WhereScape Senior Solutions Architect Alexis Desai quickly takes us through the process for automatically producing documentation with WhereScape RED in this 9-minute video.
Documentation is an essential component of any sustainable data architecture, yet for practical reasons it is often neglected by teams still working with manual processes. Developers are under constant pressure to meet deadlines and are judged more on the code they produce than how well they document it.
WhereScape RED automatically produces all documentation and updates it with any changes as you work. You get full data source lineage, including track back, track forward, and impact analysis so IT will always have an up-to-date, accurate and complete view of the data infrastructure.
WhereScape removes the documentation issue from a developer’s schedule entirely, enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks and meet Agile deadlines without cutting corners. All they have to do is click one button and all their work will be documented to a level of detail that would take many hours to do by hand.
WhereScape is metadata-driven. The WhereScape GUI is a simplified manifestation of all the metadata that sits behind it and makes the data warehouse work as it is shown to. This out-of-the-box documentation feature means that each action taken by users and every item and structure within the architecture is stored, such as:
- The code itself.
- Lists of columns and objects, who created them, whether they are included in certain jobs and so on.
- Transformations.
- Lineage backwards and forwards (where did data come from and where did it go after this point?).
- Data types and all information about the current object you are looking at.
- Interactions between the various objects within the architecture.
WhereScape documentation is a roadmap that goes back through the project you have been working on, providing hyperlinks to every stage of the process so you can click in and see its code and structure. All the documentation that developers should be writing by hand, but often don’t for the various reasons outlined above, is generated automatically at a much higher level of detail. To do this for an entire architecture would be months of work; too much to do whilst maintaining productivity in writing code.
