CoSort Sort Control Language (SortCL) Metadata: Familiar and Open Syntax for Application Consolidation, MDM, and Data Stewardship CoSort Products

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SortCL Metadata. Powerful, Easy, Open.

SortCL Data Definition and Manipulation Files: Simple, Reusable, Interoperable.

Challenges:

IT and Data Departments depend on metadata to understand their own systems and to align their tools and processes. Some tools, however:
• use cryptic metadata that cannot be easily understood
• don't expose their metadata so it cannot be modified
• employ proprietary formats other tools cannot use

Solutions:

CoSort's metadata is in the form of a familiar and self-documenting Sort Control Language (SortCL), which has been widely adopted worldwide since 1992. SortCL allows your application, business and data governance teams to speak a simple, common language around flat files.

SortCL reduces complexity and the need for elaborate metadata maintenance by using a common metadata to define the layout and manipulation of sources, processes, and targets. The same metadata is used in many applications, including:
• Transformation (e.g. sorts, joins, conversions, lookups)
• Presentation (static reports and handoffs to BI apps)
• Protection (e.g. field encryption, anonymization, etc.)
• Conversion (of data types and file formats)

SortCL's metadata supports data and application independence. Job commands and data layouts can reside together or separately in explicit, logical text files -- metadata repositories -- that can be centralized for re-use. Multiple levels of data and application independence occur through nested specifications and references.

You can define multiple file layouts to reflect, and output, multiple views of the same data. You can also use these layouts to generate safe test data in the same format through SortCL or the CoSort Test Data (RowGen) tool. And, you can easily convert to SortCL's data definition format from 3rd-party file layouts, ETL tool metadata, and Oracle tables via the CoSort Fast Extract (FACT) product.

From production efficiency and maintenance cost standpoints, SortCL metadata enables the combination of high-volume data transformation and reporting. You can use the metadata in just one script, for one-pass:

• Data Warehouse and Reorg Operations
• Web Reports and Business Intelligence
• Compliance and Outsourcing Projects
• Impact Analysis and Data Forensics
• Testing and Application Prototyping

From a compliance standpoint, SortCL metadata also supports field-level protection functions like encryption at the same time you are prepping data for analysis. SortCL metadata and its inclusion in audit trails allow you to map these processes and help satisfy the requirements of your risk and controls framework.

Conclusion:

You can exploit SortCL's metadata and operational infrastructure to replace multiple processes with one, and add simplicity, transparency, compliance and auditability.

CoSort (IRI, Inc.)