between these objects. The
following products like Schema Logic Enterprise Suite, Rochade, Metatrieve,
Datamapper, Metacenter, Metadata Integration Frame work stores and handles
metadata in an efficient and effective manner.
Following are few examples for metadata reports.
A metadata report on business process activities, data flow.
A metadata report on source and target columns can be generated to find out
all the source and target field names, data types, definitions etc.
A metadata report on workflow can be generated to find out all the workflows,
workflow properties, workflow scheduling, workflow execution details etc.
A metadata report on mapping can be generated to find out all the sources and
targets in the mapping, source fields and target fields participated in the
mapping etc.
A metadata report on business intelligence can be generated to find out all the
score cards and balanced score cards.

Business Intelligence:
Business Intelligence is a technology based on customer and profit oriented
models that reduces operating costs and provide increased profitability by
improving productivity, sales, service and helps to make decision making
capabilities at no time. Business Intelligence Models are based on multi
dimensional analysis and key performance indicators (KPI) of an enterprise.
Business Intelligence applications that are based on Business Intelligence
Models are created by Business Intelligence software which provides the
aggregated details about suppliers, customers, internal activities, business to
business transactions to the managers or whoever needs it to take better
corporate decisions.
Many business questions or situations need to be analyzed in order to achieve
the target of an enterprise with the help of several managers or executives in
each cadre. Below are some of the samples of these questions.
Business Intelligence: Finance:
What is the net income, expenses, gross profit, and net profit for this quarter,
year?
Business Intelligence: Accounts:
What is the sales amount this month and what is the outstanding pending
payment?
Business Intelligence: Purchase:
Who is the vendor to be contacted to purchase products?
Business Intelligence: Production:
How many products are manufactured in each production unit today, weekly,
monthly?
Business Intelligence: Sales:
How many products have been sold in each area today, weekly, monthly?
Business Intelligence: Quality:
How many products have been defective today, weekly, monthly, quarterly,
yearly?
Business Intelligence: Service:
Are the customers satisfied with the quality?
These business intelligence questions are related with why, what, how, when,
and business intelligence reports(olap reports) are useful in providing solutions
to the above questions by means of reporting, score cards, balance score cards
that are helpful in managerial decisions.
Business Intelligence Tools
Business Intelligence Tools help to gather, store, access and analyze corporate
data to aid in decision-making. Generally these systems will illustrate business

intelligence in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market

research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis,
inventory and distribution analysis.
With Business Intelligence Tools, various data like customer related,
product related, sales related, time related, location related, employee related
etc. are gathered and analysed based on which important strategies or rules are
formed and goals to achieve their target are set. These decisions are very
efficient and effective in promoting an Organisation's growth.
Since the collected data can be sliced across almost all the dimensions like
time,location, product, promotion etc., valuable statistics like sales profit in one
region for the current year can be calculated and compared with the previous
year statistics.