We recently sponsored the MDM and Data Governance Summit in New York. This was a lively conference with over 400 attendees and a good venue to reconnect with some of our customers.
This year, for the first time, TopBraid Reference Data Manager (TopBraid RDM) was included by conference chair Aaron Zornes in his “Field Reports” on leading RDM solutions. Aaron concluded that because of its agile approach to business data modeling, TopBraid RDM appears to be an excellent choice as a flexible and low cost web-based solution for reference data governance that provides value quickly.
He also noted that its uniquely strong standards-based semantic querying features, taxonomy support, and mappings and crosswalks capability promote business user and data steward self-service that requires only modest initial IT support.
Because most MDM solutions use a relational DBMS approach, model changes require development work and IT intervention to enhance the repository, screens, and interfaces. Implementations based on object-oriented approaches overcome some of these challenges, but their use of proprietary modeling technologies result in limited interoperability and vendor lock-in.
TopQuadrant’s RDM uses W3C semantic standards-based representation and models for everything in the product, including the data sets, metadata about the reference data, permissions and data quality rules, and it stores its data using a standards-based NoSQL graph database persisted using any traditional SQL database. These features provide more flexibility and interoperability than even proprietary object modeling approaches.
With this platform, TopBraid RDM can provide an organization total flexibility in defining diverse reference data types. With neither coding nor involvement of administrators, any authorized user can define a new type of data and associated attributes and relationships. They can also manage information not only about reference data but also about the reference data sets themselves, such as who provides governance, what the onboarding procedures are, and where it is used.
Download the complete Field Report to learn more.