Technical Metadata for IT

Here are the examples of technical metadata, you may find in the metadata repository

Technical Metadata can be defined as the metadata generated and used by and for the IT systems. Many of this technical metadata will be coming from the business and functional specifications. A decent proportion of this meta-data is auto-generated by the systems. However, one has to manually add specifics of some complex routines, the description of the metadata object etc... This is not a comprehensive list, but fairly representational.

Table Structures

• Tables Structures- Logical
• Table Structures- Physical
• Triggers associated with Tables, whenever any operation (add, delete, update...) is done
• Domain values related to the fields
• Data Standards associated with the fields
• Any additional business rules associated with the fields
• Indexes
• Primary Keys
• Owner of the data in the table

System operations

• Job control sequence (which system batch-job to run when)
• The starting and ending criteria of a job
• The checks to be performed before and after the job.
• The roll-back check points rules (whenever the jobs get interrupted, to what point they should be rolled-back)

Models

• Relational Normalized Data models (logical and physical)
• Relational de-normalized (also knows as dimensional models) for data warehouse and BI)
• Multi-dimensional models (in OLAP as multi-dimensional arrays)
• Data mining models (Sample data structures)
• Business Hierarchy
• Additivity Rules

Security

• Batch-job execution security matrix
• System access security matrix
• Meta Data Access security matrix
• Enterprise Reporting tools security matrix

Report Scheduling and Publishing

• Report generation schedule
• Report publishing and storage destinations
• Intranet access links

ETL

• Source Systems mapping
• Extraction Design and business rules
• Transformation Design and business rules
• Loading Design and business rules

Interdependencies

• Across the tables
• Across the systems
• Across the programs

Programs

• Program names and descriptions
• Program usage (which system uses a program)
• Parameters passed OR returned by the program
• The placement of the program in the system architecture (front layer, middle layer OR the DBMS layer...)

Version Management

• Version numbers of each metadata object and change history
• Version currently under use (the latest version might not be in use)
• Version location

IT Systems specs

• IT system data model
• Data Flow Diagram within the IT system
• Functional decomposition diagram
• Functional and program specs of the programs
• IT system architecture