Metadata – Data About Data

Enterprises need a logical, common view of all data assets to ensure that everyone gets a single version of the truth. Metadata – critical to providing this 360-degree view – enables organizations to apply transformations, reuse objects, and understand how changes impact the physical layer of the business intelligence system.

All Information Builders business intelligence; extract, transform, and load (ETL); and enterprise integration initiative (EII) products share metadata. And, since it is portable across all computing platforms, WebFOCUS' common toolset can be used to manage and customize all enterprise metadata to satisfy business users' complex requirements.

WebFOCUS Metadata Solutions and Benefits

A Single, Consistent View of Business Data
WebFOCUS’ approach to metadata simplifies development, maintenance, and support while improving performance of the overall business intelligence system. WebFOCUS metadata acts as a buffer between users and data sources, allowing people to work with data in business terms, easily manipulating it for reporting, analysis, ETL, or enterprise integration.

Reusable Business Views
WebFOCUS provides the tools to create business views containing calculations, filters, sort objects, rankings, and styling. They can be reused by any WebFOCUS application to dramatically reduce development times, and a library of powerful routines lets users apply complex mathematical, string, date, and time functions.
 

OLAP Modeling and Disparate JOINs
WebFOCUS' built in modeling tool let users create OLAP dimensions from any type of data described within the WebFOCUS enterprise catalog. Analysts can perform OLAP against non-OLAP data sources. The JOIN tool can perform complex JOINs and reuse them in any reporting application, shielding users from the complexities of the back-end data.
 

Impact Analysis
Display all procedures used in a table, file, field, or column. This reduces the administrative effort of keeping reports and ETL procedures in synch with the live back-end systems.
 

Unicode and Multiple Languages
Global organizations need to generate reports in local languages. WebFOCUS metadata supports Unicode and multiple languages, giving business users the ability to select the language used in column titles and descriptions.

 
Other Features and Benefits
  • Multi-dimensional cube view to support SAP BW, Hyperion Essbase, and other MDDBs
  • Data lineage to understand the history of transformations applied to any column or field
  • Embed security all the way down to the field value level
  • The ability to leverage metadata from other vendors, such as Ascential, Informatica, and Teradata MDS
  

* PDF file. (Download Adobe Acrobat Reader.)

Learn More