Ab Initio One System Platform

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Contents
Co>Operating System..................................................................................................................................2
What is an Ab Initio application?.........................................................................................................4
Business logic is specified completely graphically...............................................................................5
The Co>Operating System natively processes any type of data..........................................................7
Performance and scalability................................................................................................................9
The Co>Operating System’s processing model..................................................................................10
Batch, real-time, web services – the Co>Operating System does it all..............................................12
Integration with legacy codes............................................................................................................13
Very high resilience in the face of bad data.......................................................................................13
Very high resilience to system failures..............................................................................................14
The Co>Operating System drives productivity with reuse.................................................................15
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................................16
Different metadata in different contexts...........................................................................................18
Navigating and understanding metadata..........................................................................................18
Metadata integration........................................................................................................................24
Many types of metadata....................................................................................................................25
The EME is an open system...............................................................................................................29
Metadata governance.......................................................................................................................29
A final word.......................................................................................................................................31
Reusability of business logic across batch and real-time applications...............................................32
Achieving performance for different real-time execution models.....................................................32
Interfacing with a wide range of real-time systems...........................................................................34
Native support for web services and SOA..........................................................................................34
Interfacing with special purpose and legacy messaging systems.......................................................35
Robustness in the event of failures...................................................................................................36
Operational robustness.....................................................................................................................37
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................................37
Business Rules Environment......................................................................................................................37
The Ab Initio Business Rules Environment is not a standalone tool...................................................38
What are “business rules”?...............................................................................................................39
BRE rules can include arbitrarily complex logic.................................................................................41
Built-in testing allows business users to verify rules – by themselves...............................................41
Transparency – Business logic exposed, at last..................................................................................42
No “RETE algorithm”..........................................................................................................................43
How does the BRE work with the Co>Operating System?.................................................................43
Complete rules management and governance..................................................................................44
Uniting the enterprise with unified technology.................................................................................45
Data Quality...............................................................................................................................................45
Architectural overview......................................................................................................................46
Data quality processing workflow......................................................................................................47
Validation rules..................................................................................................................................49
Reporting...........................................................................................................................................51
Reporting: Lineage.............................................................................................................................53
Reporting: Data Profiler.....................................................................................................................54
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................................56
Conduct>It.................................................................................................................................................57
Operational Console..........................................................................................................................58
Co>Operating System
The Co>Operating System is an environment for building, integrating, and running
enterprise business applications. The Co>Operating System is the foundation for all of Ab
Initio's technologies, including the Enterprise Meta>Environment, Continuous>Flows,
Conduct>It, Business Rules Environment, and more. These technologies provide a complete and
seamless application development and execution environment.

The heart of the Co>Operating System is a “dataflow engine.” This engine drives a large library
of data processing “components” that manipulate the data flowing through an application.
Applications are designed, implemented, and maintained graphically through Ab Initio’s
Graphical Development Environment (GDE).

The core principle of the Co>Operating System is that applications are designed and developed
in the way most people would design a system on a whiteboard (or even on a napkin). Easily
recognizable icons are used to represent the input and output sources, which are then combined
with processing boxes and arrows to define the overall processing flow. By selecting the
appropriate components from an extensive library and “wiring them up,” you create an Ab Initio
application.

Ab Initio seamlessly integrates the design and execution of applications: the drawing is the
application. And the resulting application can be batch, near real-time, or real-time in nature, or
even a combination of all of these – all united into one consistent and powerful computing
environment.

The graphical dataflow approach means that Ab Initio can be used to build the vast majority of
business applications – from operational systems, distributed application integration, and
complex event processing to data warehousing and data quality management systems. But
graphical design and development addresses just one part of the challenge. These applications
must also meet significant operational and management requirements.
Historically, graphical programming technologies yielded pretty pictures that fell apart when it
came to addressing these real-world requirements. The Co>Operating System is a genuinely
different beast – it actually works. Here are some sample deployments and their underlying
requirements:

 One of the world’s largest stock exchanges converted millions of lines of Cobol code for mission-
critical operations into Ab Initio applications. The solution is now a major part of the trade
processing pipeline. It connects to the real-time trading bus and processes transactions at over
500,000 messages per second.
 One of the world’s largest retailers receives market-basket data in real-time from the cash
registers in thousands of stores for inventory control and fraud detection.
 One of the world’s largest phone company’s processes call detail information for call rating, data
usage tracking, and network monitoring. Many billions of call-detail records per day are
processed, as are millions of usage queries.
 One of the world’s largest chip manufacturers pulls manufacturing quality information in real-
time from the fabrication line to increase yields.
 One of the world’s largest credit card networks uses Ab Initio as its data backbone, processing
and passing all transactions to back-end systems in batch and real-time. They accumulate 1
petabyte of transaction data per year in an Ab Initio data retention system that supports
customer service call centers with sub-second response times to queries.
 One of the world’s largest Internet company’s processes tens of billions of advertising
impressions per day for billing and better ad placement.
 One of the world’s largest insurance companies does many parts of its claims processing with Ab
Initio. This company’s re-insurance and treaty processing system contains many tens of
thousands of rules, all implemented in Ab Initio.
 One of the world’s largest package delivery companies generates all of its invoices and
computes sales compensation for its account teams using Ab Initio applications.
 One of the world’s largest banks consolidates information about all their customers from all
lines of business into an enormous data warehouse built with Ab Initio software. The same
company uses Ab Initio to customize and process all the SWIFT transaction traffic between its
international subsidiaries.

You might have noticed that all these examples say “one of the world’s largest.” Why have all
these major corporations chosen Ab Initio? Because not only is Ab Initio software intuitive and
easy to use, it also stands up to the most complex application logic and to huge amounts of data.
And it does this with high performance and remarkable robustness. This combination is unique.

These are just some examples of specific deployments at these customers, and these deployments
tend to be very broad. Meeting the requirements of all these applications requires many
capabilities, including:

 The ability to easily express large amounts of complex logic graphically.

 Connectivity to practically anything; a wide range of databases, queuing systems, flat files, ERP
systems, standard messaging protocols, and more.
 Native support for complex data structures – any kind of data from anywhere. Hierarchical (XML
and legacy), international, big objects, variable length, bit-packed data, and more.
  Support for a wide range of operating systems (Unix, Linux, Windows, mainframes) and
distributed processing across these platforms.
 Open architecture for rapid integration with legacy and 3rd party applications, data, and
environments.
 High efficiency and high scalability, along with the ability to enable “cloud"-like computing
across networks of servers.
 High-performance batch and real-time processing (web services and service-oriented
architectures (SOA), as well as streaming).
 High degree of reusability of both large and small portions of applications, including business
rules.
 High resilience against data issues and system failures. Strong user control over failure response.
 Comprehensive management capabilities. Software development lifecycle support, including
version control and release promotion. Execution scheduling, monitoring, and alerting.
Application analysis, and more.

The only way to meet these requirements is to have an architecture designed from the beginning
to meet them all – at the same time. Once an architecture has been set, it is practically impossible
to add fundamental capabilities. The Co>Operating System was designed from the beginning to
have all these capabilities. It is a robust, proven technology that is successfully used for a very
wide range of complex data processing applications.

What is an Ab Initio application?

The core of an Ab Initio application is a dataflow graph, or “graph” for short. A graph consists of
components that are connected together through data “flows".

For example, the following graph is a simple application that reads each record from a flat file
containing customer transactions, and then reformats the data (by applying rules) before sorting
it and then rolling up (or aggregating) the data. The results of this processing are then written out
to a table in a database, such as Oracle.

Through the use of highly configurable components, the Ab Initio Co>Operating System
provides all the fundamental building blocks for business data processing, including:

 Data transformations
 Selection/Filtering
 De-duplication
 Joining/Merging
 Normalizing/Denormalizing
 Compressing/Uncompressing
  Aggregating/Scanning
 Sorting
 Data generation and validation
 ... and more

In addition, the Co>Operating System comes with a large library of built-in components for
dealing with virtually every type of data source or target. This library includes components for:

 Connecting to any kind of flat file on Unix, Windows and mainframes

 Connecting to all common (and many less common) databases (Oracle, DB2, Teradata, SQL
Server, Netezza, Greenplum, mainframe DB2, IMS, IDMS, Adabas, ...)
 Connecting to all standard message queuing infrastructures (IBM MQ, JMS, Microsoft MQ)
 Connecting to web service infrastructures (WebSphere, WebLogic, IIS, Apache/Tomcat, ...)
 Connecting to many 3rd party products (SAP, Siebel, SAS, PeopleSoft, Salesforce.com, ...)
 Parsing and manipulation of hierarchical data structures (XML, ASN.1, Cobol, ...)
 Parsing, manipulation, and generation of domain-specific data formats (Swift, FIX, EDIFACT, ...)
 Content-based message routing
 Metadata connectivity to a wide range of data definition and business intelligence products
(ERWin, ERStudio, Microstrategy, Business Objects, Cognos, ...)

Small applications may have 3 to 5 components. Large applications may have a hundred
components. Very large applications may have many thousands of components. Applications can
also consist of many graphs, each of which may have many components.

Throughout the spectrum – from the smallest applications to the largest – Ab Initio applications
exploit reusable rules and components, enabling rapid response to changing business needs.

Business logic is specified completely graphically

Below the component level, the Co>Operating System can apply practically any type of user-
specified rules and logic to any type of data. And, those rules are specified in a graphical manner.
This is a significant departure from other technologies. To the extent that these technologies
provide graphical specification of rules, they apply only to simple rules. When rules get
complex, the user quickly runs into walls that cannot be overcome. In the end, the user
frequently has to leave the technology for anything complex and instead use traditional
programming methods (Java, C++, scripting, stored procedures, Perl, ...).

Not so with the Co>Operating System. Once users have the Co>Operating System, they will find
that it is easier to specify complex logic from within the Co>Operating System than from
without. This has tremendous implications for productivity, ease of use, and transparency – it is
easier and faster to specify rules graphically, and it is easier for business people to understand
them.

