Best Practices for Organizing Metadata in DataStage

[ryoung011]

Experts,

We are trying to determine the best approach for organizing the metadata within DataStage. Our environment uses Oracle tables, sequential flat files, and hash files. Any table or file can act as a source and/or target. We have several development initiatives that may share a table definition yet target different schemas (i.e., the Product dimension may be in several schemas). This is an interesting challenge because DataStage automatically prepends the schema name to the table name in the metadata definition.

Any help on how to organize the Categories within the metadata and instill a process that maximizes reusability and modularity would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Rick Young
SEI - Atlanta
A Systems Evolution Company

[ogmios]

Document... document... and buy big wooden clubs for your QA department.

Most projects I've seen start with good intentions, but DataStage makes it just too easy to import tables where you shouldn't put them. So most end up in a pot-pourri qua meta-data.

Personally I'm in favor of one central person doing all imports, or if you have very big projects: 1 person per project.

Ogmios

On the "bright" side, DataStage job themselves don't care whether you change meta-data after the job has been created: the meta-data is copied to the job itself and would remain unchanged.
But it becomes a nightmare then to figure out which jobs need changing because of a table change.

[chulett]

This is an interesting challenge because DataStage automatically prepends the schema name to the table name in the metadata definition.

It only does this when you tell it to. If you uncheck the 'Fully qualify' option when importing the metadata, it won't do that. At least that's the way it works for plugin metadata when importing via OCI - I'm assuming they all work the same way.

[ray.wurlod]

Appoint a metadata steward with full responsibility for metadata. That person can choose whether or not to delegate, and should have the power to threaten and punish!

Don't lose sight of the bigger picture; the start of a project is THE BEST time to implement tools such as MetaStage and Parameter Manager.