New features and changes were introduced for InfoSphere® MDM Version
11.4, Standard and Advanced Editions, along with documentation updates.
Installation and upgrade
The following
changes and improvements were made to the installation and upgrade
processes:
- Installation
- Key improvements were made to the product's ability to download
and apply fix packs through IBM® Installation
Manager. The InfoSphere MDM
Installation Launchpad facility was reconfigured and improved to make
it more intuitive.
- Skip level upgrades
- This release supports skip level upgrades that help you to upgrade
your installation directly from previous releases without intermediate
upgrade steps. For InfoSphere MDM
Server 10.1 or earlier, you have an automated upgrade process if your
operating system is UNIX or Linux and if your database is DB2® or Oracle. The automated upgrade support for Oracle is new in
this release.
- Upgrade with Interceptor tool sample
- An Interceptor tool sample provides code and procedures to minimize
the impact of downtime during upgrade. You can use the Interceptor
tool sample to capture incoming interactions while the operational
server is offline being upgraded. When the upgraded operational server
is online again, you can replay the captured interactions to the upgraded
operational server.
Big Match for Hadoop
The following items
are new or changed for InfoSphere Big
Match for Hadoop (formerly known as the Probabilistic Matching Engine
for InfoSphere BigInsights™):
- Installer script
- Handles the configuration and installation of the web-based Dashboard
interface.
- Probabilistic Matching Engine
- Is now supported for use with InfoSphere BigInsights, Version 3.0.
Hybrid MDM
The following item is new for
hybrid MDM:
- Conversion of party models to hybrid party models
- Users of the MDM Workbench now can convert a virtual MDM party
model to a hybrid party model as if the hybrid party model was created
from scratch. With this conversion, users can move a virtual MDM solution
into a hybrid MDM solution. Customizations that the user already made
to the virtual MDM party model are retained when they do not clash
with any new hybrid-specific content. The configuration project is
turned into a hybrid configuration project so that the hybrid validations
and builders are enabled.
IBM Stewardship
Center
The following items are new or changed for
IBM Stewardship
Center:
- Change requests to update master data
- Line-of-business users can search MDM and submit Change Requests
to update master data. These Change Requests are routed to data stewards
who have the authorization to approve or reject the changes. Approved
changes are submitted to the MDM operational server to persist the
changes.
- Organization domain
- IBM Stewardship Center now
includes support for the Organization domain. You can search MDM,
update master data, and resolve suspected duplicates. The process
applications are ready for immediate use to solve your data stewardship
requirements, providing consistent visibility, collaboration, and
governance of your master data.
- Repair of hybrid data quality issues
- With a new user interface that is included with IBM Stewardship Center, you can view and repair
hybrid data quality issues. Data quality events are generated when
you run the persistEntity service. These events trigger the creation
of Repair Data Quality tasks for the data stewardship team.
Reference data management
The following
items are new for reference data management:
- Bulk Export program
- Exports multiple batches of data from the InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management
Hub without using the graphical user interface.
- Reference Data Management Transform and Batch Import
sample
The Reference Data Management Transform and Batch Import sample
shows how data exported from one InfoSphere MDM
Reference Data Management Hub instance by the RDM Export All script
can be transformed and imported into another InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management
Hub instance. The sample takes XML files and transforms them into
transaction formats that can be used by the InfoSphere MDM Reference Data Management
Batch Import.
The sample is supported on RHEL version v6 only.
Salesforce.com and MDM integration sample
New
features are added to the Salesforce.com and MDM sample:
- MDM Powered Search for InfoSphere MDM Advanced Edition
-
MDM Powered Search for InfoSphere® MDM Advanced Edition uses
the MDM probabilistic matching capability. MDM Powered Search for
MDM Advanced Edition enhances the Salesforce.com search so that you
can find variants of an account name and address even if you have
typographical errors. The probabilistic matching capability also finds
account names that sound similar. By making existing customer records
evident, you can apply the known information at the point of entry
and avoid creating duplicate records in Salesforce.com.
- Synchronization of Account and Contact from Salesforce.com
to InfoSphere MDM
- Synchronization of Account and Contact capability uses the InfoSphere MDM party maintenance
APIs and the Salesforce.com polling API. They synchronize account
and contact information from Saleforce.com. In the WebSphere® Cast Iron® orchestration, the Salesforce.com
polling API is used to poll for any adds or updates in Salesforce.com.
The MDM Party maintenance service synchronizes the changes in the
on-premises MDM.
