Agile Data Warehouse – MetaShare

I haven’t had any time to work on MetaShare lately, but I know that someone has made it work with Katmai already.  I don’t think that the code was checked in, but if I get a chance, I’ll try and make the changes so there is a switch to allow operation with Katmai.

Also – I’ve had a couple of requests to perform a demo of MetaShare.  I’d be happy to do that.  Let me look into ways to do that and I’ll post somethig about a time and method.  I know that some folks are not necessarily in the US, so maybe we can figure out a way to do the audio over the internet as well as desktop sharing.  If anyone has suggestions, let me know for both audio and desktop sharing.  If there isn’t anyone from outside the US, then we can use something like http://www.freeconferencecall.com/ - but I’m still interested if anyone knows of a free desktop sharing solution we could use.

We’d cover breifly how I set up the demo environment with Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit sample data structure and SSIS packages written by Warren and Joy, how to extract metadata out of the MDWT_AdventureWorksDW database as well as the SSIS package store and publish this information as Wiki using FlexWiki.  We’ll also talk about how powerful it is to publish this metadata as wiki instead of something like a dead text document.

Maybe we could do something week after next – the week of the 10th?  Leave me a comment here if you’d be interested in attending.  We can also do multiple sessions if we can’t agree on a time.  I think it will take from a half hour to an hour to run through the whole thing.

Stay tuned.

Mark

MetaShare Beta 1

MetaShare Beta 1 is now available at http://metashare.sourceforge.net.  This release now includes the TIFL document architecture that allows for construction of various target drivers.  The two target drivers that I’ve written so far are FlexWiki and HTML.  The TIFL format is very close to HTML so adding HTML wasn’t too hard.  There is a new command line switch to choose which output is wanted.

I’d like to consider writing a driver for a couple more targets including SharePoint wiki as well as a product called Perspective wiki.   This is a feature request that I’ll add and we’ll see where it goes.

I had thought about implementing SQL authentication for the suite of tools instead of using integrated authentication, but I’d like to give it a go at using integrated authentication for now.  I like having built in security for the suite so that not just anyone can log on to the website and update/mess up the internal metadata.  Hopefully someone will give some feedback in either a comment here on the blog or a feature/bug request on the SourceForge site.

MetaShare is still a beta product and I’d really like some feedback on how it is working for everyone.  I’d really like to take feedback into account before christening it version 1 and having an “official” release.  Let me know any suggestions or problems.  Hopefully we can make this a value add to the Microsoft BI stack.

MetaShare Progress

I’m getting really close to having the TIFL (Target Indpendant Formating Language) architecture completed in MetaShare.  This slices MetaShare into layers so that the particular target formatting is not intertwined with the generation of metadata collaboration documents.  This should hopefully be completed within the next few weeks.  The next item will be changing MetaShare.Web to run off of sql authentication.

FlexWiki Permisions

I was setting up FlexWiki and running MetaShare.Generate for the first time on a fresh VPC of Windows XP and noticed that I couldn’t edit the generated documents.  I realized that I needed to give the ASPNET account full access to the files in the MyWiki folder under the WikiBases folder.  This could also be used to manage contributor and reader permission across the entire set of wiki files.

Extracting SSIS Metadata

(Continuation of the Metadata 2.0 Series)

MetaShare does more than expose and help maintain your database metadata. It can also search your SSIS server for packages that are the source of the the columns in your dimensions and facts. By providing a folder on the SSIS server in which to search, MetaShare will automatically generate a document to display information about the column’s lineage inside that package. It lists the SSIS task name, task type, and the description as defined in BI Studio.  Spending time and effort fully documenting SSIS packages becomes worthwhile because the data collected inside them becomes available to users.

Hopefully this can get a conversation going about how we can collaborate on our metadata and get it out where it needs to be – in front of the business users.