Database subsetting and data subsetting

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"Due to the sensitive nature of our solutions, testing procedures are necessarily rigorous, and this adds significantly to the overall application cost. Data Subset contributes directly to the quality and speed of delivery of the final product, achieving the valuable ‘double’ of reducing costs and improving our quality of service. The automatic documentation of database structures and relationships also reduced the effort involved in our documentation project."

Christine Green,
Watson Wyatt

What is database subsetting and what data subset techniques do Grid-Tools use?

Database subsetting is an innovative way to create referentially correct, business intact, cut-down versions of your production database. Once a cut-down version is made, one or many smaller copies of that database are created for use in development or testing, saving you disk space and effectively offering more efficient testing.

GT Datamaker™ contains a powerful database subsetting tool. Data Subset™ allows you to define sets of tables to be extracted, add in your own relationships and define selection criteria. Grid-Tools database subsetting software uses native database utilities to migrate the data, allowing you to incorporate the generated scripts into your existing test data management framework.

Data Subset™ can also scramble or mask your data as it is being extracted from production.

database subsetting diagram

Grid-Tools offers basic to advanced subsetting

We have a vast level of experience in organizing database subsetting tasks in highly complex environments.

These include:

  • An easy to use data explorer, allowing you to view the data as you design your subsets
  • Utilization of the native database utilities to move the data. For example, Oracle Data Pump allows for high performance database subset builds
  • The ability to shrink a database in situ, allowing you to reorganize your tables into different tablespaces and compress your data
  • The ability to validate the quality of your data during testing. These checks can be incorporated into your standard testing processes
  • The ability to compare data before and after a transaction, providing detail on what exactly changed in the database, not just what you expect to have changed
  • The ability to use "data cubes" to drive extracts, which allows you to provide an intersection of different parts of an application database. For example, "ensure that my Claim Providers and Claimants have matching claims".
  • The ability to date shift will keep your time sensitive data up to date just as if you were using current production data

Datamaker™ provides a complete test data management system, allowing you to subset, scramble, generate and manipulate data as you need it.

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