Announcing General Availability of CA Test Data Manager 4.7
TDM 4.7 delivers a number of powerful new features, including containerizing TDM components, which opens up support for Linux. This new version can be downloaded directly from the CA Support Site. Once logged in you will be able to select the latest version from Download Management. Look for CA Test Data Manager in the search box to speed up your discovery.
What’s new in TDM 4.7?
Containerized TDM
TDM Portal is now available in a Docker software container
PostgreSQL Support
Support for PostgreSQL for the following Portal features
REST Publish Actions
New point of extensibility in Portal
Low Vision Support
Helps Federal agencies implement Section 508 compliance obligations
Enhanced Data Model & Discovery
Usability enhancements
Enhanced Find & Reserve
Productivity enhancements
Enhanced File Definition Manager
Mainframe Copybook Parsing now supported on Linux
Enhanced Security
Support for authentication via Oracle Directory Services
Why Containerize TDM?
With ‘open source first’ increasingly becoming the norm, it’s no surprise many enterprises are choosing Linux as the foundation for new apps, and Docker software as the virtualization tool to consistently and efficiently deploy those apps anywhere. Docker software also helps accelerate the journey towards standardization in the areas of open source, Cloud, and DevOps.
While CA Test Data Manager has been primarily Windows based, Release 4.7 introduces TDM to the world of Linux through its new containerized deployment option. More importantly, Docker sets the foundation for TDM’s horizontal scaling strategy. In this release, TDM Portal is the first service to be available inside a container.
In future releases, we plan to make more TDM services available in containers. One of the many benefits of Docker software is to automatically deploy and configure a container. When a CA TDM job has heavy processing requirements, the Portal can spin up multiple containers as needed to parallelize jobs whenever possible. The goal is to be able to process large volumes of data, e.g. masking billions of rows in hours. The benefit will be faster turnaround time through the testing phase of the SDLC, enabling customers to eliminate barriers to Continuous Delivery.
Can you believe that PostgreSQL was initially released in 1996? This open source project is rapidly becoming one of the most popular database platforms for both on-premises and Cloud-based applications. With growing enterprise acceptance of PostgreSQL, demand for managing test data is a critical requirement for migrations and new application development. TDM 4.7 introduces support for PostgreSQL for key TDM Portal capabilities including Masking related workflows (Discovery, PII Profiling, PII Audit, and Masking) and Synthetic Data Generation.
In most TDM implementations, customization of Data Generation flows is a requirement. TDM 4.7 introduces a new type of Publish Action - REST. With REST Publish Actions, custom processing can be performed on a remote host separately from the Portal. This means that computation intensive operations will neither harm performance of the Portal nor disrupt Portal stability. Using the Action Service container, Test Data Engineers (TDE) can quickly develop actions in any programming language or with any library of choice. The TDE will go to the Portal to deploy their custom actions from within any Generator by clicking on Actions > Create Publish Action and choose the Action Type of REST.
Section 508 (29 U.S.C. § 794d) was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology, to make available new opportunities for people with disabilities, and to encourage development of technologies that will help achieve these goals. Section 508 support is normally requested by Civilian agencies when acquiring COTS software. TDM 4.7 introduces tools to help the tester implement Section 508 compliance, through low vision support features including:
CA is committed to Section 508 focused on helping both public and private sectors meet their compliance obligations.
The foundation for deploying an effective TDM solution is todocument relationships across the data by building a Data Model. In more complex enterprise applications, the Data Model can be very large and difficult to navigate. In TDM 4.7, the Test Data Engineer (TDE) can easily search the Data Model for tables and columns of interest using both partial and exact strings.
We have introduced a similar usability enhancement in PII Discovery. Typically, the TDE will need to choose specific tables or ignore others when discovering PII. Filters to include/exclude tables are now prepopulated with a dropdown list that is searchable using both partial and exact strings.
Once the PII has been discovered, the workflow presents a Heatmap on the scanned Data Model. Previously, the TDE would have to click on each box to investigate and confirm the PII found. TDM 4.7 introduces a multi-select feature to choose multiple boxes and perform actions on a selected group of tables, accelerating the discovery and confirmation process prior to PII Audit sign-off or Masking.
Find & Reserve functionality just became much more powerful with the introduction of comparison operators. In the past, you needed to know the exact values you were searching for. Now you can search across ranges of data with greater than, less than, and between options by clicking the drop down to the right of each date or numeric field. Other enhancements include a popup calendar for picking dates, and the ability to include tables without a primary key in the Find &Reserve Model.
Other Interesting Features
Mainframe Enhancement – Along the theme of expanding platform support, the File Definition Manager is now supported on any O/S that supports Java. This means that Test Data Engineers have the flexibility of parsing mainframe copybooks on Windows and Linux.
Security Enhancement – TDM 4.7 now adds support for Oracle Directory Service (in addition to existing support for Active Directory and LDAP).
For more information, you can find TDM 4.7 release notes here.