Discovery Hub® 17.11Release Communication

What can you expect from this release?

Get the same figures, regardless if you use PowerBI, Tableau or Qlik

TX DWA is Now Discovery Hub® by TimeXtender

Simplify The Journey of GDPR Compliance

Discover New, Smart Features

What’s In Discovery Hub® 17.11 Release

QLIK, TABLEAU OR POWER BI: WORK WITH THE SAME DEFINITIONS AND VALUESWith the new shared semantic layer, models are defined once and automatically used to deliver data in the right form and context to PowerBI, Tableau and Qlik — no need to choose. You can have the same data delivered in these three front-ends at the same time, saving time and money. Maximize the time spent analyzing data and discovering new business opportunities, and avoid the scenario of individual users seeking and transforming data in non-compliant ways. Whether business users analyze data in PowerBI, Qlik or Tableau, the view is based on a single version of the truth where everyone works with the same definitions and values.

The shared semantic layer allows mapping from the modern data warehouse (MDW) to a business context model that meets the needs of a specific business unit — organizational, geographical, etc. — or analytical purpose. This means you can build out a semantic model for a specific group of users (e.g., Finance, Sales, Marketing) or for a specific purpose (cross-business analysis). Business context models can be automatically mapped to a variety of tools and formats, such as Qlik, PowerBI and Tableau. This shared semantic layer is central to users’ understanding of the data available in the MDW and to their well-governed and innovative use of it. It enables businesses to use the same language across the entire organization in every front-end fed through Discovery Hub®. Meanwhile, it provides different perspectives — grouping together related data for area-specific purposes. In short, models in the shared semantic layer are defined once and automatically used to deliver data in the right form and context to any supported data discovery tool.

The models can be designed without scripting a single line. It is accomplished within an easy to use drag-and-drop environment. When you set up the model, you can choose an ‘endpoint’ that connects the model to the selected front-end tool.

INTEGRATED TABLEAU SUPPORTTableau users can gain enterprise-wide benefit from Discovery Hub’s agile, governed and secure environment by using the Tableau Semantic Layer Endpoint. This endpoint provides automated integration to Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server and Tableau Online.

The endpoint creates a Tableau Data Source (.tds) file allowing users to:• Identify/publish relevant tables and fields• Rename contexts to provide company-wide standard definitions• Identify/publish relations between tables • Identify/publish custom fields• Create calculated fields

Tableau users can direct their focus to data discovery and report analysis without concerns over access, transformation, quality, history, security and compliance of their data. Traditionally, each user had to create his or her own data models, creating multiple versions throughout the organization. With Discovery Hub®, all Tableau users can gain access to a single version of the truth, containing data that is transformed in in a way they can understand and trust.

Users with domain knowledge can create semantic models with the data elements relevant to each specific business unit or department (e.g., Finance, Sales or Marketing). This Semantic model is then automatically translated to the Tableau application, ready for use by these departments. Data scientists who would like to do their own data discovery can also choose to connect directly to any other level of Discovery Hub®.

IMPROVED POWER BI SUPPORT Users can benefit from the combined strength of Discovery Hub® and Power BI. By leveraging the power of automation, users get easy, agile access to stored data that is secure and well-governed. Power BI users no longer need to create their own data models. With Discovery Hub®, enterprise-wide data models are created and managed ensuring one source and one view. Discovery Hub® combined with the visualization and reporting capabilities of Power BI serves a broad audience of users with different analytical and reporting needs.

Now, Discovery Hub® supports SSAS Tabular, a natural fit for Power BI.• Identify relevant tables and fields• Rename contexts to provide company-wide standard definitions• Define relations between tables with cardinality and direction• Custom calculations (i.e., DAX measures)

Power BI business users, data scientists and analysts seeking further discovery are also able to connect directly to other levels of Discovery Hub®.

ADDITION TO QLIK SUPPORTNow Qlik users have two options to gain access to agile, secure and governed data, making the data easier to understand while enabling compliance.

• Option 1: Via the existing Qlik models tab — You can build business context models specific for Qlik as the front-end, infusing the model via a single right-click into a QlikView or QlikSense app. A new feature in this release makes it even easier to test Qlik Sense Server connections.

• Option 2: Via the new shared semantic layer — Here you can build business context models that are front-end neutral as described above. These business context models can be automatically mapped to Qlik View and Qlik Sense as well as a variety of tools and formats.

The Qlik-specific endpoint permits an application to run that automatically creates QVD files, which allows you to:• Extract tables and fields• Rename contexts to provide company-wide standard definitions• Leverage relations between tables with Hash and prefixing to avoid unintentional

relations (link tables, avoiding circular references)• Custom fields

In this release, Option 1 provides greater functionality than Option 2. Future releases will expand the existing Qlik-specific functionality into the shared semantic layer. Eventually, Option 1 will be deprecated once the functionality is covered in the shared semantic layer.