General updates
The following items are
new or changed across editions:
- Algorithm functions
- New MXNM standardization, comparison, and bucket functions enhance algorithm support for
non-Latin languages where characters might have multiple pronunciations.
- Application toolkit
- A set of reusable change request management components that process
requests by users to change master data. The components include a
business process definition, a human service, a coach view, business
objects, and other components. With these components, data stewards
can review change requests that are made by other users. The human
service includes components that route approved changes to the MDM
operational server to persist the changes and error handling components
to surface any errors that are returned.
- A set of reusable error handling components to manage errors and
exceptions that are returned by the MDM integration services,Java
services, and JavaScript type
errors.
- Composite transactions that enable multiple transactions
to be sent to the MDM operational server at one time.
- Creation or conversion of a party model to a business process
management-enabled party model
- Users of the MDM Workbench can now create a business process management-enabled party model
in the MDM Workbench. They can also convert a virtual MDM party model to a business process
management-enabled party model convert a virtual MDM party
model to a business process management-enabled party model. The business
process management conversion changes only the virtual MDM configuration
and does not require supporting projects.
- Elimination of concurrent entity event broadcasting for
virtual and hybrid MDM implementations by enabling entity event staging
- The Entity Manager allows multiple entity-level events for the
same Entity ID to be sent to the event notification handler, which
can create concurrent broadcasts for an entity record. In certain
environments, such as multimember clusters, concurrent broadcasting
can result in transaction rollbacks. Also in hybrid implementations,
duplicate records might be added in the physical MDM tables.
- To eliminate the concurrent broadcast of entity-level events,
a new property, enableEntityEventStaging, can be set in the Event
Manager configuration file. If set to true, the Event Manager places
all outgoing entity events into a new staging table in the MDM database
(mpi_evtstager). A true setting ensures that only one outgoing entity
event for a specific entrecno and enttype is broadcast at a single
time to each registered event destination. This property can be set
for virtual and hybrid MDM implementations.
- ETL operations for virtual MDM implementations
- You can configure the IBM InfoSphere DataStage® MDM Connector stage to use the
MDM Member Search (MemSearch) API to search and read member data from
the MDM server.
- InfoSphere MDM
Inspector force-directed graphing
- To visually understand the scoring between pairs of members, you
can view all of the members within an entity as a force-directed graph.
The graph identifies the glue members and potentially identifies which
entities to decompose into subentities.
- Managing transient events
- The MDM Event Manager is now capable of determining when an event
is considered transient. Transient events contain invalid information
and are not relevant to downstream systems. For a transient event,
the Event Manager does not send the event.
- Preview and comparison of two or more parties and party
associations
- The new getComparativeEntities inquiry transaction returns details
of multiple parties with all child business object collections and
selected party associations aligned based on business keys of the
MDM business objects. It can be used in both physical MDM and hybrid
MDM implementations. Use the transaction to preview and compare two
or more parties and party associations. The transaction orders and
therefore allows for the alignment of all the child object collections
and selected party associations across the parties. The transaction
does this action by ensuring that the child objects with the same
business keys appear at the same index for each party.
- Performance enhancement through sequence
generation
- Each database access operation impacts system performance, and
sequence number generation is one of the most common operations. To
enhance performance by decreasing the number of database access operations,
block values for entrecno, memrecno, rellinkno, and tskrecno are now
cached. Rather than accessing the database for each new record number,
the next sequence number is retrieved from the cached values. The
database is accessed only when all of the cached values are used.
As part of a comprehensive performance tuning project, experienced
MDM implementers can set the number of values to cache by editing
the MAD_ENTRECNOINCR, MAD_MEMRECNOINCR, MAD_RELLINKNOINCR, MAD_TSKRECNOINCR
properties in the com.ibm.mdm.mds.jni.cfg file.
Documentation updates
Watch and play with
animated diagrams whose drill-throughs and hovers provide interactive
workflows, processes, and overviews:
Other visuals help you understand complex concepts and
processes:
Deprecated components
The following components
might become obsolete:
- The embedded instance of InfoSphere Global Name Recognition (GNR) that supports GNRMETA is
deprecated. GNRMETA continues to be supported, but it requires an external instance of InfoSphere
Global Name Recognition to drive it.
- Initiate® Inspector
GSA is deprecated.
- Legacy Java™ API for XML-based
RPC (JAX-RPC) web services are deprecated. To work with JAX-RPC web
services, read about the com.ibm.mdm.server.jaxrpcws.app.ear file.
- RMI is deprecated. Alternative function is possible with Java API for XML web services (JAX-WS).
- Solaris support is deprecated.
- Unstructured text correlation is deprecated.