How Safyr is Used

Safyr’s unique capabilities are employed in a variety of projects

Data Governance/Data Catalog

Helping data engineers to provision data catalog, data governance or data lineage products with accurate, relevant metadata, quickly and easily.

Data Warehouse and Analytics

Supporting data analysts who need to discover source application tables needed for the design of the data warehouse schemas for analytics projects.

Data Migration and Integration

Helping data architects uncover detailed information about their application data model during data migration and integration projects.

Data Compliance

Giving the data privacy specialists a tool to help them locate metadata relating to personal data for GDPR, CCPA and other regulatory standards.

Application Rationalisation

Supporting data and application specialists who need to compare metadata between two instances of the same application.

Data Architecture

Enabling data modelers to build metadata schemas which provide the information to create fully populated data models for without needing to manually rekey or copy information.

Who are the typical Safyr users?

In order to meet the growing demands of the business for enterprise data governance, improved confidence in data, and greater agility etc., it is imperative that those who are working at the coalface of data discovery have the tools necessary to exploit their application metadata.

Safyr gives data analysts, data engineers, data architects and data modelers the ability to access, analyse and make use of ERP metadata in a number of other data managements products and platforms.

A typical process

Connection

The first step is to connect and harvest the metadata from your source applications once you have implemented Safyr. The method of connectivity will depend on the application.
For example, if you are working are working with SAP, you will need to have Silwood’s SAP Transport installed on the system. (These are certified by SAP).
If you are working with Force based applications then Safyr uses the Salesforce metadata API to retrieve the metadata.
Once that is done the connection is terminated because it is not needed until you want to repeat the exercise.

Define use case

Now that Safyr has completed harvesting all the metadata from your source application, you will have a complete and accurate glossary containing business and technical names for all the source application tables and attributes, as well as the relationships between them. In addition, where available Safyr will capture information about other objects such as programs, application components, etc.
Before you embark on using Safyr’s search and analysis capabilities, it is important to define what initial use cases you need the metadata to reflect.
These could include concepts such as Customer Master, Materials Master Data, Bill of Materials, Order to Cash, etc. Or, it may be related to locating and identifying Personal Data items as part of a program to meet the requirements for GDPR, CCPA and other data privacy regulatory schemes.

Discovery and curation

You can then use Safyr to locate the tables and related tables which represent the use cases you have identified as being important.
This is typically a rapid process which does not require you to have in depth knowledge of the application you are exploring. Safyr gives you a range of tools for basic and advanced search and filtering which means you can quickly find what you need.
Importantly, if you make a mistake, do not meet the requirements of the business, it is simple to rework the process.
Once you have found the groups of tables and related tables you can save them as Safyr Subject Areas ready for sharing with other products.

Sharing metadata

Once you have found the tables and created the Safyr Subject Areas you need, it is a very simple process to share that metadata with many different tools and data platforms. There are different mechanisms and methods for this.
For example most of the Data Catalog vendors who partner with Silwood ingest the Safyr Data Catalog JSON output format.
For some partners, we have developed tighter integration processes. Silwood also provide export to enable you to compare data models from different instances of the same application, to view Subject Areas as an Entity Relationship Diagram, and to export metadata to an Excel spreadsheet.

Using Safyr with other tools

Metadata from Safyr can be used with
  • Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud (ERP/CRM Integrator)
  • Alation Data Catalog (RALA)
  • Precisely Data360 Govern
  • Zeenea data catalog
  • Solidatus data catalog
  • Microsoft Purview
  • Quest Erwin Data Intelligence
  • Alex Solutions
  • Rocket Software Data Intelligence
  • Informatica EDC
  • Adaptive Metadata Manager
  • Data Advantage Group Metacenter
  • Quest Erwin Data Modeler
  • Idera ER/Studio
  • SAP PowerDesigner
  • Unicom System Architect
Safyr can also export metadata in industry standard formats including
  • JSON (Safyr Data Catalog Export)
  • XML
  • CSV
Silwood have developed other export formats
  • Safyr ER Diagrammer (Entity Relationship diagrams)
  • Safyr Compare (Locate metadata differences in different instances of the same application)
  • Safyr Reporting (configurable export delivering metadata in Excel spreadsheet format)