Either way, Qlik users benefit from all the data logic created in Discovery Hub®, and the enterprise-wide data models that are created and managed. This ensures one source and one view in Discovery Hub® where you can immediately start to analyze data in a Qlik application — minus the need to join data first and without compliance worries.

COMPLIANCE / GDPRThe deadline for the EU GDPR regulation that affects companies inside and outside the European Union is fast approaching (25th of May 2018). At TimeXtender, we help our partners and customers simplify the journey to compliance with functionality such as automated documentation of all environments, data lineage, impact analysis, masking of data and security control.

This release enhances the existing functionality with the following:• Tagging of fields. A Data Protection Officer (DPO) or someone with similar

responsibilities can categorize fields in a project according to compliance regulations, e.g., a field can be tagged as PII or Personal Identifiable Information. The DPO can then filter documentation to only show PII-related information. Using data lineage and the automated documentation, the DPO can verify where the tagged fields are used. The DPO can also create impact reports by source and endpoints and define tags.

• Security settings in documentation. Security settings are now part of the documentation by default

• Reference diagram in documentation. Table relations are shown as diagrams in the documentation. This graphical representation gives a clear overview of how a selected table (center table) is related to other tables

• Customizable documentation. To better control the layout of the documentation, you can now insert your own logo, customize colors, titles, subtitles, headers and footers

OTHER NEW FEATURES• Relationship diagram. Similar to the above described reference

diagram, the relationship diagram shows all the relations to and from one central table

• Durable supernatural key. This new feature allows you to create a ‘key closet’ of business keys linked to surrogate keys. When you import data from various source systems or doing incremental loads, you can ensure that fields with the same value receive the same key. For instance, a field contains the email address ‘john.doe@company.com’ will receive a durable supernatural key e.g. ‘7’. If the same field is imported later, or a field from another system has the same ‘john.doe@company.com email, it will also receive DSK ‘7’. Discovery Hub® holds the functionality to automate the generation, storing and fetching of keys based on the values in the records.

The feature allows you to anonymize data, (e.g., a social security number can be replaced by a durable supernatural key instead) meaning that the modern data warehouse or semantic layer won’t show this type of sensitive information. In future releases, this key will be the foundation to create semi-automated golden records.

IMPROVEMENTSWe removed some inconsistencies and made a number of improvements to enhance the user experience.

• Push execution to queue after deployment. The deploy/execution can now be pushed to the background allowing the developer to move on with the next task.

• SCD surrogate key automation. When generating foreign surrogate keys for history tables, Discovery Hub® will automatically identify the corresponding record based on a specified date field, or simply by choosing the current record.

More improvements are covered in the Release Notes and User Guide.

CLOUDFor partners and customers that missed information on previous releases (May and August 2017) note that data can be saved in Azure SQL Databases as well as on-premise Microsoft SQL Server. This means that if you built your data models in Discovery Hub®, it’s easy to migrate to the Cloud. You only need to indicate a new server location and Discovery Hub® software manages the rest. This saves you a lot of time and money since you do not need to manually migrate and rebuild all the data and schemas.

TX DWA RENAMED INTO DISCOVERY HUB® BY TIMEXTENDERIn 2014, the software was renamed from timeXtender to TX DWA to better position it as data warehouse automation software. Many developments have taken place since that time:

• Discovery Hub® does more than data warehouse automation — it automates the entire data discovery lifecycle all the way to the front-end visualization tools

• In 2016, TimeXtender invented a new IT architecture behind BI & analytics which we called Discovery Hub and registered it as a trademark

• Since Discovery Hub® automatically creates and maintains the innovative IT architecture behind BI & analytics, the software was rebranded to Discovery Hub® by TimeXtender.

• The messaging strategy is to remove antiquated references to data warehousing. Discovery Hub® goes far beyond the traditional data warehousing methodology.

DEPRECATED FEATURES: FUTURE-PROOFING DISCOVERY HUB®

Some features in Discovery Hub® have outlived its usefulness and continue to exist in the product solely for backwards compatibility. While backwards compatibility is high priority for us, developing and testing for outdated features takes time we could otherwise spend on new features. For this reason, we have created a policy for feature deprecation and will begin marking features as deprecated in the product.

TimeXtender will gradually phase out deprecated features and strongly recommends avoiding these features in new developments.

The deprecated feature in this release is: data exports.

TIMEXTENDER – BECAUSE TIME MATTERSTimeXtender inspires quality business decisions with data, mind and heart. Discovery Hub® by TimeXtender simplifies the journey to compliance and automates the complex and time-intensive tasks required to access, model and govern data.

www.TimeXtender.com