I would like to begin a discussion of  a pragmatic approach to creating a dynamic metadata repository(DMR) , via the “Metadata Mart”  approach.

Gartner’s – Michael Blechar states “ Best practices include scoping metadata management into smaller areas where governance can be more easily applied at a more abstracted level of detail in repositories which I call “metadata marts”” in his recent blog post Down With the Uber-Repository, Long Live Metadata!.  In addition I referenced the work of Joseph Novella published on The Data Profiler regarding creating a Dynamic Metadata Repository. 

Based on my experience,  I concur the leading Gartner Metadata Analyst – Michael Blechar.

In addition he states “I tend to find that there are two main issues which are incorrectly getting bundled together when Gartner clients want to address metadata management. And while they seem to want to make this mostly a technological decision, the fact is that it should be secondary to other issues. The first and more fundamental question needs to be “which metadata needs to be managed, and with what degree of rigor”. Metadata is pervasive in the organization – so managing all metadata is not a viable option. Like all other forms of data, there will be a subset of the metadata which is more critical to the organization. The most obvious example is the metadata about the subset of your information assets involving your data, processes, architectures, etc, which you consider to be “master data”. “ 

Michael has emphasized three primary issues in regards to metadata repositories of Data Governance and Scoping as well as focusing on the metadata required to support your MDM (Master Data Management) areas.

In this approach the objective would be to avoid manually creating the repository and use existing tools or accelerators, for data profiling, cleansing or matching, specifically using purposed tools while not committing to a full scale proprietary Metadata or MDM solution.  We have created a series of tools that will provide this functionality, without requiring a strategic decision. Yet our tools will provide the acceleration needed by your staff or consultants to quickly profile, validate , match and organize your date into meta marts as well as analytical MDM repositories. This will allow you to better focus on the specific needs you have for defining your Data Governance goals and strategy. I will be elaborating on this in my next post.