In the Co>Operating System, you specify rules using Ab Initio’s Data Manipulation Language
(DML), and these rules go inside “transformation” components, which are the basic building
blocks for processing data. There are transformation components for mapping one kind of record
structure to another, for aggregating data, for filtering data, for normalizing and denormalizing
structures, for joining multiple record streams, and more. Each of these components can apply
rules specified in DML to the records as they are processed.

Below is a screen shot of a simple rule that computes the output of a mapping component. On the
left are the fields coming into the component, on the right are the fields coming out, and in the
middle are the rules.

Individual rules can be built with the “Expression Editor”, shown below. Expressions can be
arbitrarily large and complex, and DML has a large library of built-in operators and functions.

Ab Initio also supports an alternate set of user interfaces for the specification of business rules.
These interfaces are aimed at less technical users, often business analysts and subject matter
experts. They use business terms rather than technical terms, and organize rules in a familiar
spreadsheet-like manner:
Learn more about the Business Rules Environment.

The Co>Operating System natively processes any type of data

With the Co>Operating System, the data is what it or the user wants it to be – the Co>Operating
System does not force data to be translated into a limited set of built-in formats that it
understands. Instead, the Co>Operating System processes data in its native format and does this
identically on all supported operating systems. So, the Co>Operating System, and all of Ab
Initio’s components, can natively process mainframe data on Unix and Windows servers, XML
on mainframes, complex hierarchical and bit-packed structures everywhere, international data
with automatic transcoding, and so on. Given the same data and the same application, the
Co>Operating System will produce the same results, regardless of where the application is
running.

Applications can read and write from a heterogeneous set of systems, and the data can have very
different formats at different points in the application. The example below shows an application
that reads mainframe data from a flat file, reads XML data from an MQ queue, processes that
data with different intermediate formats, and outputs the results to a flat file using an
international codeset.
The Co>Operating System knows how to get data formats from wherever they are stored:
database catalogs, schema definition products, Cobol copybooks, XML DTDs or XSDs, WSDL,
spreadsheets, or in-house data format systems.

Here is what the record format for the intermediate flow marked “ASCII hierarchical” in the
example above might look like:
Finally, the Co>Operating System and its components know how to automatically translate
formats as necessary. For example, if EBCDIC and packed decimal data is presented to a
component writing to an Oracle database, the component will automatically translate the data to
ASCII and decimals if the columns in the database have those formats.

Performance and scalability

The Co>Operating System was designed from the ground up to achieve maximum performance
and scalability. Every aspect of the Co>Operating System has been optimized to get maximum
performance from your hardware. And you don't need “cloud” technology because the
Co>Operating System naturally distributes processing across farms of servers.

The Co>Operating System is typically at least 4 to 5 times faster than the next fastest
technology. This includes programs hand-coded in Java and C++: it is the rare programmer who
can write a program that runs as fast as the Ab Initio version! What’s more, this special
programmer will be the only one in an organization who can do this with Java or C++, and he or
she will spend weeks coding something that can be accomplished in just days with Ab Initio.
Usually, such talented programmers don't do mere programming for long; they are tapped to do
design, architecture, and even project management.

How does Ab Initio achieve both scalability and performance? What is Ab Initio’s “secret
sauce"? There are many ingredients, but the most important ones are architecture and fanatical
attention to all details. The Co>Operating System’s architecture was designed from “first
principles” to enable scalable computing.

The Co>Operating System’s architecture is known as “shared-nothing.” Because the

Co>Operating System does not require the CPUs to share anything, they can run completely
independently from each other. This allows a single application to span as many CPUs on as
many servers as desired. The Co>Operating System provides facilities for distributing workload
evenly across many CPUs, so most applications achieve linear scalability. This means that
doubling the number of CPUs leads to a doubling of performance. Ten times more CPUs means
ten times more performance. The Co>Operating System combines data parallelism and pipeline
parallelism to create the maximum number of opportunities to execute pieces of an application
concurrently.

The simple example below shows how an application might partition data so that the Score
component can run in parallel across many CPUs (and servers). The Partition by Round-robin
component splits the customer data into equal streams of data, like someone dealing out a pack
of cards. The Co>Operating System then runs multiple instances of the Score component, each
instance working on one stream of data. As each record is output from each instance of the Score
program, the Interleave component merges the streams back together before writing the result to
the output file. It’s as simple as that.

Shared-nothing architectures work wonderfully as long as there are no bottlenecks. But a single
bottleneck will ruin the whole thing. This is where attention to detail matters. Any part of the
system that might cause a serial bottleneck must be carefully designed and implemented to never
get in the way. All algorithms in all components must be optimal under many different scenarios.
All communication and data transport between partitions and components must use the most
efficient channels. Only when all these details, and many more, are attended to, will the system
scale.

Another critical detail is the execution of business rules. If the system is designed properly, this
is where a majority of the CPU time should be spent. The Co>Operating System’s
transformation engine is what runs the business rules. This engine has a special design called a
“just-in-time compiler". This means that the business rules are compiled by the Co>Operating
System at the last possible moment, when all the information about what they are supposed to do
is finally available. The “just-in-time” aspect yields tremendous flexibility, and the “compiler” is
highly optimized to run traditional business logic with maximum performance. This is why it is
hard for a programmer using traditional technologies to compete with the Co>Operating System.

The Co>Operating System’s processing model

The Co>Operating System is a distributed peer-to-peer processing system. It must be installed on

all the servers that will be part of running an application. Each of these servers may be running a
different operating system (Unix, Linux and zLinux, Windows, or z/OS).

Here’s how the Co>Operating System manages a distributed set of processes across a network of
servers:
1

1.

The Co>Operating System is started on the "Master" Server which reads in

application definitions, data formats, logic rules, parameters, ...

As you can see in these diagrams, a single Ab Initio application can run inside a single server or
across a network of servers. The definition of the application, the graphical diagram specified by
the developer, is the same in both cases. An application will run across a different set of servers
just by changing the specification of which component runs where – there are no changes to the
application itself. An application can therefore be rehosted from mainframes to a Unix server, or
from a single server to a farm of servers, for example, with no changes.

The Co>Operating System runs equally well on Unix, Windows, Linux and zLinux, and z/OS.
Furthermore, a single application can run on any mix of these platforms. Every component in an
Ab Initio application can be run on any platform on which the Co>Operating System has been
installed (with the exception of a few platform-specific components, such as VSAM access on
mainframes). The Co>Operating System takes care of the complexity of moving data between
the machines, thereby providing a seamless middleware and processing capability. Furthermore,
the assignment of components to target machines can be changed before every single run of an
application.

Any component or group of components can be assigned to a different computer resource:

Batch, real-time, web services – the Co>Operating System does it all

The needs for building and operating batch and real-time applications are very different, and
their technologies have been different as well. Not so with the Co>Operating System. The
Co>Operating System has a single architecture that applies equally well to batch, real-time, and
web services (SOA) systems. Instead of requiring you to have a multitude of technologies and
different development teams for each system, with potentially multiple implementations of the
same business logic, the Co>Operating System, with Continuous>Flows, lets you use one
technology, one development team, and one encoding of business logic that can be reused across
different systems.

With the Co>Operating System, whether an application is batch or real-time depends on what the
application reads and writes. Here is the same application, shown first as a batch system (hooked
up to flat files for the input and output), then as a real-time queuing system (MQ for the input
and JMS for the output), and finally as a web service (getting service requests from an outside
system and returning results to that same system):

Batch

Queuing

Web Services

Learn more about Continuous>Flows.

Integration with legacy codes

While Ab Initio enables you to build end-to-end applications completely with the Graphical
Development Environment, and run those applications completely within the Co>Operating
System, users often have existing applications or 3rd party products that run fine and that are not
worth reimplementing. Ab Initio makes it easy to reuse those existing applications, whether they
were coded in C, C++, Cobol, Java, shell scripts, or whatever. In fact, the Co>Operating System
makes it possible to integrate those applications into environments they were not originally
designed for.

Legacy codes are integrated into Ab Initio applications by turning them into components that
behave just like all other Ab Initio components. For most legacy codes, this is easy – all that is
required is a specification for the program’s inputs and outputs, along with command-line
parameters. The example below shows how you can take a Cobol program that can read and
write flat files and plug it into an Ab Initio application. The Cobol code, along with its
Copybooks and JCL, is turned into an Ab Initio component; the component is placed in an Ab
Initio application that spans Unix servers and a mainframe; and the application connects to
various data sources and targets (SAS and a database). Finally, for performance, the workload is
partitioned so that the Cobol code can have multiple instances running in parallel.

Users collect and add a range

of Cobol-related data including:

This component can be connected

to anything Ab Initio can talk to.

Very high resilience in the face of bad data

One of the hardest parts of building and maintaining real systems is dealing with unexpected or
bad data. It happens all the time, and when fed such data, most applications behave badly – if
you're lucky, they just crash. If you're unlucky, these apps may do something strange with the
bad data, and it’s possible that nobody will find out until the bad results have gone to
downstream systems and contaminated them. Cleaning up that kind of mess takes time and really
eats into productivity.

The Co>Operating System is inherently resilient to bad data and constantly checks the data to
verify that it meets a variety of user- and system-specified criteria. If the data does not conform
to those criteria, it is not allowed to move forward without some kind of intervention. And it is
easy for the developer to build into the application automated intervention and reporting. The
intervention can be designed to correct erroneous data and feed it back into the system, or it can
be designed to segregate all related data entities so that they can be processed later in a consistent
manner.
Below is an example of how a developer builds an application in Ab Initio that 1 captures
problem data, 2 runs the problem data through a “cleanup” set of rules, 3 merges the cleansed data
back into the original process, 4 sequesters data that cannot be cleansed, and finally 5 generates a
report about the problem data that is 6 sent via an MQ queue.

All Ab Initio components that process data in interesting ways have optional “Reject”, “Error”,
and “Log” ports. The Reject port gets all problem data; the Error port gets a corresponding
record that describes each problem; and the Log port gets debugging information. This makes it
possible to build extremely robust data processing pipelines.

