In our constant quest to improve the lives of data professionals, we’ve learned that documenting databases and managing metadata can be a time-consuming and tedious task for many organizations. I can attest that as a developer, I despised the process of generating documentation.
Great news! The options for streamlining this critical function have just expanded. Today, we’re announcing the preview of SentryOne Document. Pairing automatic documentation capabilities with powerful data lineage tracking, SentryOne Document is a one-stop shop for seamlessly forging a well-documented, compliant data environment.
SentryOne Document is a cloud solution that builds on the foundation of SentryOne DOC xPress, our software for documenting databases, analyzing data lineage, and managing metadata. Here’s how SentryOne Document can help you, and what you can expect during the preview phase.
Understand Your Data’s Origins With Data Lineage Analysis
Simply put, data lineage is the pathway your data travels through the lifecycle of data-centric applications, showing the data’s origins and where it can move throughout your solutions.
Analyzing data lineage is critically important for a few reasons:
- Validating business-critical data. A company’s data is vital to its ability to survive and succeed. Data drives the individual functions within an organization, from your CEO looking at data about sales growth to your marketing department examining buying behavior data to set sales forecasts. Without a clear understanding of where data is coming from, who uses it, and how it’s been transformed, these functions become fruitless.
- Streamlining engineering efforts. A new software development process requires information about which data sources to pull from and/or push to—and that information-gathering takes significant time and resources. Well-documented data sources and a clear understanding of data lineage in your environment can mitigate any potential delays.
- Understanding the impact of database changes. Lastly, data lineage can be imperative in your always-changing data estate by helping you identify the impact of a proposed change and the potential benefits or costs associated with the change. With the ability to explore the dependencies in your environment, you’ll save countless hours in assessing how a change in one area will impact other areas.
Furthermore, not to scare anyone with any General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) horror stories, but understanding your data lineage could save you from fines or lawsuits, as customers and individuals in the EU now have the right to compensation if their data rights are violated.
The data lineage analysis capability in SentryOne Document gives you visibility into your data’s lifecycle, taking the frustration out of understanding where and how information flows through your database application.
These relationships can be very simple, as in this example:
Or complex, as in this example:
Automatically Document Databases From Any Point in Time
It’s no secret that maintaining up-to-date documentation in your database environment is time-consuming, especially in environments that experience frequent change. With SentryOne Document, you can efficiently and accurately document your entire Microsoft Data Platform environment.
With the point-in-time documentation view in SentryOne Document, once a target is part of a solution, you can view documentation based on a specific date and view historical documentation as needed, allowing you to track environment changes over time. This can be an asset when your team uses a CI/CD pipeline or software delivery process, especially in detecting undesirable changes.
Join the Preview and Lock In Special Pricing
We’re offering 15% discounted pricing for SentryOne Document during the preview phase, so there’s no better time than now to end your frustrations with documentation and metadata management—and save money. SentryOne Document is licensed per documentation source, and we’re offering three different packages so you can choose the one that best fits your environment. You can see the pricing on the SentryOne Document web page.
Want to learn more? Check out the following resources:
As you start to explore SentryOne Document, please let us know what you think. We want to know if you have questions or suggestions, so feel free to email me directly or post a comment here. We’re happy to unveil this powerful new solution that can help you gain control of documentation and data lineage analysis, a time-consuming—but critical—function for every data management team.
