Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc., The CoSort Company

SortCL Data Definition and Manipulation Files: Simple, Reusable, Interoperable.

Challenges:

IT and data departments depend on metadata to understand their own systems and to align their tools and processes. Some tools, however use:

• cryptic metadata that is not easily understood
• hidden metadata so it cannot be modified
• binary metadata other tools cannot use

Solutions:

Metadata used in IRI's CoSort package is typically found in the form of a familiar and self-documenting Sort Control Language (SortCL), which has been widely adopted worldwide since 1992. SortCL allows your application, business and data governance teams to speak a simple, common language around flat files.

SortCL reduces complexity and the need for elaborate metadata maintenance by using a common metadata to define the layout and manipulation of sources, processes, and targets. The same metadata is used in many applications, including data:

• Transformation (sort, join, aggregate, remap)
• Presentation (static reports and BI-tool handoffs)
• Protection (field encryption, masking, de-ID)
• Conversion (of data types and file formats)

SortCL's metadata supports data and application independence. Job commands and data layouts can reside together or separately in explicit, logical text files -- metadata repositories -- that can be centralized for re-use. Multiple levels of data and application independence can occur through nested specifications and references.

You can define multiple file layouts to reflect, and output, multiple views of the same data. You can also use these layouts to generate safe test data in the same format through IRI's test data generation package, RowGen, or protect real data at the column level with FieldShield.

You can also convert to SortCL's data definition format from 3rd-party file layouts, ETL tool metadata, and Oracle tables via IRI's Fast Extract (FACT) product.

From production efficiency and maintenance cost standpoints, SortCL metadata enables the combination of high-volume data transformation and reporting. You can use the metadata in just one script, for one-pass:

• Data Warehouse and Reorg Operations
• Web Reports and Business Intelligence
• Compliance and Outsourcing Projects
• Impact Analysis and Data Forensics
• Testing and Application Prototyping

From a compliance standpoint, SortCL metadata also supports field-level protection functions like encryption at the same time you are prepping data for analysis. SortCL metadata and its inclusion in audit trails allow you to map these processes and help satisfy the requirements of your risk and controls framework.

Conclusion:

You can exploit SortCL's metadata and operational infrastructure to replace multiple processes with one, and add simplicity, transparency, compliance and auditability.