Very high resilience to system failures

Servers fail. Networks go down. Databases refuse to load. The more servers participating in an
application, the higher the probability that there will be a system failure of some type. It is hard
to build applications that can reliably recover from such failures. While many developers think
they can, in practice you don't discover whether the architecture is robust until it has survived a
variety of failures. There can be much pain while climbing this learning curve.

The Co>Operating System, on the other hand, was designed from the beginning to reliably
recover from all these types of failures. As long as the environment has been configured so that
crucial data is not lost, the Co>Operating System’s checkpoint/restart facility will be able to
restart an application where it stopped before the failure, even if the application spans networks,
multiple servers, and multiple databases, and regardless of whether the application runs in batch
or real-time. The Co>Operating System uses a two-phase-commit-like mechanism that has much
higher performance than the industry-standard XA protocol. For environments that require the
XA protocol, the Co>Operating System supports this as well, even across multiple databases and
queuing technologies from different vendors.
The Co>Operating System drives productivity with reuse

Because of the nature of the problems they are solving, Ab Initio applications can become very
large and complex. However, most systems include many pieces that are very similar to other
pieces, or for which there may be many variations on a theme. With traditional programming
technologies, developers frequently end up making many copies of these pieces and then making
minor modifications to each copy. The result is a maintenance and productivity nightmare.

Ab Initio provides a number of mechanisms to radically increase reuse of these application

pieces. Application pieces of all types can be stored in the Ab Initio Enterprise
Meta>Environment (EME), a centralized repository, and reused both within and across
applications. Here are examples of what you can centrally store, manage, and reuse:

 Record formats
 Business and logic rules
 Sections of applications (applications are called “graphs” and the sections are called
“subgraphs")
 Orchestrations of applications (“plans” in Ab Initio’s Conduct>It)

Ab Initio’s reuse capability is very powerful. Reused application pieces can link back to and
track changes to the centralized version from which they came. Furthermore, these pieces can
support locally applied customizations while still tracking the centralized version.

Below is an example of just one of these reusable application modules: the subgraph. A subgraph
can contain the components of a subsection of an application (graph). There is no limit to the size
or complexity of a subgraph, and subgraphs can be nested. Subgraphs behave in all the ways that
normal components do. And they can be saved in a library for reuse across many applications.

This subgraph corresponds to the error-handling portion of the application described earlier:
Notice that the components in this subgraph do not explicitly connect to any input or output
components. Instead, they connect to the input and output ports of the “Standard Error Handling
Process” subgraph.

Here is the same application as before, now built with the new, reusable error-handling subgraph
(subgraphs are visually identified in the GDE by the extra border line surrounding them):

Conclusion

The Co>Operating System is the base software for the entire Ab Initio architecture. All the key
Ab Initio architectural concepts manifest themselves in the Co>Operating System. And because
all of Ab Initio’s technologies incorporate the Co>Operating System in one way or another, they
incorporate those concepts in a consistent and seamless manner.

The results of this architecture are that:

 Entire application systems can be built graphically, and without traditional coding.
 Technical development and maintenance staff is far more productive with a graphical paradigm
than with traditional coding.
 Technical staff can be far more responsive to changing business needs.
 Applications are far more transparent and therefore easier for business users and analysts to
understand.
 Application systems are far more robust in every sense: they have unlimited scalability, they are
portable across many platforms, they can deal with any kind of complex data, they can
implement very complex business rules, they can withstand bad data and system failures, and so
on.
 Applications can reuse the business logic across batch, real-time, and web services applications.

These things, and more, are possible because the Co>Operating System was designed from the
beginning with a single architecture to achieve these results.

Enterprise Meta>Environment
The IT infrastructure is the central nervous systems of modern businesses, and management
needs to know everything about it. What information flows through it, what does that
information represent, how accurate is it, how does it flow from one place to another, how is it
processed, and where is it stored? This is what metadata is about – it is “information about
information.”

But getting that metadata is not so simple. While there are products that claim to address this
need, they have taken a very academic approach. Indeed, the concept of “information about
information” raises the question of what “information” is in the first place. So these metadata
products have focused on defining concepts and how the concepts relate to each other. While
these concepts eventually connect with actual information, the connections are tenuous. This
metadata must be manually entered by humans and is therefore subjective, incomplete, subject to
human error, and inevitably obsolete, since it trails the real systems, which are changing
constantly.

Ab Initio has taken a very different approach by focusing on operational metadata. Operational
metadata is actionable by business and IT management. It is about the systems that process data,
the applications in those systems, and the rules in those applications. It is about the datasets
throughout the enterprise, what is in them, how they got there, and who uses them. It is about the
quality of the data, and how that quality has changed over time. It is about all the many things in
all the IT systems.

Ab Initio also ties this operational metadata together with business metadata – business
definitions, created by business people, of the various pieces of information throughout the
enterprise. The result is a true enterprise metadata management system – the Ab Initio Enterprise
Meta>Environment, or EME.

An enterprise metadata management system must be many things to many people:

 The CFO needs to be able to tell regulators what a field in a report means and what the source
of the data in it is.
 The CIO wants to know about the IT systems – hardware and software – in the company. Who
owns this system? What systems does it depend on? What systems depend on it? What is the
level of data quality across these systems, and how does it change from one system to the next?
 The business analyst who is helping a division head manage her business needs a business
glossary that will help her find the pieces of data she needs to pull together for an analysis by 5
PM today.
 The operations staff wants to know what happened in production, today and in the past. What
jobs ran successfully? How long did they take? How much data was processed? How much spare
capacity is available? How good is the quality of the data?
 The systems architect is concerned with the inventory of applications, data tables, files, and
messages that make up the company’s systems. How do they all connect? What produces what?
What reads what? What depends on what?
 Application developers want to know the history of changes to their code. What does the data
look like now? Who fixed what? When? How? Why? What got released? What work is still in
progress?
There is no end to these kinds of questions. Getting useful answers quickly is essential. These are
questions that can be answered with the Ab Initio Enterprise Meta>Environment.

Different metadata in different contexts

The term “metadata” has different meanings across industries. Ab Initio uses the term
“metadata” in the context of the business computing world. In the image processing world, for
example, it means something altogether different: information such as when an image was
captured, what kind of device took the picture, what the lighting was, and so on. Web pages have
metadata too, this being the language the page was written in, the tools used to create it, and how
to find more information on this topic.

Navigating and understanding metadata

Ab Initio’s metadata graphical user interface, the EME Metadata Portal, allows one to start at
any point in the system and explore in any direction one chooses. All this metadata is presented
at the appropriate level of detail for each audience. Business users are not overwhelmed with
technical minutiae when they are trying to answer business questions, while developers and
operational staff can easily find the details of interest to them.

Consider a file that the EME has identified as the ultimate source for a calculation used in a
report. What can the EME tell you, a user, about this file? Through Ab Initio’s approach of
relating elements of metadata, one to the other, you can glean interesting and important
information about the file from the intuitive graphical interface, including:

 Which applications use the file

 Its record format
 Its data quality
 Its size over time
 The documented, expected values for each of its fields
 The actual census of values found
 The stewards (and their managers) responsible for its governance
 Documentation about its business meaning and the use of each of its fields
 Its relationship to logical models and similar datasets, including database tables and messages
 A list of programs that read or write the dataset

Below is a screen shot of the EME in the process of navigating metadata. The underlying screen
is a lineage diagram that displays a number of datasets and their processing relationships. Each
of the overlays shows different types of metadata that have all been linked together to the same
metadata element.

The EME can show

DATA LINEAGE and:

DATA STEWARD INFORMATION

OPERATIONAL STATISTICS
DATA PROFILE RESULTS

CONCEPTUAL DEFINITIONS

DATASET DETAILS

MAPPING SPECIFICATIONS

ENTITY RELATIONSHIPS

DATA QUALITY METRICS

DATA QUALITY HEATMAP

SEMANTIC MODELS
Metadata integration

Capturing so much metadata and storing it in separate buckets would be an accomplishment in

and of itself, but the EME does more than that. It establishes relationships between elements of
metadata, which effectively enriches their value, revealing deeper meaning about the business to
the real-world users of metadata at a company.

The challenge, of course, is how to gather all this metadata in a way that is actually useful. In
large, complex organizations with heterogeneous, distributed (even global) environments, this
challenge is particularly hard. There are issues of scalability and integration. How to gather
metadata from such a disparate set of sources and technologies? How to process so much
information? How to store it and display it intelligently, without overwhelming the user or
dumbing down the content? How to marry metadata across lines of business, countries, even
languages?

The EME integrates all the different kinds of metadata stored in it and, as a result, multiplies the
value of each. For example, this integration enables end-to-end data lineage across technologies,
consolidated operational statistics for comprehensive capacity planning, and fully linked data
profile statistics and data quality metrics.

To begin with, all information about the definition and execution of Ab Initio applications is
automatically captured and loaded into the EME. This includes business rules, data structures,
application structure, documentation, and run-time statistics. Because users build end-to-end
operational applications with the Co>Operating System, everything about those applications is
automatically captured.

This metadata is then integrated with external metadata through a combination of the EME’s
Metadata Importer and sophisticated metadata processing with the Co>Operating System.
Ab Initio’s support for combining metadata from multiple sources allows metadata from one
source system to be enriched with metadata from other sources. For example, the Metadata
Importer might load the core details of database tables and columns from a database catalog, then
enrich the metadata with descriptions and logical links from a modeling tool, and finally link the
imported metadata to data quality metrics. The Metadata Importer can load external metadata
such as:

 Reporting tools: MicroStrategy, Business Objects, Cognos, …

 Modeling tools: ERwin, ERstudio, and Rational Architect, …
 Database system catalogs for all major and most minor relational database management
systems
 Tabular metadata, usually stored in spreadsheets using either predefined templates or
customer-specific layouts
 Industry-standard protocols for metadata exchanges, including Common Warehouse Model XML
Metadata Interchange Format (CWM XMI)

Non-standard and custom metadata sources can also be imported and integrated into the EME.
Users can apply the Co>Operating System’s powerful data processing capabilities to arbitrarily
complex sources of metadata. The Co>Operating System can extract metadata from these non-
standard systems, process it as necessary, and load and integrate it with other metadata in the
EME.

