In one of our Exmon demo's a customer asked if it was possible to use the Exmon DM solution for creating a ‘Data Catalog’ which contains meta data such as descriptions, data owners, abbreviations, etc.
The customer uses this before even building a data model, to make sure all business users are aligned regarding the data definitions. During the demo we discussed if it was possible to synchronize the DG rules defined by business users on the Turnkey solution into this DM table. In this case it was regarding a dimensional table called ‘Plant items’ and its attributes (columns) but it could be any table (e.g. Customer, Product, etc.). I have managed to do this with DM actions that trigger UPDATE statements which fetch data from the DG database (the DG rules SQL syntax as well as their descriptions).
Personally, I think Exmon can tap into new markets by combining the DM and DG modules in a more intuitive way. For example, you could have a dropdown menu on the DG Turnkey solution where you could link a specific rule to a certain ‘Dimension’ or ‘Attribute’. Currently, you can fetch data from the DG database into the DM module to accomplish the above. But not the other way around.
Visualizing a Data Catalog in DM is really something customers can benefit from, but it is just not completely incorporated into the product at the moment.
