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DIG Symphony
This month, we're introducing you to the capabilities and benefits of DIG Symphony. DIG Symphony is the latest - and most powerful - addition to the DIG Suite of products. Symphony is planned for public availability in the first quarter of 2005. Be sure to look for the release announcements!
In the meantime, read on to find out why we're so excited about this tool.
Symphony Product Features
The Symphony approach offers a low cost, integrated methodology to managing key data processing and workflow operations for individual projects, or across the enterprise. Solutions include data quality, standardization, integration, parsing, enhancing, correcting, merging, matching, purging, and general cleansing.
The Symphony framework provides an integrated, Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach to information processing. The following items represent some high-level features of the Symphony Designer and framework. As you read more about each feature, you will begin to understand how Symphony can be an important and integral part of almost any solution that endeavors to process information.
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Symphony Designer - "The User Interface"
The first and maybe most important part of any application is the Graphical User Interface (GUI). After all, if it's hard to use, productivity will inevitably be compromised. That's why we put significant effort into the Symphony Designer GUI and will continue to do so for future versions of the product. For instance, many data cleansing operations can be accomplished with less than 3 clicks and the overall appearance, flow, and instructions are intuitive to even novice users. This means that even non-technical users can build data quality and transformation "packages" quickly and easily.
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Stateless Packages
A Symphony Package represents a "compiled" version of all the options, built-in functions, dependencies, and customized business logic that you've designed for a particular workflow or data processing operation. Each Package is stateless, meaning that it doesn't hold any information in memory from one execution cycle to the next. This is a key attribute for scalability, high-availability, and clustering.
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Scalability and Availability
The Symphony Architecture allows you to easily expand your solution from individual projects to enterprise-wide deployment as your needs expand. Symphony also supports multiple users in parallel, large data sets, micro-batches, and real-time SOA requests.
The Stateless nature of Symphony Packages means that they can be portable and free to run on any computer that has the Symphony engine. Furthermore, Symphony Packages can be executed in a multi-threaded, parallel fashion on the same computer, or in a cluster of computers for high-availability (99.999% uptime of SOA related services) and load-balancing configurations for greater throughput.
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Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Symphony supports industry web services standards (SOAP, XML, WSDL, and HTTP). This is critical to interoperability between disparate systems, and is easy to maintain. In SOA architectures, Symphony Packages that contain business process flows and rules are decoupled from individual applications. This enables the changing of business processes without necessarily requiring changes to each consumer application.
Additionally, Symphony Packages can be run in three different ways:
– In batch mode while executing in the designer - this allows the user to see what's happening while executing on-demand.
– In batch mode on an automated schedule - this mode executes unattended and without a GUI.
– As a real-time web service - this enables the self-contained packages to be used in an SOA environment by a host of disparate applications or users simultaneously.
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Customization and Extendibility
The Symphony Designer provides a fully integrated compiler for both C# and VB.NET. This means that organizations with their own, or external professional services can write their own custom functions to customize their own workflow and data processing business rules to a much greater extent than is normally possible with most APIs. Better yet, all custom code is encapsulated by the Symphony Package it was designed with so it can be managed and executed with the full compliment of features provided by the Symphony engine. This helps avoid "stove-pipes" of disparate custom solutions that are often not documented, properly versioned, or easily managed.
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Extensive Collection of Data Sources
Symphony implements a wide array of .NET data providers allowing ready access to almost any type of data imaginable. Sources include; Oracle (native .Net), SQL Server (native .Net), Microsoft Access, OLEDB, ODBC, ChoicePoint Public Records, QSent Telephone Data, Digital Information Gateway Virtual Data Warehouse, delimited text files, fixed-length text files, ADO-XML, and support for custom sources.
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Unicode Support
Symphony implements the Unicode properties of the Microsoft .NET framework. This means that Symphony can be used with data from almost any language. As businesses expand their reach to encompass global markets, so can they expand their Symphony SOA solutions to meet the needs of those markets.
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.NET Framework
The Symphony engine is 100% C# managed code. This provides extreme compatibility and manageability with Microsoft operating systems and enterprises, especially those utilizing Active Directory to manage their .NET policies. Packages executed by the Symphony engine are subject to all enterprise and machine policies governing the .NET framework.
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As the release of DIG Symphony comes closer, check back here for details and examples of how this tool fits into your organization's operations model. |
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...that you can export search results and import them again later?
The Export to XML feature lets you save your search results out to an XML file, which can be used to import the data into a number of applications - including DIG itself. Once you have saved search results to an XML file, you can import the results back into the DIG Results grid - whenever you might need them.
To export your search results:
- In your Results tab, use the Results Panel to select the list containing the results you want to export.
- Select the records you want to export:
- To export all of the records, right-click in the Select column and choose Select All.
- To select individual records, click in the Select column of the records you want to export.
Note that you must be in "Edit" mode in order to select data. Use the Tools / Options / Data Mode command to set the Edit mode.
- From the File menu, choose Export Selected, and then choose XML.
- From the sub-menu, choose Save.
- In the Save As window, select the directory where you want to store the file, give it a name, and then click Save.
The data is saved to the file you specified. Now, whenever you want to retrieve the results, you can do so using the File menu's
Import / XML command. Simply navigate to the directory where the file is stored and double-click the file name. DIG opens a new tab,
using the file name, preceded by "Imported-," as the tab name.
Once you have imported data, you can work with the data in the same manner as any search results.
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