Many types of metadata

The EME integrates a very wide range of metadata and is fully extensible. The home page of the
Metadata Portal allows the user to directly navigate the type of metadata of interest:
From this page you can select an area of interest and dive in to see:

Metadata about projects and applications. The EME stores and manages all information about
Ab Initio projects and the applications they contain. Projects are organized in hierarchies and can
be shared or kept private. The EME keeps track of which projects reference other projects, as
well as tracking all objects within a project.

Details about application versions. The EME maintains complete version information and
history about every detail of Ab Initio applications. Differences between versions of graphs,
record formats, and transform rules are displayed graphically. Users can see details about the
exact versions that are being used in production.

Users, groups, locks, and permissions. The EME provides access control management for all
metadata. Furthermore, as part of a complete source code management system, the EME’s
exclusive locking mechanism for whole applications or pieces of applications prevents
developers from interfering with each other.

Hierarchical organization of metadata. Metadata can be organized into arbitrary hierarchies

and folders to help capture business meaning and to provide targeted navigation.
Data dictionaries. The EME supports the creation of one or more data dictionaries or conceptual
data models. Data dictionaries can be a simple hierarchical list of business terms, or a more
complex semantic model with complex relationships between business terms.

Enterprise-wide deployments typically have multiple data dictionaries – one for each division or
product area, as well as an enterprise model. In the EME, divisional business terms link directly
to columns and fields, and have relationships back into the enterprise model. This allows
companies to harmonize business concepts across the enterprise without forcing each division to
abandon its own data dictionary.

Metadata from reporting tools. The EME imports metadata from all the major business
intelligence (BI) reporting tools, including MicroStrategy, Business Objects, and Cognos. This
includes details about reports and report fields, as well as internal reporting objects such as Facts,
Metrics, Attributes, and Aggregates. Lineage queries can trace the calculations of various report
fields back through the BI tools into the data mart or data warehouse, and from there all the way
back to the ultimate sources.

Metadata from database systems. The EME imports metadata (schemas, tables, columns,
views, keys, indices, and stored procedures) from many database systems. The EME performs
lineage analysis through multiple levels of views and stored procedures. For large database
systems, the EME is often the only way to understand the interrelationship of database tables,
views, and procedures – especially for impact analysis queries, table reuse exercises, and
consolidation projects.

Metadata from files. The EME imports metadata about files, including complex hierarchical
record formats such as XML and COBOL copybooks.

End-to-end data lineage. The EME builds complete models of the flow of data through an
enterprise by harvesting metadata from a large number of different operational systems,
reporting tools, database systems, ETL products, SQL scripts, etc. This integrated model allows
users to query the system about data lineage – how data was computed, and what is impacted by
a change.

System diagrams. The EME stores graphical pictures that can represent system diagrams or
other diagrams of metadata organization. In the Metadata Portal, clicking on a “hot-linked”
graphical item within a diagram navigates the user to the connected metadata object.

Logical models. The EME imports logical and physical models from common modeling tools. It
models links from logical models to physical models, which are then merged with the schema
information in the actual databases.

Domains and reference data. The EME stores reference data, including domains and reference
code values. It can be the primary manager for certain reference data, or can track and maintain a
copy of reference data from a different system. It also supports code mappings between logical
domain values and multiple physical encodings.
Data profiles. The EME stores data profile results and links them with datasets and individual
fields. Many statistics are computed, such as common values and data distributions. These
statistics can be computed on demand or automatically as part of an Ab Initio application.

Operational statistics. The Co>Operating System produces runtime statistics for every job and
for every dataset that is read or written. These statistics can be stored in the EME for trend
analysis, capacity planning, and general operational queries.

Data quality metrics. To support a comprehensive data quality program, Ab Initio computes
data quality statistics and error aggregates and stores them in the EME. The EME can analyze
and display data quality metrics for datasets and for collections of datasets. Data quality metrics
can also be combined with data lineage to see a “heat map” showing where there are data quality
problems in the enterprise.

Pre-development specifications. The EME can capture mapping specifications as part of the
development process. The Metadata Portal allows analysts to specify existing or proposed
sources and targets along with arbitrary mapping expressions. By using the EME for defining
mappings, users can see how the mappings fit into a larger enterprise lineage picture.

These specifications can then be used to guide a development team and to permanently record
requirements. After production deployment, the EME will continue to show these specifications
in lineage diagrams alongside their actual implementations.

Data masking rules. The EME stores data masking rules, which can then be applied to data
flowing through Ab Initio applications. Ab Initio provides many built-in rules, and users can
define their own custom masking algorithms. These rules can be associated with fields or
columns, or with business terms in the conceptual model. When linked at the conceptual level,
data masking rules are automatically applied to the corresponding physical columns and fields.

Data stewards and metadata about people and groups. The EME stores metadata about
people and groups. This metadata can be linked to other metadata objects to document data
governance roles such as data stewardship. Metadata about people and groups can be
automatically imported from external systems such as corporate LDAP servers.

Built-in and custom metadata reports. The EME provides many built-in reports. Users can
also define custom reports that run against metadata stored in the EME and that are accessible
from the Metadata Portal.

Custom metadata. Users can extend the EME schema to allow a wide variety of additional
metadata to be integrated into the EME. Schema extensions include the addition of attributes to
existing objects, as well the creation of new metadata objects that can be linked to other existing
metadata. Users can easily customize the EME user interface to allow for tabular and graphical
views on both standard and custom metadata.
The EME is an open system

The EME is an open system based on industry-standard technologies:

 A published, extensible relational schema. The EME comes preconfigured with a rich
metaschema that contains a wide variety of types of metadata. The metaschema can be
customized and extended with custom tables and columns to support a variety of user-defined
metadata. The EME manages these extensions and customizations in concert with the built-in
metadata objects, and provides full customization of screens and reports.
 A standard commercial relational database (currently Oracle, DB2, or Microsoft SQL Server),
which holds all of the business metadata and summaries of the operational and technical
metadata. Technical metadata is stored in an object data store accessible via ODBC.
 A graphical user interface that can be hosted in any standard web browser. In addition, the EME
supports navigation to external repositories of detailed metadata, such as document
management systems, image databases, and 3rd party products.
 A three-tier architecture using commonly available application server technology. On top of the
database is a standard Java application server (currently WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, or
Apache Tomcat) that manages security, calculates role-based views, and implements the
workflows around metadata maintenance.
 Support for external reporting tools. While the EME supports a wide range of built-in reports
through the Metadata Portal, 3rd party reporting products can also directly access the metadata
in the database for custom reports. The relational schema is fully documented and comes with
preconfigured database views to support these reporting tools.
 Web services APIs to enable service-oriented architecture and metadata as a service. These
interfaces allow external systems to query business metadata as well as to submit metadata
change requests. External systems can also subscribe to changes to the metadata, thereby
enabling the EME to send messages when any approved change occurs. For example, if the EME
is managing valid values, the approval workflow (described later) can send messages to external
operational systems to update their cached lookups of these valid values.
 Metadata exports. In addition to the data access interfaces, the EME can also export metadata
in a number of ways. For example:
o Virtually every EME tabular screen can be converted into an Excel spreadsheet with the
click of a mouse.
o The EME can export metadata in the emerging standard for metadata exchange, CWM
XMI.
o The EME can generate a Business Objects universe and populate it with metadata.

Metadata governance

The EME provides sophisticated governance processes that can be customized to meet the needs
of large enterprises.

For technical metadata (applications and business rules), the EME supports a complete source
code management system, with checkin/checkout, locking, versioning, branching, and
differencing.
For business and operational metadata, the EME comes with a built-in metadata governance
workflow, including work queues, approvals, and audit trails. The EME can also interface with
external approval workflow tools. The EME’s proposal/approval workflow mechanism is based
on changesets. Users create changesets to propose metadata additions, updates, and/or deletions,
and then submit them for approval.

Below is a screen shot of the changeset submission process:

When a user submits a changeset for approval, the EME sends an email message to the
appropriate metadata stewards. These stewards can inspect the proposed changes and approve or
reject them. If approved, the changeset is applied and becomes visible to the general user
population.

The EME also supports integration of changesets via its web services API, as well as with
external workflow approval/BPM systems, such as Oracle’s AquaLogic. In this case the external
workflow system is responsible for communicating items in work queues, documenting
communications, managing escalations, and resolving final status.

All approved changesets result in new versions of metadata in the EME. The EME maintains a
complete history of all previous versions and their details.
A final word

Enterprise metadata management was long a goal of large companies, but an unattainable,
impractical one. Passive “repositories” (in many cases simply glorified data dictionaries) held
only a fraction of the relevant metadata and soon became stale, out-of-date “islands” of metadata.
The organizations that most needed a comprehensive approach to managing metadata – complex,
global companies with inherent problems of scalability, with diverse metadata sources, with
security issues that cross lines of business, and with huge amounts of information to display and
navigate – were the least likely to succeed.

But Ab Initio's Enterprise Meta>Environment has finally made enterprise metadata management
possible, even in the largest of companies. Some examples:

 A major global bank is finally able to meet the requests of its regulator that its accounting
numbers be verifiable. A full-scale data quality program across the enterprise, including quality
measurements at various points of the data lineage, is being rolled out using the EME.
 A major financial institution is saving tens of millions of dollars on the replacement of a key
software system because the EME has enabled a complete understanding of how the legacy
code worked, and empowered business and IT to collaborate in describing how the replacement
system should function. Many person-years of planned effort were simply eliminated.
 Several multinational enterprises with incredibly complex IT environments – operations in as
many as 100 countries, thousands of disparate systems, and hundreds of thousands of files,
database tables, and messages – are using the EME to inventory every piece of data and to
define its meaning and value; they’re using the EME as an asset management system. These
companies realize that data items are assets to be tracked, just like cars, buildings, and office
equipment.

The Ab Initio EME didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t come from an ivory tower: it’s the
result of years of serious engagement with companies like these.

