Perspectives

Perspectives are a way to simplify the repository view for a particular group of users by taking just part of the metadata from the physical layer (the default one scanned by IBM Automatic Data Lineage from the source systems), changing its structure, and renaming it to make it easier to consume for a specific group of users. It is basically just a different view on the same metadata. It becomes useful primarily in the following scenarios.

  1. Automatic Data Lineage is used by less technical users who may not be familiar with physical representation and naming conventions of servers and databases that are extracted by Automatic Data Lineage by default into the physical layer.

  2. The data environment covered by Automatic Data Lineage is large and the physical layer becomes hard to navigate (hundreds of databases and other sources).

  3. There are groups of users who are only interested in specific parts of environments (migration project, reporting team, finance and risk team, etc.).

Perspectives are configured by Automatic Data Lineage administrator. If you have any specific ideas of what perspectives you need or what you would like to see there, contact your Automatic Data Lineage administrator to set it up for you.

Selecting a Perspective

To use a perspective, select one from the list of available perspectives. (Physical is the default perspective.)

Perspectives setting shown in the repository

The hierarchy in the repository tree will change based on the perspective.

Working with Perspectives

The hierarchy of objects that appears in the repository tree after selecting a particular perspective is defined by your Metadata administrator and server to organize selected objects from the physical layer and make it easier to navigate.

The hierarchy of objects in a selected perspective

Conceptually, there are two types of objects.

  1. Perspective objects — Perspective and Container that are user-defined and create the new hierarchy for the selected physical objects

  2. Physical objects — actual physical objects included from the physical layer.

In other words, perspective is really just a different view of part of the physical repository. Note that the same object may be present in different perspectives. For each physical object, you can see its location within physical perspective.

Location of a physical object when physical perspective is selected

Visualizing Lineage for Perspectives

Visualizing lineage when using a perspective works nearly the same way as visualizing objects from the physical layer. However, there are three notable differences.

  1. Color coding — objects within the selected perspective are shown in maroon.

  2. The object path reflects the path in perspective (not the physical one).

    Example of objects from the Finance perspective. The hierarchy matches the perspective hierarchy.

    Note that objects outside the selected perspective are displayed as physical objects (color coding and path). Automatic Data Lineage does not attempt to visualize them as a perspective, even if they are only included in just one other perspective.

  3. The user can choose whether to display objects outside the perspective. Compared to the previous screenshot, you can see that the objects not included in the perspective have been hidden, but the lineage is still connected. In the case of very source / very target objects (such as the orange object (ORCL / LOAN / CD_COUNTRY on the left), when hiding objects not included in the perspective, some lineage may be hidden as well. This can be expected, as it may not be interesting for the user; otherwise, the object would have been included in the perspective.

    Objects not included in the perspective are hidden from the visualization.

    To learn more about configuring perspectives, check out Open MANTA Perspectives.