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Latest Database Trends – Better Metadata Management for Operational Success

by Tanya March 17, 2021

Metadata management was historically regarded as one of the vital tasks in enterprise databases management, an essential component of data governance. Metadata management facilitates data provenance, and it will continue as the backbone of any data-driven processes. However, some important shifts are happening in metadata management in light of the latest trends in technologies like the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, and the statistical expression of data for business decision making.

Over the last couple of years, metadata management emerged from simple back-office processes to the front-end operation of IT departments and data stewards, which is now a tactical measure to meet the business objectives and offer some competitive advantages in terms of administration of business operations. Metadata now largely influences the production environments and productivity of the processes and largely depends on cataloging various types, data modeling, mapping, machine learning, edge computing, etc.

Cataloging metadata

Metadata collected by organizations depend on some specific use cases, and it involves various types of data. While you rely on the use of metadata for repeated operations like analytics, data integration, then organizations tend to produce three types of metadata:

  • Application composition: It is a type of metadata that reveals the specifications of a particular application involved in the operations. While integrating the e-com data on the cloud to applications like Salesforce, there is metadata about the connectors deployed, mapping constructs, and even some basics as the application names, etc.
  • Execution results: The execution of metadata stems directly from the jobs performed. While integrating the e-commerce data to Salesforce, the execution metadata will involve timestamps to run at the scheduled timings.
  • Run environment: The run environment metadata will typically focus on the requirements to run a specific job. Examples of run environment metadata include facets of memory related to the file systems and performance.

These categories will act as the foundation to cataloging metadata accurately, which is indispensable to mine the metadata and ensure a competitive advantage. It will enable you to handle your data efficiently without any hassles.

Mapping in metadata management

Mapping is one of the most important metadata management modes, which offers a competitive advantage while deploying for IoT and AI use cases. This is to rectify the differences in different data models and the schema needed to load the applications for operational purposes. When the data dissimilarities are addressed with successful efforts for mapping, metadata will be generated related to the same. Metadata related to various mapping jobs can be reused in different use cases, departments, and various organizational objectives. For a better insight into the implementation of metadata management, you can approach RemoteDBA.

Repeating mapping for similar fields is more efficient than customizing mapping for each integration. While you leverage residual metadata from already done mapping efforts to current scenarios, you may be saving up to 90% of time and effort in repeating the mapping. The application of metadata management will help reduce the time, but it will also enable the organizations to exploit metadata that they can access.

Even though various methods with which machine learning can assist in metadata management, it can optimize the mapping process by suggesting how metadata from old jobs can streamline the efforts for similar jobs. While working with data on the scale for broader integrations between e-com and CRM applications, you can effectively reduce the development time and effort with machine learning. Machine learning techniques can decrease the overall development time, too, by suggesting the mapping more effectively.

One of the most advantageous algorithms for metadata management is shallow learning. This is not deep learning but shallow learning in which AI can recognize the similarities in the fields within a system or multiple systems. While categorizing various fields for customer last names, for example, across different retail systems, there can be very slight alterations in terms of spellings, characters, or abbreviations.

Supervised learning

Enterprises can also deploy advanced machine learning forms to execute the action from metadata like detection of anomalies, which may be pivotal on streaming datasets in IoT jobs for e-com. Several cloud platforms offer options to utilize ‘supervised machine learning,’ which is a training model to run what is normal for your application. Once the training model results are different from the trained model, we may know what is different.

There are also some alternative approaches for detecting anomalies as log data monitoring, which may not be sustainable for big datasets of recurring nature. Enterprises can now more effectively monitor the peaks and valleys in terms of data transmissions from metadata. Metadata can be used to detect things so that you are alerted about the same if there is any business change.

Reducing the amount of code

Good practices in metadata management are meritorious in low-code data modeling by meeting the requirement for data integration. The top machine learning models now involve data from various sources. The longstanding values of data emit from IoT stem from integrating and aggregating these sources with traditional data sources. Whenever you try to move data from one source to the target database, you need to remodel data from one to another. However, using the metadata from previous mappings will reduce the logic needed for this remodeling process. Some use cases like currency conversion for international e-commerce transactions require some unique transformational logic where add-on coding will be needed. Overall, the best thing about metadata management is that it is low code in most cases, and when you need code, you can inject it when needed.

Many advantages of metadata management are mapping, machine learning, and data modeling, which are realized in edge deployments in IoT. Various elements in terms of mapping and automation in metadata management are timely good for edge computing. It is based on the levity of the smaller devices on the cloud. The new-age customers want to enjoy the lightweight transformation of data, which again goes back to the need for mapping, which can be effectively done with metadata management.

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Tanya

The first Millennial blogger in the UK. Twitter @_luckyattitude

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