Informatica Cloud Data Quality vs. Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting

For effective data collaboration, systematic verification of customer information, and address, among others, Informatica Data Quality is a fruitful application to consider. Besides, Informatica Data Quality controls quality through a cleansing process, giving the company a professional outline of candid data profiling and reputable analytics. Finally, Informatica Data Quality allows the simplistic navigation of content, with a dashboard that supports predictability.

Incentivized

The tool is excellent when you need to provide all the details about your clients, yet hide their identity - all while maintaining the referential integrity of the data (so child-records of the masked parent record and maintain the same fake ID of the parent).

Incentivized

• The matching algorithms in IDQ are very powerful if you understand the different types that they offer (e.g., Hamming Distance, Jaro, Bigram, etc..). We had to play around with it to see which best suit our own needs of identifying and eliminating duplicate customers. Setting up the whole process (e.g., creating the KeyGenerator Transformation, setting up the matching threshold, etc..) can be somewhat time consuming and a challenge if you don't first standardize your data.
• The integration with PowerCenter is great if you have both. You can either import your mappings directly to PowerCenter or to an XML file. The only downside is that some of the transformations are unique to IDQ, so you are not really able to edit them once in PowerCenter.
• The standardizer transformation was key in helping us standardize our customer data (e.g., names, addresses, etc..). It was helpful due to having create a reference table containing the standardized value and the associated unstandardized values. What was great was that if you used Informatica Analyst, a business analyst could login and correct any of the values.

• It offers several ways in which you can mask your data; for example, you can choose to replace all names with "real fake names", or choose to replace all SSNs with existing SSNs, but randomly assigned. You control the algorithm.
• It works on non-Oracle databases as well (in our case, we use it for both Oracle and SQL/Server).
• The overhead is minimal (it doesn't take long to run, and it doesn't consume too many system resources.

Incentivized

• Several partnerships diminishing the value of technologies
• Unable to get list of objects from Repository (like sources & targets) that don't have any dependency
• Scheduling: The built-in scheduling tool has many constraints such as handling Unix/VB scripts etc. Most enterprises use third party tools for this.

• The learning curve was not trivial - but we got through it.
• Cost - this product is not cheap.

Incentivized

As pointed out earlier, due all the robust features IDQ has, our use f the product is successful and stable. IDQ is being used in multiple sources (from CRM application and in batch mode). As this is an iterative process, we are looking to improve our system efficiency using IDQ.

Easy to use not only for developers but also business users

Incentivized

The application works well except an occasional error out while using the system. It usually gets fixed when restarting the Infa server

Incentivized

Performance works just fine. It was able to load 200+ business terms, 150+ DQ automation, etc. very well.

Incentivized

IDQ is used by a department at my organisation to ensure and enhance the data quality.
The usage was started with address standardization and now it had been brought to altogether a next level of quality check where it fixes duplicates, junk characters, standardize the names, streets, product descriptions.
In the past we had issues mainly with duplicate customers and products and this were affecting the sales projection and estimates.

We also looked at Delphix: the tool was quite powerful, easy to use, and competitive from a cost standpoint. However, since our entire data warehouse environment is built on the Oracle technology stack, it made sense to us to use the Oracle product here, as it integrates very well with other Oracle database and ETL products.

Incentivized

Scalability works as expected and it is truly an enterprise system.

Incentivized

• Integration with tools like PowerCenter helped faster delivery of product, and at the same time conversion
• Reduce overall project cost due to bad data , bad quality, exceptions identified nearing go-live and post production
• Employee efficiency is increased exponentially due to more automated, customized tool

• We have many compliance regulations we need to adhere to. Without this tool, we were always taking a risk of exposing client information, and get penalized by the State of the Feds (the financial consequences are significant).
• So while the tool doesn't save us money directly, it greatly reduces the risk we had been taking all these years. To some degree, this is much like an insurance policy.
• Given the above, it also allows us to share information with other departments/agencies, in situations where before we simply couldn't take the risk of exposing client information.

Incentivized