Manage Configurations
The configuration is an extremely important concept. It is the scope for many operations, including lineage analysis, search, version management, etc. In this way, what would otherwise be an overload of information (everything in the repository) is instead well managed according to the configuration of metadata one is interested in analyzing or working with. The name configuration comes from the concept of "Version & Configuration Management" where a configuration is a collocation of particular version of models.
A valid configuration consists of a collection of model versions, mapping versions, glossaries and stitchings. The model versions relate to data stores and data processes that have been harvested into Talend Data Catalog .
A configuration may be understood as any of the following:
- Repository workspace - a collection of repository objects to be analyzed together (search, browse, reports, etc.) as a technical scope, or business area under the same access permission scope.
- Enterprise architecture - a collection of data store models (ODS, data staging areas, data warehouses, data marts, etc.) and data process models (ETL/DI, and BI) connected together through data flow stitching.
- Design workflow - a collection of conceptual, logical and physical models connected (semantically stitched) together through semantic mappings modeling the design process.
A configuration may have one or more configuration versions. configuration versions may be understood each as a different collection of versions of repository objects. In this way, one can define several configuration versions, each containing various versions of the repository objects. As a result, one may perform
- Historical analysis using configuration versions containing older versions of models which were deployed at some time in the past
- What-if analysis using configuration versions containing the versions of models which may be deployed in the future.
One may also publish a configuration version or make it available to users of the Published version. In this way, a configuration may be used by an administrator of Talend Data Catalog to ensure the completeness and correctness of what is visible to business users and how all users search and analyze within the full complexity of Talend Data Catalog .
Talend Data Catalog accomplishes this management within the UI by way of the configuration Manager. This tool provides a drag and drop based visual interface for constructing configurations of repository objects. One may:
- Define any number of configurations
- Publish a configuration to a different set of users (by group)
- Publish none, some, or all configurations.
In this way, one has infinitely fine control of who sees what and when they may see it.
For viewing rights to a model (or glossary, etc.), the simplest best practice is to control viewing via configuration access, and not through restricting viewer rights to specific objects which may be in a configuration. This suggestion follows from the fact that any user who needs to open a configuration MUST ALSO have view permissions to all of the models in the configuration (either by explicitly assigning the Metadata Viewingcapability object role assignment to all the objects contained, or if no such assignment has been made, then the object is by default viewable). So, the easiest way to manage access to a model is to simply not include it in any open configuration.
Again, if ANY model of a configuration is not viewable by a user then the entire configuration is not viewable by that user.