Continuous>Flows
Real-time business data processing is truly challenging, and few software products actually
tackle the requirements. Ab Initio does.

Ab Initio addresses a wide spectrum of real-time applications, ranging from “mini-batch”, to

high volume “asynchronous messaging”, to service-oriented applications (SOA), to low latency
“request/response” applications, all with a single technology – the Co>Operating System’s
Continuous>Flows facility.

The Co>Operating System is a “dataflow engine”. This engine flows streams of records, or
transactions, through a sequence of “components”. These components each do a variety of
computing on input records, applying business rules for example, to produce output records.
Complex processing logic is decomposed into easily understood steps, with each step carried out
by a different component. Records flow through the necessary set of components until the
processing is complete.
This dataflow model is perfectly suited for both batch and real-time processing. While most of a
batch and corresponding real-time application may be similar if not identical, the end-point
components determine whether the application is batch or real-time. A batch application
connects to flat files and static database table components. A real-time application connects to
messaging queues, web services, RPC’s, CICS servers, and/or special purpose components
(usually via TCP/sockets).

With Ab Initio, the fact that batch and real-time applications have so much in common, and that
they both use a single technology – the Co>Operating System – results in significantly lower
complexity and higher performance. Lower complexity translates to higher productivity, and
higher performance lowers costs.

Reusability of business logic across batch and real-time applications

In most cases the business-logic components between the input and output components stay the
same, meaning that the same business logic can be reused across batch and real-time
applications. This has big productivity implications. With non-Ab Initio approaches, the
technologies and methodologies for batch and real-time processing are usually very different, so
that the same business logic is reimplemented multiple times for the range of batch to real-time
uses. With Ab Initio, you develop the business logic just once and then plug it into Ab Initio’s
batch and real-time infrastructures:

Achieving performance for different real-time execution models

Application architects are often challenged by the need to meet seemingly conflicting
performance requirements:

 Batch applications need to process data as efficiently as possible. A batch job may take a long
time to run because there are so many transactions to process, and none of the results are
 available until the job has completed. But while it is running, a batch job is expected to process a
very high number of records per second.
 “Mini-batch” applications are collections of batch jobs that individually process small volumes of
data. However, there may be thousands or even tens of thousands of such small jobs that run
each day. By limiting the amount of data processed by a job, the response time for each job is
minimized. This approach also allows the same applications to process very large data volumes
efficiently in a traditional batch setting. (Managing tens of thousands of jobs a day presents its
own set of complexities, which are addressed by Ab Initio’s Conduct>It.)
 Asynchronous messaging applications connect to message queues and also need to process
transactions as efficiently as possible. However, the downstream systems usually expect their
response messages within a few seconds to tens of seconds. Indeed, if an asynchronous
application can respond within a second or two, it can support interactive use.
 “Request/response” or synchronous messaging applications are expected to process a
transaction as soon as it shows up and to respond as quickly as possible, usually with a latency
of less than a second. If multiple such applications work together to process a transaction,
individual applications may need to turn around responses in tenths to hundredths of a second.
Ab Initio directly addresses this “sweet spot” of reliably performing meaningful units of work in
the tens of milliseconds range (in contrast to the extremes that some narrow, specialized
systems go to).

The Ab Initio Co>Operating System’s Continuous>Flows capability is a single technology that

is effectively used by customers in all these modes. This is because the Co>Operating System
was architected, from the beginning, to meet all the requirements of these different approaches.

There are two primary differences in Ab Initio between batch (including mini-batch) and real-
time applications:

 Termination: Batch applications terminate once they have finished processing all the data
in their inputs. After termination, no system resources remain associated with a batch
application.

Once started, real-time applications stay up indefinitely to receive and process

transactions that arrive on their inputs. If there is a lull in the flow of new transactions, a
real-time application waits until new transactions appear.

 Checkpointing and recovery: Batch applications take checkpoints at predetermined

locations in an application, and all data that passes through one of these locations is saved
to disk (or the checkpoint has not been successfully taken). Recovery is just simply
restarting an application at the last successful checkpoint.

Real-time applications can take checkpoints between transactions, as often as every

transaction or infrequently based on other criteria (such as elapsed time or number of
transactions). A restarted application automatically picks up at the last transaction that
was successfully checkpointed.
Interfacing with a wide range of real-time systems

Ab Initio’s Continuous>Flows provides interfaces to a wide range of real-time systems:

 3rd party queuing systems: IBM MQ, JMS, TIBCO Rendezvous, and Microsoft MQ. Ab Initio
provides components for directly connecting to all of these queuing systems
 Web services: WebSphere, WebLogic, IIS, and Apache/Tomcat
 Ab Initio queuing and RPC for low latency and high volume point-to-point connections between
Ab Initio applications
 Legacy / in-house messaging software

Native support for web services and SOA

Ab Initio applications can easily implement web services in a service-oriented architecture

(SOA). This is accomplished through an Ab Initio-provided servlet that is installed in a standard
application server (WebSphere, WebLogic, IIS, or Apache/Tomcat) of the customer’s choosing.
The servlet provides a registration mechanism for associating particular web service calls with
specific Ab Initio applications. When a web service call comes in, the servlet communicates with
the Ab Initio application via TCP (the Ab Initio application runs in its own set of processes and
is outside the application server) and returns to the original requestor the results returned by the
Ab Initio application.
The Co>Operating System also provides full support for parsing messages defined via WSDL.

Interfacing with special purpose and legacy messaging systems

Commercial queuing products and web services are relatively new to the industry, and their
performance rates are modest. Customers with large messaging volumes, or whose needs pre-
date the existence of commercial queuing products, have built their own in-house high-
performance messaging solutions.

Continuous>Flows supports robust interfacing to these legacy solutions through special

processing components (“Universal Subscribe” and “Universal Publish”). These components call
custom C++ subroutines that interface with the legacy messaging system. The components also
handle rollback and recovery in the event of failures.
Ab Initio, in concert with special-purpose messaging systems, can achieve extremely high
performance rates – sustained rates of over 500,000 messages per second in mission-critical
applications have been measured.

Furthermore, the Universal Subscribe and Universal Publish components are used in just the
same way as Continuous>Flows components for 3rd party queuing products. This provides users
with the option of switching from their in-house queuing solution to a 3rd party queuing product
with minimal changes to their Ab Initio applications.

Robustness in the event of failures

The Co>Operating System checkpointing facility provides robust handling of application failure.
A checkpoint allows an application to commit changes to multiple databases and input and
output systems (queues). In the event of an application failure, the Co>Operating System does a
“rollback” of the environment back to the last successful checkpoint. Once the underlying
problem has been cleared up (database refuses to load, out of disk space, network failure, …), the
application can be restarted, and it will automatically pick back up after the last successfully
processed transaction.

Most checkpointing schemes are notoriously expensive from a computational perspective, and
developers’ efforts to try to minimize that cost often result in complex, unstable applications.
The Co>Operating System was architected to both have extremely high performance and to be
robust. The Co>Operating System provides a number of checkpointing alternatives that trade off
transaction latency against recovery time. In all cases, the Co>Operating System guarantees that
all transactions will ultimately be written once and only once to all target devices (databases,
files, and queues).

The Co>Operating System provides two basic mechanisms for checkpointing. The best known is
the XA standard protocol for 2-phase-commit. The Co>Operating System includes a transaction
manager that will coordinate commits across disparate databases and queuing products, and can
even batch transactions into a single commit to increase throughput.

However, XA has its limitations: it has high computational overhead; it is complex to administer;
and it is not supported by all desired input and output devices. As a consequence, most Ab Initio
users depend on the Co>Operating System’s native checkpointing mechanism, which is very
much like 2-phase-commit. This mechanism works with all input and output devices (databases,
files, and queues) to which Ab Initio connects, works across heterogeneous and distributed
servers, and is very performant and extremely robust. Ab Initio has even built into its connector
components ways of compensating for limitations of certain 3rd party queuing products – for
example, in certain products a queue manager crash can result in transactions being delivered
more than once.

With the Co>Operating System’s native checkpointing system, developers can control the
frequency of checkpoints in a number of ways, such as the number of transactions and elapsed
time, or as a result of an event such as a special token in the message stream. Furthermore, they
can control the degree of transactional consistency at checkpoint time across multiple output
devices. Default settings yield very high performance; transactions are never lost; and the
correctness of the application is never sacrificed.

Operational robustness

The Co>Operating System seriously addresses operational requirements for mission-critical,

real-time applications. Some example mechanisms include:

 Running multiple instances of a real-time application simultaneously for load-balancing and

failover
 Bringing down pieces of an application system so that updated modules can be initiated without
suspending a 7×24 nonstop system
 Pooling connections to databases to limit resource usage
 “Folding” multiple components into a single process to lower CPU overhead and memory
footprint
 Using “micrographs” – dynamically loadable graph logic – to dramatically reduce the use of
operating system resources

Conclusion

The Continuous>Flows approach to real-time processing brings together the productivity

increases of graphical dataflow implementation, a truly general model for connecting to data
streams, and robust mechanisms for reliably checkpointing work and coordinating transactions.

Business Rules Environment

Ab Initio serves a wide range of users. At one end of the spectrum are professional application
developers. These folks understand how to design and build sophisticated systems that process
large amounts of data in complex environments. For these users, Ab Initio provides the
Graphical Development Environment (GDE) for graphically building complex processes and
business logic. The resulting applications run on the extremely robust and scalable Co>Operating
System.
At the other end of the Ab Initio spectrum are business users. These people are not skilled at or
even interested in the mechanics of processing terabytes of data or thousands of messages per
second. However, they do know what their systems are supposed to accomplish and often best
know the details of the data and the rules that drive the business.

Over the years, a division – sometimes an adversarial one – has evolved between IT teams and
the business users they serve. The business users know what they want done and what it means
to the business, and the IT professionals know how to do it. The IT shop asks for specs and the
business users do their best to provide them. But there are inevitable ambiguities and mistakes –
mistakes in the specs and mistakes in the translation of the specs into code. The process – from
spec to code to test to release – never works as cleanly or as quickly as everyone hopes. At each
stage, one human has to figure out what another human meant. That takes time and, worse,
introduces big opportunities for errors. And each error (of course) takes more time to find, revise
in the spec, and change in the code. Productivity suffers. Correctness is never completely
assured. Sometimes the cycle never converges – and projects simply fail.

