Chris Mercer Q&A with Grid-Tools Ltd

Chris Mercer is the Test Team Leader for VocaLink, an international payment transaction specialist, with an automated payment platform processing over 90 million transactions on a peak day and a switching platform connecting the world’s busiest ATM network of over 60,000 ATMs.

GT: What initial problems were you having with managing and creating data and how did you go about choosing Datamaker?

CM: We had been having two data maintenance issues for quite some time, which were causing grief for VocaLink. Firstly, a lack of referential integrity in the data we were using was causing the applications to fail in the test database on one of our current projects. This had a large impact on the test team, as our testers were trying to set-up test conditions with little regard to data integrity.

Secondly, we used Datamaker to create referential data from the ground up. We thought Datamaker would be useful in a preliminary reference data setup, because we were previously using live data that was very large in size. This was impractical for functional testing, as the data needed more focus. My line manager, Teresa Hehir, heard about Datamaker at a conference she attended and, after assessing the product, thought it was a possible solution to tackle our problems.

GT: Would you recommend the Grid-Tools methods for provisioning test and development environments to other companies?

CM: Yes

GT: What value do you feel Datamaker might bring to another company?

CM: For us, it has made the data much more visible. Before we used Datamaker, the data was consigned to an afterthought and assumed to be okay until it failed! I believe Datamaker can reduce costs, but a cost/benefit analysis should be done in the case of complex reference data design, as there may be quite an investment to make in resources to bring Datamaker “on-stream”.

GT: What do you feel are the differentiating benefits of Datamaker over other tools in the marketplace?

CM: I cannot offer any direct product comparison to hand with the exception of using TOAD and SQL scripts, which are much more cumbersome and inflexible than Datamaker.

GT: In what instances do you feel Datamaker would be most useful? What sort of requirements would a tool like this fulfil?

CM: Datamaker is especially useful to overcome database corruption during testing, and to get testers thinking about their needs for reference data at the same time as transactional data while preparing test scripts

GT: What do you feel are the most innovative/best features of Datamaker?

CM: The ability to link foreign key columns together is the most innovative and best feature of Datamaker, especially where the naming convention is not obvious.

GT: What industries would benefit most from using Grid-Tools?

CM: Not sure about an industry, but any sector with complex referential data design and large resources used for testing could definitely benefit from using Datamaker.

GT: In your experience, how easy has the tool been to use?

CM: The tool was easy to use, with an intuitive GUI interface. Datamaker has good documentation and Grid-Tools online services and their forum were very helpful.

GT: If you were to explain the benefits of Datamaker to a DBA, what would you say?

CM: I use Datamaker as an adjunct to the daily DBA services at VocaLink, as they are only tasked with application of patches and database backup/restore and not aware of data content as such.

GT: Are there any features of the tool that made a massive impact in this project?

CM: The capability to upload data from spreadsheets was the most useful feature of Datamaker. This can be done in other applications, but Datamaker keeps the data in SQL tables and verifies it. This was an important feature for us.

It was also easy to train our testers to use Datamaker. The tool has an intuitive look and feel and they acquired the principles of the Datamaker operation quickly and were up and running in a short time with very little support.