Informatica Test Data Management (TDM) Reviews

The ability to mask the same data consistently and in a repeatable way across heterogeneous data sources (e.g., Oracle, XML). This is done without the need to store original and masked value pairs anywhere physically.

• Provided more realistic and consistent test data dumps to external developers
• Decreased the DWH ETL development and testing cycles
• Allowed more thorough testing to be performed on each layer (ODS, DWH, and DM)

I have used this solution for five years.

Both TDM and the underlying ETL tool are quite stable. There is a resilience period that you can configure in order to avoid downtime, at least during shorter repository database outages.

These products are highly scalable in my experience. They are scalable both horizontally (grid, multi-node environment) and vertically (more CPU cores). They are also scalable in terms of the pushdown capability to the database engine or hive.

We used custom, hand-coded, Oracle PL/SQL-based stored procedures to mask certain data sets. (This wasn't an all-around solution, but rather a targeted solution to solve a certain problem).

It is easy to set up by following the installation guide provided by the vendor.

Go with a subscription, or rent it for a short term. You have a maximum of one- to one and a half-year projects.

Note that TDM licenses will limit the usage of the PowerCenter ETL tool to data masking, data subset, and test data generation.

 It's not possible to use the product for other purposes, e.g., data warehousing.

Go with the PowerCenter standard edition, unless you need business glossary and metadata management capabilities (full data lineage, impact analysis). Those are part of the advanced edition.

We looked at IBM InfoSphere Optim and Oracle Data Masking.

Instead of implementing custom, hand-coded data masking scripts and procedures in-house, go for a well-documented, supported, enterprise-wide, and applicable product.

The rest can be achieved with some customization. The development of an identical software product simply wouldn't be worth the effort.

The learning curve is not long and the product documentation is available in the Informatica knowledge base.

Visit the Informatica Velocity portal for best practices, project lifecycle, and roles/skill sets needed, before investing.

The data masking feature has been the most frequently used one. Masking of sensitive production data was my main job.

This product saves time by enabling pretty quick development of data masking/sub-setting the Informatica code.

• Help file: More detailed steps must be added with illustrative screen images
• Administrator support documentation

I have used this product for about two years. I have used it to create data masking solutions for various projects for my clients during the years 2013 and 2014.

We did encounter stability issues. The service component on the Informatica PowerCenter server had unexpected outages, multiple times, at irregular intervals.

Although the PowerCenter host server was up and running, the product was not accessible/usable since the TDM service was down.

There is no client installation available for this product.

This product can only be used on a web browser like Internet Explorer.

The response from Informatica support was nil.

I used the Informatica PowerCenter tools for the manual creation of data masking codes. I switched to this due to its comparatively, lightning fast, code development.

While using this product for development, the initial steps were mostly like hit and miss as the help manual was insufficient. Since the product has a web-based client interface, navigation during the initial couple of days was a pain.

I only did a theoretical comparative study of this product with other products like Grid-Tools, Dataguise, and Camouflage.

This has been created as an add-on to the robust and famous Informatica PowerCenter server. (If the available, internet bandwidth is strong.)

I would like to rate the product as follows:

• Usability/Ease of use (developer): I would give it a rating of 9/10, as it enables quick code development.
• Help file: I would give it a rating of 6/10, as it needs a considerable amount of improvement to be user-friendly.
• Admin control: I would give it a rating of 7/10, since the Informatica admin was unable to start up its service for unknown reasons.

Dynamic data masking is a valuable feature of this product.

It has improved compatibility with the Informatica users.

• It should enable DevOps in CI/CD environments
• There should be compatibility with big data in SAP environments: These are most widely used in the enterprise level of the organization

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

There is good support from Informatica.

We are using multiple solutions, depending on the clients' requirements.

The setup was of medium complexity.

It depends on the business functionality.

Data Masking and creating subsets of data.

One of our banking clients didn’t want to give live business data to developers, as it had sensitive information. We had to mask the data using Informatica TDM and leverage its built-in algorithm of seed values.

We also had to create a subset of data that had to be given to different teams. For example, the sales team only needed sales information and didn’t require customer information such as Social Security Number. The team working on credit information needed the Social Security Number. So we created subsets of data for each team from the master data.

They have to create more transformations that can be utilized in the tool. TDM has limited capability in this regard.

I have been using this product for almost a year.

We never had issues with stability.

Informatica is highly scalable.

Technical support was really helpful when we were setting up our servers and they responded fairly quickly to questions.

We did not have anything before, as our client is a big Informatica vendor. A close second was IBM InfoSphere Optim.

The setup was fairly straightforward once you set up the nodes, servers, repositories, and environment variables.

I am not aware of the pricing of this product.

We looked at IBM InfoSphere, but we were always going with the Informatica product. We already had other Informatica products.

Only use this product if you have business requirement for creating subsets and masking. If you need real time masking, you can utilize Informatica Dynamic Data Masking.

The product provides four main features:

Data discovery to profile data and mask sensitive data.

Data subsetting to take a subset of production data from all schema tables while preserving referential integrity.

Data masking to create masking rules and mask the fields that we select.

Data generation If we don’t want to mask production data, the tool can generate data based on rules that we configure.

All of the features are strong, however my favorite is data masking. Also, it provides many built-in rules and rules that we can customize to mask all types of data. The masking engine is very strong.

TDM includes built in policy packs, and these are masking and data discovery techniques that are created for common confidential fields like name, Date of Birth, address… Such fields that you can find almost in every database in any company.

The data discovery techniques are regular expressions (RegEx) that are executed on the metadata (the column names) or the data itself to find matches to my discovery.

Example: a data discovery rule with a regular expression set to *name* will find all the fields that include “name” like First_name_EN, full_name_FR… but it will not return the field FN_EN (And I mean by this First Name English)

So if I want to discover all the fileds in my database that might include names I will miss some, since the data discovery rule with RegEx = *name* is very simple and needs to be more complex to cover all columns syntaxes.

I did the implementation for many clients. It is mostly used to mask production data and get values that are realistic but not real. With this, they create development and testing environments with data that looks like it’s real. Developers and UAT will be able to work with such better data sets.

Data discovery and the built in policy packs are very simple; they need stronger ones.

I have been using Informatica since 2012.

I have not encountered stability issues.

I have not encountered scalability issues.

Informatica provides good support for this tool, from knowledge base to tickets for direct support. Any issue is always solved thanks to their support.

I have not used another tool.

To install TDM, you need to install PowerCenter first, which is another Informatica tool. So the installation takes time but it’s always smooth and not that complex.

This is the only product I’ve used.

I recommend it. A very user friendly tool and it’s not mandatory to be technical to use it.

Data masking is the most valuable feature of this product.

I could mask PHI and PII information in my data before sharing it with both the testing teams and the teams that are outside our organization.

If there were some methods to mask data in the cloud, then that would be good.

I have been using this solution for one year.

We have not encountered any stability issues. It is highly stable.

It is highly scalable.

The technical support is excellent.

I have not used another different solution before. This is the first time I am using such a solution.

The initial setup process was straightforward.

It is an excellent product. It is easily maintainable and flexible. The pricing and licensing policy depends upon the budget and compliance needs for the project.

We have not evaluated any other product prior to this solution.

Go ahead and use this product. It is easy for an organization to train the employees with this product.