What if business users had a way to control the specific parts of the systems that implemented
their business logic? What if their business rules could be expressed in a way that they
understood, and that they could even write, and that could be automatically converted to code
that ran inside a larger system? Sounds pretty good? That’s the whole idea behind the Business
Rules Environment.

The Ab Initio Business Rules Environment (BRE) allows business analysts to specify business
rules in a form that is very familiar and comfortable to them: grid-like spreadsheets. In the BRE,
the rules are specified in business terms, not technical terms, and with expressions that are clear
to anyone who has worked with Microsoft Excel. As a consequence, not only can rules be
specified quickly and accurately, they are also easily understood by other business people.

Furthermore, the BRE puts the business users in the driver’s seat when it comes to verifying the
business rules. The business users are not only able to put the rules directly into the system, they
are also able to immediately see the results of applying those rules to test data. If they don’t like
what they see, they can change the rules on the spot. The savings in time are enormous.

The Ab Initio Business Rules Environment is not a standalone tool

Traditional “rules engine” products are standalone tools. They require work to interface to other
products and the rest of the computing infrastructure. They have performance and scalability
limitations. They can process only simple data structures. Their perspective is limited to the rules
they process, so they cannot trace lineage across entire systems.

The Ab Initio BRE solves all these problems and limitations, and many more, because it is
tightly coupled with Ab Initio’s Co>Operating System and metadata technologies. It was
architected and implemented that way – this is not an afterthought or the result of a typical
software company’s marketing strategy.
  The same BRE rules can be run without reimplementation in batch, continuous, web services,
and real-time applications.
 BRE rules run extremely efficiently and can be scaled to run across many CPUs and many
servers. There is no limit to the scalability of systems built with Ab Initio.
 BRE rules can process complex legacy hierarchical data. Whatever may exist in a legacy
environment (EBCDIC, packed decimal, international formats, XML, Cobol Copybooks, …) can be
handled natively by the BRE in conjunction with the Co>Operating System.
 The same BRE rules run identically on all platforms supported by the Co>Operating System
(Unix, Linux, Windows, z/OS, and z/Linux).
 The BRE benefits from all of the Co>Operating System’s robustness features, such as error
handling, checkpointing, and so on.

What are “business rules”?

The BRE supports three different styles of business rules: decision rules, validation rules, and
mapping rules. While they are fundamentally similar, business users are comfortable thinking of
rules as belonging in one of these categories.

As required by the nature of the business, rules can be simple and short or extremely long and
complex. The BRE handles both extremes. Currently, the largest BRE rulesets in production
have more than 50,000 rules.

Here is an example of a very simple decision-style business rule specified in the BRE. This is the
tax computation for US income taxes (form 1040):

This rule has two inputs, Filing status and Taxable income line 43, and computes a single output
named Tax (line 44). In the BRE, there is an implicit AND operator between columns and an
implicit ELSE operator between rows. So the first few rows of this rule read as follows:
IF the Filing status is Single AND the Taxable income line 43 is less than or equal to 100000,
THEN the Tax (line 44) is equal to looking up the Taxable income line 43 in the Tax from Table
and returning the amount for Single filers.

ELSE IF the Filing status is Single AND the Taxable income line 43 is greater than 100000 and
less than or equal to 171550, THEN the Tax (line 44) is equal to the Taxable income line 43
times 0.28 minus 6280.00.

ELSE IF the Filing status is Single AND the Taxable income line 43 is greater than 171550 …

… and so on …

Next is an example of a validation rule. It validates multiple inputs in the same rule, and sets
multiple outputs in each case:

And here is an example of a source-to-target mapping rule. For this style of rule, the BRE
displays on the left a list of the potential input values (the “Inputs” column) such as fields,
variables, constants and calculated values. In the middle is a list of the target fields (“Output
Name” column). To the right of each target field is a column (“Expression/Rule”) where the user
can drag in values from the “Inputs” column or create an expression for calculating that output.
(We’ll see what the “Computed Value” column is all about later.)

BRE rules can include arbitrarily complex logic

The logic inside BRE rules can be simple, as in the examples above. However, in real life
business users often have very complex rules. With non-Ab Initio technologies, those rules
cannot be implemented in the business rules product. Instead, they require hand-coding in
programming languages such as C++ or Java. This can have a huge negative impact on usability
and productivity. It reintroduces the whole spec-interpret-code-test-fix cycle that dooms projects
to failure.

Not so with the Ab Initio BRE. The BRE inherits the complete data processing capability of the
Co>Operating System. This means that all Co>Operating System functions – and there are
hundreds – are available to the BRE, as well as complex logic structures.

As a result, there is no limit to the size or complexity of the expressions within rules, or the size
or complexity of the rules, or the number of rules within a ruleset.

Built-in testing allows business users to verify rules – by themselves

A key advantage to using the Ab Initio Business Rules Environment to develop business rules is
the BRE’s built-in testing capability: rules developed within the BRE can be executed against
sample data without ever leaving the editing environment. During testing, the BRE reports the
outputs computed for each test record, as well as the states of every intermediate variable and
calculation. A BRE user can inspect output records, and then click on any computed value to see
exactly how and why that value was computed:

For each test record, the BRE shows the case(s) that triggered (in yellow), and also darkens any
cells that resulted in a failed comparison. The BRE also calculates counts of the number of times
each particular rule is triggered (“Times Fired” in screen shot). This information can be used to
find missing test cases or invalidly constructed rules (if a case never triggers).

Testing can be run at any time during rule development, allowing for an incremental approach to
the creation of a large set of rules. There is no need to wait until the rules are all entered before
starting to evaluate behavior.
The output of a test run can be saved as a benchmark against which later test runs are
automatically compared. When rules are changed, either during development or when
modifications are being designed, it is possible to see all the differences between the current
behavior of the modified rules and the saved benchmarks results. This feature is invaluable when
evaluating the impact of a proposed change. Without the Ab Initio BRE, business users are often
“flying blind” when changing their rules.

Furthermore, rule execution details are also available from rulesets running in production. Users
can configure the amount of tracking information that is saved, ranging from just information
about which rule cases (rows) are triggered for every input record to all input, lookup,
intermediate, and final values. This allows analysts to study the behavior of the rules over time,
often leading to improvements in results by adjusting the business logic. These details can also
be critical to answering questions about how specific decisions were made in the past.

Transparency – Business logic exposed, at last

Large, complex business rules systems can consist of many rules that have been implemented on
top of other rules. Understanding how these rules interrelate and how data flows through them is
critical for business users. Unfortunately, typical business users can rarely see how their systems
work.

With the BRE, business users have complete visibility into their systems, because the BRE
displays diagrams of how data flows through interconnected rules, irrespective of how large and
complex those rules are. Furthermore, graphical lineage can be displayed for applications that
consist of many rulesets that may be distributed across an application, or even across multiple
applications.

The following figure shows a simple lineage example for the ruleset shown above that calculates
income taxes based on the US 1040 EZ form. Green ovals represent rules (calculations) and
rounded rectangles represent variables. In testing mode, sample test values are shown below each
variable name, along with all intermediate calculations. Below the full lineage diagram is a
zoomed section showing how the calculation of the deductible (line 5) impacts the final refund or
amount owed.
The lineage ability of the BRE allows business users to truly understand how large sets of
complex rules work.

No “RETE algorithm”

What’s RETE? Don’t worry – with the BRE, you don’t have to know. With traditional rules
products, however, rules are executed in an order determined by something called the “RETE
algorithm”. This means that a “business” person has to understand a fairly complex computer-
science / artificial intelligence concept (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm if you
really want to know).

In practice, the RETE approach makes it very difficult to understand the consequences of a
change to a rule, since it may impact other rules that are very far away in the specifications.
Performance is also very difficult to tune, since small changes may have big, unintended
consequences.

In the BRE, rules run in the order in which you specified them. Performance is not only
substantially higher, it’s predictable! You don’t have to be a computer scientist to figure out how
rules work.

How does the BRE work with the Co>Operating System?

It’s straightforward: the BRE takes the rules created by the user and puts them into a component
in a graph run by the Co>Operating System. Learn more about components, graphs and the
Co>Operating System.
Because business rules run in the Co>Operating System, they inherit all the advantages and
strengths of the Co>Operating System. Rules can interface to any data source or target, can
process any kind of data, can handle any volume of data, can run batch and/or real-time, can run
distributed across multiple servers running different operating systems, all in a completely robust
way. The Co>Operating System includes everything for building and running robust mission-
critical applications, and the BRE inherits all of this.

Below is an example of a Co>Operating System graph (application) in which a key component

contains rules specified with the BRE:

Complete rules management and governance

All rules are stored in the Ab Initio Enterprise Meta>Environment (EME), which has complete
source-code management capabilities, including versioning. As a consequence, BRE users have
the choice of two deployment methodologies:

 Treat rules like other application elements. This means they must go through all the standard
code promotion stages: development, testing, and finally promotion to the production
environment. While this robust methodology is very familiar to IT development staff, the
number of steps can take a lot of time. Nevertheless, the BRE’s integrated testing streamlines
and shortens the overall process.
 Treat rules more like reference-code data in an operational database. Business users are often
able to make changes (add, updates, and deletes) to reference codes without running those
changes through the complete application-code promotion process, thereby allowing them to
respond quickly to business needs.

Ab Initio does not promote one approach over the other; we just make it possible for our users to
choose the approach that best fits their needs.
Finally, because of the EME’s strong support for versioning, users can easily configure their
environment to enable “champion/challenger” deployment of rules. The idea is to run two
versions of the same rules side by side to compare and contrast their outputs. Users then establish
processes to review these differences and improve their rules until they get the desired results.

