IBM InfoSphere Optim Test Data Management (TDM) Room for Improvement

SD
Delivery manager at OSI Digital

TDM's efficiency in terms of generating reports needs improvement. It could work faster.

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it_user642165 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Leader in Global Technology, Corporate Systems at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

IBM treats non-production deploys with a lower priority to resolve problems. When we archive, we select a similar-sized non-production environment first, before we archive production. We need the volume to determine how big to make the archive files and how long the archive jobs will run.

For more detail:

As the project manager for an archive solution, we first test our solution before we deploy it to production. This involves the IT-AD folks that maintain the application and business folks that own the data. Like any project plan it has a start date and an end date. Fudge is integrated into the project plan for accommodate on foreseen delays.

We build the archive solution in a non-production environment with production like volume of data. Let’s call this our test environment. When we encounter an problem that we can't resolve, we reach out to IBM. They build an environment to simulate the conditions that are causing our outage. Because this is not a production environment. IBM assigns a lower priority for a resolution. In the past it has taken weeks up to 2 months for a fix. Delaying the completion of the project plan, beyond the fudge added to the plan.


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OM
Data Modeler Manager / Application Development Manager at CIGNA Corporation

Areas of improvement: 

  • Installation is too cumbersome.
  • GUI
  • Very clunky Windows 3.1 look and feel.

Additional features: Unless I missed something, the direct connectivity to DB2i rather than going through a federated server.

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Buyer's Guide
Test Data Management
March 2024
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it_user651513 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director-Projects at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Scripting complex data masking requirement in Lua can be converted into a simpler, user-friendly interface.

Instead of a free text editor, which is used to code the functions (mostly "if-else" conditions), a drop-down like interface can be created to join various conditions and generate a policy for masking.

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SD
Test Engineer at cigniti

I think it could be more secure. I don't have experience with the security aspects concerning PII data, but I think it can still be streamlined a little more. It could also have some more features, and the initial setup could be more straightforward. 

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AS
Technology Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The tool needs to have more test data management features like synthetic data generation and data reservation.

Optim is capable of extracting/masking production data and move it to the test region, for test data provisioning. However, there are various scenarios when the production data, cannot fully meet the testing requirements. In such cases, the testers have to manually set up the data, as Optim does not provide any functionality, to generate data from scratch. Hence, synthetic data generation is a very important feature, that must be present in a TDM tool. Other tools such as CA TDM have this feature.

There are other important TDM features, that are missing from IBM Optim such as:

  • Data reservation that provides ability to the data user, in order to reserve certain data, so that no one else uses the same data for testing.

  • Data mining that provides a capability to search for data, that matches the test requirements.
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it_user628044 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Project Manager /Senior Solution Architect at Cognizant

In the IBM Optim tool, the Synthetic Test Data Generation feature is lagging behind.

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it_user653673 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The tool does not support new test data generation.

Optim tool is helpful to extract (subset and mask) the data from a production-like environment. The test data generation is not part of IBM Optim.

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SK
Technical Lead at Wipro Technologies

Improvisation in the area of the self-service user interface for test data management is required to cater to test data needs.

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SK
Technical Lead at Wipro Technologies

The Core Optim was much better than the newer front-end release Designer & Manager, which added more complexity. However, the newer release has more elaborate reports.

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EE
Database Security Consultant at a tech services company

I would like to be able to combine different masking functions on the same column map, making more complex masking without the need to write a Lua procedure.

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it_user599013 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Test Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Data masking with InfoSphere Optim products creates intermediary extract files and writing the data to persistent storage, which means that extraction, masking, and insertion happen being separate processes, taking more for the process to run.

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it_user660612 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Analyst at a consultancy with 201-500 employees

Licensing could be improved. The PVU licensing mechanism is a limiting factor to expanding the use of the tool.

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Buyer's Guide
Test Data Management
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Broadcom, Informatica and others in Test Data Management. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.