Spring 2024: Focus on Shadowbase Product Management

Transform Your Data!

Today, the value of a company’s data cannot be overestimated.

Data has become the fuel to power new business opportunities.

Even Antonio Neri said, “Data is your most valuable asset.” at HPE Discover this year.

While exploiting data is nothing new, the amount of data being generated certainly is, and it is only now that we have the tools to gather and mine vast amounts of that data in real-time.  The key is unlocking any data silos that exist in your enterprise and opening up the data to new opportunities to build out value-add services.  HPE Shadowbase helps you do that by integrating your NonStop data and applications into the rest of your enterprise.

HPE Shadowbase Data Integration and Application Integration

But this exploitation of data comes with some problems, with the first being how to get the data to the place where it can be acted upon?

Existing IT systems have typically been developed in a stovepipe fashion, a new application is needed, so go build or acquire the new application. Companies also accrete disparate IT systems via business mergers and acquisitions. The net of these processes is that applications (and the data collected and used by those applications) are often isolated, and the data managed by one application is not available to others.

This issue seriously limits the possibility of exploiting that data for new purposes. Fortunately, HPE Shadowbase Data Integration and Application Integration software overcomes this problem by providing a data distribution backbone, enabling the real-time distribution of events and data between heterogeneous systems and applications, from wherever they are created to wherever they are needed.  Shadowbase software allows you to build efficient event driven architectures (EDAs).

But the problem doesn’t end there.

It is highly unlikely that the format of the data/events created by one application would match the format requirements of another application (just as two people cannot communicate without a common language). The wrong way to solve this problem is for each application to learn the others’ language. This is an overwhelming software development task if any more than a few applications are involved and would have to be repeated ad infinitum as new applications are developed.

Data Transformation

A much simpler, repeatable, and scalable solution is the practice of data transformation. With data transformation, the data/events created by one application are transformed, mapped, and changed on the fly into the formats required by other applications, as the data is distributed to wherever it is needed. In this way, the data arrives at the target application in the required format, without changes needed to the application.

“But” I hear you say, “isn’t that data transformation process itself also an onerous and time-consuming task?” Fortunately not, because as well as providing the data distribution backbone, HPE Shadowbase software also includes powerful capabilities to simply and easily transform source data into whatever format is required by the target database or application:

• SBMAP – a scripting “language” that can be used to tell Shadowbase software how to transform source data into target data formats. SBMAP is powerful, sophisticated, and extensible.
• SBDDLUTL – a utility that reads an Enscribe record’s DDL definition, simplifying the replication of non-relational Enscribe data into structured SQL databases. SBDDLUTL includes features to allow manipulation of the source fields when creating the target columns, including dropping fields, mapping fields, renaming fields, and normalization of the non-normalized Enscribe data.
• SBCREATP – a utility that converts and maps SQL/MP table schema data structure definitions into target SQL database equivalents and produces an editable CREATE TABLE statement for the selected target database environment.
• User Exits – enable the execution of customized user logic at various points in the Shadowbase replication stream. More complex (and powerful) than a scripting language, but extremely flexible, enabling almost any kind of data transformation, filtering, cleansing, and processing to be performed.
• DBS Mapping – a scripting “language” for target-side, other-server platforms.
  • It includes capabilities such as:
    • DROP all events for a target table,
    • DROP certain events for a target table,
    • convert UPDATEs to INSERTs,
    • DROP column(s),
    • concatenate (text) columns,
    • formatting,
    • and character conversion/replacement capabilities.

Simply put, HPE Shadowbase Data and Application Integration provides all the facilities required to distribute data and events from wherever they are created to wherever they are needed, in the form required, in real-time, and without change to existing applications – unlocking the value in your data for competitive advantage and for building new solutions for your business.

Shadowbase software can integrate your NonStop into your other corporate assets and environments, including both the public and private cloud.

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