Uniting the enterprise with unified technology

With integrated, interactive testing and automatic generation of production-ready, executable

modules, the BRE allows business users to participate directly in the development of applications
in a way that complements the expertise of IT staff. By presenting business logic in a way that
business users can express and understand, the BRE removes huge amounts of uncertainty and
risk surrounding the development and deployment of new applications.

BRE rules and the applications driven by them are executed by the Co>Operating System, which
means they can be arbitrarily complex, yet run extremely efficiently, and with complete
scalability. And the same rules can be run in batch applications and web service applications
without recoding. Every benefit of the Co>Operating System, in fact, is realized through the
BRE. Why? Because the BRE was built with the same, unified technology as the Co>Operating
System. The BRE and Co>Operating system work together, seamlessly, to unite the enterprise.

Data Quality
It matters. Data quality problems can have a significant impact on a company’s bottom line. Bad
data can result in redundant work and missed opportunities. Data quality problems can
accumulate, increasing in scope and impact, as data moves through the enterprise. In the worst
cases, this can cause executives to reach incorrect conclusions and make bad business decisions.
Pretty serious stuff. Yet most companies have no formal data quality programs that can measure
and mitigate data quality problems. Most companies are not even aware that they have a data
quality problem.

The solution is to institute an enterprise data quality (DQ) program. By its very nature, an
enterprise DQ program is beyond the capabilities of any single canned solution. DQ requires a
holistic approach – with touchpoints throughout the business and implemented across a range of
technologies. DQ should be an integral part of the data processing pipeline and should not be
limited to just offline, retrospective analysis. DQ is not just about customer name and address
cleansing. It’s about the consistency and representation of all enterprise information.

If the technologies used for DQ are to be part of the processing pipeline, they have to be
production-level robust. They have to deal with complex legacy data, real-time transactions, and
high sustained processing volumes. Approaches that do not meet all these requirements end up
being relegated to offline deployments and rarely meet expectations. This is what typically
happens with special-purpose niche DQ tools that specialize in certain types of data and that can
be used only in limited circumstances.

Ab Initio’s approach to data quality is different – it is end-to-end. Because the Ab Initio

Co>Operating System is a complete application development and execution environment, Ab
Initio’s approach to data quality works anywhere the Co>Operating System can be deployed,
which is in practically any operational or analytics environment. The Co>Operating System
natively processes complex legacy data, runs distributed across heterogeneous sets of servers, is
very high performance and completely scalable, and can implement highly complex logic. (Learn
more about the Co>Operating System.)

Ab Initio’s end-to-end approach to data quality is based on design patterns using Ab Initio’s
seamlessly coupled technologies – they are all architected together – including the Co>Operating
System, the Enterprise Meta>Environment (EME), the Business Rules Environment (BRE), and
the Data Profiler. Using Ab Initio, a company can implement a complete data quality program
including detection, remediation, reporting, and alerting.

Architectural overview

When it comes to DQ, one size does not fit all, especially for large organizations with many
legacy systems. Ab Initio, therefore, provides a series of powerful building blocks that allow
users to put together custom data quality solutions that meets their specific needs, whatever those
needs might be. For users who are just starting to put a data quality program in place, Ab Initio
supplies a reference implementation that can serve as the foundation of a complete program. For
users who have different needs, or who already have pieces of a data quality program in place,
Ab Initio’s DQ building blocks may be plugged together with existing infrastructure as desired.

A typical data quality implementation starts with constructing a powerful, reusable DQ

processing component with the Co>Operating System, as shown below:

The Co>Operating System enables components to contain whole applications. This particular
reusable DQ process component is an application in its own right, and includes the following:

 A subsystem that detects and possibly corrects data quality problems. The Co>Operating System
serves as the foundation for implementing defect detection. The BRE can be used to specify
 validation rules in an analyst-friendly interface, and the Data Profiler can be integrated into the
process for trend analysis and detailed problem detection.
 A data quality reporting system. The EME includes built-in data quality reporting that integrates
with the rest of an enterprise’s metadata, data quality metrics and error counts, and data profile
results. Users can extend the EME schema to store additional data quality information and to
augment the base EME capabilities with their own reporting infrastructure.
 An issue reporting database. Records that have data quality issues are logged in a database or
file so they can be examined as part of a complete data quality workflow. Ab Initio provides the
technology to store, retrieve, and view those records, although users are free to select any data
storage technology that meets their needs.

This DQ processing component is typically run as part of existing applications. If an application

has been built with Ab Initio, the DQ component can easily be plugged into it. For applications
not built with Ab Initio, the DQ processing component has to be explicitly invoked. The DQ
component can also be implemented as an independent job that sources data directly. Below are
examples of both deployment cases, standalone and integrated into an existing application:

Data quality processing workflow

The diagram below illustrates a sample complete data quality detection workflow. It is important
to remember that each DQ deployment is tailored to the user’s specific needs.
As indicated earlier, the input to this DQ Process A can be any type of data from any source. It
can be a flat file, a database table, a message queue, or a transaction in a web service. It can also
be the output of some other process implemented with Ab Initio or another technology. Because
the DQ Process runs on top of the Co>Operating System, the data can be anything the
Co>Operating System can handle: complex legacy data, hierarchical transactions, international
data, and so on.

The output of the DQ Process B can also be any type of data going to any target.

The first step is to apply Validation Rules 1 to the data. Validation rules can be run against
individual fields, whole records, or whole datasets. Since each record may have one or more
issues, the validation rules may produce a set of DQ issues on a per-record basis E . The severity
of these issues and what to do about them is decided further downstream.

Next, cleanup rules are applied to the data 2 , and the output is the result of the DQ Process B .
Users may use built-in Ab Initio cleansing rules or build their own with the Co>Operating
System. While validation and cleansing rules are easily entered with the BRE, there is no limit to
the sophistication of these rules since they can use the full power of the Co>Operating System’s
data processing.

Records that cannot be cleansed are output to a Problems Archive 4 . These problem records then
typically go through a human workflow to resolve their issues.

The list of issues for each record E may also be analyzed 3 to generate reports and alerts 5 .
Because this process is built using standard Ab Initio “graphs” with the Co>Operating System,
practically any type of reporting and processing can be done. Ab Initio’s standard DQ approach
includes:
  Calculating data quality metrics, such as completeness, accuracy, consistency, and stability
 Determining frequency distributions for individual fields
 Generating aggregate counts of error codes and values
 Comparing current values for all the above with historical values
 Signaling significant deviations in any of the current measurements from the past

All the information generated above is stored in the Ab Initio EME for monitoring and future
reference. All DQ information can be integrated with all other metadata, including reference data
that is also stored in the EME.

While all the computation associated with these steps may consume significant CPU resources,
the Co>Operating System’s ability to distribute workload across multiple CPUs, potentially on
multiple servers, allows full data quality processing to always be part of the processing pipeline.

As demonstrated above, Ab Initio’s approach to data quality measurement includes a rich set of
options that can be customized and configured to meet a user’s needs. The processing of the data,
calculation of results, and all the steps in between are implemented using the Ab Initio
Co>Operating System. This means that data quality detection can be run on almost any platform
(Unix, Windows, Linux, mainframe z/OS), and on any type of data, with very high performance.
In situations where large volumes of data are being processed, the entire data quality detection
process can be run in parallel to minimize latency.

The next several sections present examples of the analyst-friendly user interfaces for creating
validation rules and reporting on data quality results.

Validation rules

Most data quality issues are detected by applying validation rules to the source dataset. With the
Ab Initio data quality design pattern, record-at-a-time validation rules can be defined using the
Ab Initio Business Rules Environment (BRE). The BRE is designed to allow less technical users,
subject matter experts, and business analysts to create and test validation rules using a
spreadsheet-like interface.

Using the BRE, there are two ways to define validation rules. In most cases, users define rules by
filling out a simple spreadsheet (validation grid) with field names down the left side and
validation tests across the top:
This interface makes it very easy to specify which validation tests should be applied to each field
or column in a dataset. The BRE includes a number of built-in validation tests (nulls, blanks,
value ranges, data formats, domain membership, etc.). But it is also possible for the development
staff to define custom validation tests that can be applied to individual fields. Custom validation
tests are written by developers using the Ab Initio Data Manipulation Language, and then made
available in the BRE.

For more complex validation rules, the BRE allows for the definition of “tabular rules.” These
complex validation rules may process multiple input fields within a record to determine whether
there are data quality issues. Each rule can produce an error and disposition code, which together
drive the amelioration process.

The BRE enables subject matter experts to design, enter, and test validation rules all from the
same user interface. The BRE’s testing capability allows users to interactively see which rules
trigger for various inputs. This makes it easy to ensure that the rules are behaving as expected.

The screen shot below shows validation rules during testing. The BRE displays trigger counts for
every validation test, as well as the details for each test record.
Validation rules are saved in the EME, which provides for version control, access control, and
configuration management. For applications that are built entirely with Ab Initio, including the
DQ process, the application and the DQ rules are versioned, tagged, and promoted into
production together. This ensures a robust DQ process.

While the BRE makes it easy for less technical users to define validation rules, it is not the only
way to define such rules. The full power of the Co>Operating System’s transformation
technology is available for implementing the most complex rules. Because the BRE and
transformation rules both run on top of the Co>Operating System, it’s possible to create a very
comprehensive data quality measurement strategy.

Reporting

Detection is the first part of a complete data quality implementation. The second major
component of a data quality program is reporting.

Data quality reporting is driven by the Enterprise Meta>Environment (EME). Ab Initio’s EME is
an enterprise-class and enterprise-scale metadata system architected to manage the metadata
needs of business analysts, developers, operations staff, and others. It handles many types of
metadata from different technologies in three categories – business, technical, and operational –
and this metadata includes data quality statistics.

Ab Initio stores data quality statistics in the EME for reporting purposes. One type of DQ
information stored in the EME is the aggregated counts of error codes (issues) of individual
fields and datasets. The counts are linked to the dataset being measured and to the fields with
issues. Issues are aggregated and reported by error code, which is in a global set of reference
codes, stored in the EME (the EME supports reference code management).

