Reference Data Management: What, Why, and How

RazzaDS enforces referential integrity by means of two rules: A node can't occur more than once in a single hierarchy (thus preventing circular references), and if a node participates in more than one hierarchy, it must have the same children in all the hierarchies. Additionally, simple to complex user-defined validations can be applied to the hierarchies in a real-time or batch mode.

Hierarchies can be managed as versions. For example, the 2004Q2 version of the Accounts hierarchy can be in production while 2004Q3 is being finalized (from a copy of the 2004Q2 version, of course).

Hierarchies can be imported and exported. In fact, when you deploy RazzaDS, you mostly import hierarchies from existing systems of record (using XML) rather than have users enter them manually.

RazzaDS enforces security at various levels: version, hierarchy, node, or property level. In addition it has function-level security: Users can be granted or denied access to specific functions.

RazzaDS comes in two architectural flavors. It has a small, traditional client/server version, and a larger enterprise-level Web solution based on Microsoft Windows technology. It doesn't support Unix. Deploying RazzaDS is relatively easy; however, it potentially requires the critical step of cleansing and integrating existing reference data sources in order to load the data into RazzaDS. The effort required to achieve this step will depend on the quality and cohesion of existing data, and I think will define the effort and cost of deploying RazzaDS.

Building Core (Data) Competency

Overall, I see RazzaDS as a conceptually simple, focused, and common-sense product — which is a compliment, not a critique. RazzaDS focuses on and has the potential to vastly improve upon a core competency, if you will, of application databases: that of effectively managing reference data. This focus, in turn, improves the ability of IT to serve facts and analytic data to business users and directly contributes to the organization's overall data quality. Either of these benefits alone could make RazzaDS a worthwhile investment.