The screen shot below shows the EME’s ability to display field-level issues along with historical
trending graphs. Counts that exceed configurable thresholds are highlighted in yellow or red.
As shown below, Ab Initio is able to calculate data quality metrics for datasets and fields
(columns), and these too are also stored in the EME. There is a corresponding tabular report of
these metrics, which includes trending graphs and yellow/red thresholds.
When data quality measurements are captured throughout a large environment, it is possible to
aggregate the information according to the user’s organizational structure. This makes it possible
for managers to view data quality metrics for entire systems, applications, and/or subject areas in
one report. From this report, problem areas can then be investigated by drilling down into the
details.

The screen shot below shows a number of higher-level subject areas and their aggregated data
quality metrics:

Reporting: Lineage

Many users roll out a data quality program by implementing data quality detection across a
number of datasets in a single system. For example, it is not unusual to see data quality measured
for all the tables in an enterprise data warehouse, but nowhere else. Although measuring data
quality in one system is better than not measuring data quality at all, a more useful data quality
program includes data quality checks at multiple stages across the entire enterprise processing
pipeline. For example, data quality might be measured at the enterprise data warehouse, but also
at the system of record, at intermediate processing points, and downstream in the various data
marts or extract systems. Each of these systems can capture quality metrics whether or not they
were built with Ab Initio.

The EME multiplies the value of a data quality program when data quality measurements are
made at multiple points in an enterprise. This is because the EME can combine data lineage with
data quality metrics to help pinpoint the systems in which and precisely where data quality
problems are being introduced.

Consider the following screen shot:

This screen shot shows an expanded lineage diagram in the EME. Each large gray box represents
a different system. The smaller green, red, and gray boxes represent datasets and applications.

Data quality metrics may flag individual elements. Green is good. Red indicates a data quality
problem. With these diagrams, it is easy to follow the path of data quality problems, from where
they start to where they go. For the first time, management can actually see how data and
problems are flowing through their environment.

Finally, DQ reporting is not limited to the built-in EME screens. The EME’s information is
stored in a commercial relational database, and Ab Initio provides documentation on the schema.
Users are free to use business intelligence reporting tools of their choice to develop custom
views of their enterprise data quality.

Reporting: Data Profiler

The Ab Initio Data Profiler results can also be used as part of a DQ workflow. As with all other
DQ measurements, these results are stored in the EME and can be viewed through the EME web
portal.
Many organizations consider data profiling to be an activity reserved for data discovery at the
beginning of a project. But periodic automated data profiling can add significant value to a
complete data quality program. While data quality metrics can capture the overall health and
characteristics of the data, data profiler statistics allow for drilling down into a more detailed
analysis of the contents of various datasets.

Below is a screen shot of the top-level report of a Data Profiler run on a particular dataset.
Diversity (distinct values), validity, and completeness are just some of the information
discovered by the Data Profiler. This information can be used to select which fields require
further inspection.

Below is a screen shot of a particular field chosen by the user for additional analysis.
From this screen, it is possible to drill down to a display of the actual records that contain
specific values in the selected field.

Conclusion

While data quality is a problem that every company faces, there is no single approach to
detecting, reporting, and studying data quality problems that fits every organization’s need.

Ab Initio’s end-to-end data quality design patterns can be used with little or no customization.
For users with specific data quality needs, such as additional types of detection, reporting, or
issue management, Ab Initio provides a general-purpose, flexible approach based on powerful
pre-existing building blocks.

Ab Initio’s approach to data quality is based on the Co>Operating System. The Co>Operating
System provides a high-performance multi-platform computing environment that performs data
quality detection, amelioration, data profiling, and statistics aggregation for any type of data. The
Co>Operating System provides unlimited scalability, and so can perform all of these tasks on
very large data volumes.

Ab Initio’s Business Rules Environment allows validation rules to be developed and tested by
analysts and/or subject matter experts using an easy-to-use graphical interface. The result is
significantly improved productivity and agility around creating and maintaining data quality
rules.

And, Ab Initio’s Enterprise Meta>Environment provides an unprecedented level of integration of

data quality statistics with other metadata, including data lineage, data dictionaries, domain code
sets, operational statistics, data stewardship, and other technical, operational, and business
metadata.

The unmatched combination of these capabilities within a single integrated technology puts Ab
Initio’s data quality capabilities in a class of its own.

Conduct>It
As the number and complexity of IT applications within a business grows, the importance of
operational management grows as well. And the expectations of the business for timely and
reliable results grow even more. But, as any operations manager will tell you, getting those
timely and reliable results is easier said than done when there are thousands and thousands of
moving parts across multiple inter-dependent applications that may span several servers and
geographic locations.

To be successful, the operational team needs to:

 Understand, articulate, and enforce all the key dependencies within an application and across
applications. For example, the team needs to be able to say that B can only run when A has
completed, and that C should run if A fails.
 Manage all the actions that can trigger a part of the process. A trigger could be a specific time on
a particular day, the arrival of one or more files, the availability of one or more resources – or,
perhaps, a combination of all of these.
 Proactively monitor all the dependencies so that alerts can be automatically raised and sent to
the appropriate people. Alerts should be triggered if a dependency or event has not been
satisfied within stated times, allowing business service level agreements (SLAs) to be tracked
and reported against.
 Monitor the low-level processing characteristics of key parts of an application, such as the
number of records being rejected, the latency of messages being processed, or the amount of
 CPU time being consumed by the processing logic. Again, alerts should be raised when
thresholds are exceeded.
 Develop and test the end-to-end operational process in a dedicated test environment before
formally promoting the process to the production environment.
 Record and analyze detailed operational statistics, such as actual start/end times for each part
of an application over time, so that processing trends can be identified to support capacity-
planning activities.

Ab Initio’s Conduct>It provides all these capabilities, and more.

Conduct>It is a process automation facility that provides the monitoring and execution
environment for deploying complex applications in complex environments. It facilitates the
definition of arbitrary, hierarchical job steps for large, multistage applications, as well as the
dependencies, sequencing, and scheduling of these job steps. These applications can be
composed of Ab Initio graphs and job definitions, as well as custom executables and third-party
products, all of which are managed by Conduct>It.

Conduct>It has two main elements. The first is a process automation server, called the
Operational Console, that provides monitoring and job control in complex processing
environments. Second, where sophisticated process management logic is required, Conduct>It
offers the ability to graphically develop and execute complex control flow logic.

Let’s look at the Operational Console first.

Operational Console

The Operational Console provides a wide range of capabilities that are essential to daily
operations. These include job scheduling, monitoring, alerting – and performing job-level actions
such as starting, stopping, and rerunning jobs. Across all applications, the Operational Console
collects, integrates, and manages the associated operational metadata, helping the operational
team and business analysts in planning and maintaining efficient operations.

It all starts with the Home page on the Operational Console’s browser-based interface, as shown
below. The Home page provides a summary of all of today’s jobs by application, system, or host
server, showing whether they are running (green), completed (blue), failed (red), or waiting
(yellow). It also lists all the issues or warnings that have been raised and are still outstanding.
From the Home page you may drill down to see different types of information for any job in the
environment – the reason for the failure, what a job is waiting on, when a job completed, or
when it is expected to complete etc. For example, you may wish to see all the jobs related to a
specific application to understand how it is progressing:

This monitoring screen shot shows the dependencies between the different tasks within the
selected application and the progress of each task. At any stage you can drill down further to see
the tracking details of one of the tasks:
As shown above, low-level tracking information on CPU seconds consumed, as well as record
and data volumes processed, are available for every component within a specific run of an Ab
Initio job. Alternatively, you may wish to understand how one of your jobs has performed over
time, together with a trend line for planning purposes:

The Operational Console collects a wide range of statistics for each task, from the ability to meet
the stated SLAs through to the amount of user and system CPU time being consumed.
However, it doesn’t stop there. Using the full power of the Ab Initio Data Manipulation
Language (DML), the operations team can also define their own operational probes – called
“custom metrics” – for alerting and tracking purposes. You can add probes without changing or
disturbing an application, and they have no impact on the application’s execution. These metrics
can be computed using any combination of tracking information for any flow or component
within a graph. Hence, it is easy to add a custom metric that reports and alerts on the number of
records processed by a specific component, or the amount of CPU time it is consuming, or the
latency of the real-time messages being processed.

All of the Operational Console’s monitoring capabilities are available for Ab Initio jobs, whether
they have been initiated by the Operational Console or a by a 3rd party scheduler.

For customers who don’t have access to a corporate scheduler, the Operational Console also
provides full day/time, event, and file-based scheduling capabilities, allowing sophisticated
applications to be fully scheduled without the need to write and maintain traditional scripts. The
following screen shot shows the same application shown earlier, but with all the time- and event-
based dependencies shown against the expanded tasks:
Because dependencies between tasks can become extremely complex in large applications,
Conduct>It also provides a fully graphical environment to help developers define advanced job
control flow.

A control flow is a way of expressing detailed logic about the sequence of execution. It uses a
collection of connected tasks, called a plan, to describe what should be run – the connection
between these tasks specifies an execution dependency (run this before that, for example):

The above plan shows that Task 2 can execute only after Task 1 has completed. It also shows
that a condition is subsequently evaluated (“Should the intra day process run?”), and if found to
be “No”, then the end-of-day position is calculated for each office by iterating over the
highlighted “subplan”. A subplan, as the name suggests, is itself a collection of tasks and
dependencies.

Custom tasks can also be triggered on the failure of other tasks – this is illustrated in the above
plan by the “Error Actions” task, which is run if Task 2 fails for any reason. In a similar manner,
each task can have “methods” associated with it that are executed when certain events occur,
such as “At Start”, “At Success”, “At Shutdown”, “At Failure”, or “At Trigger”, allowing
reporting and logging capabilities to be easily added to the end-to-end process.

With plans, Conduct>It provides a development-time framework for deconstructing a complex

application into manageable units of work that constitute a single, recoverable system. These
plans are then available to be scheduled, monitored, and managed using the Operational Console.
The result is a sophisticated end-to-end operational environment.