I've just been asked whether our company should consider Data Virtualisation for our test environments. The benefits are given as:
- Screening of sensitive data
- Fast data refreshes in our test environments
- Potential benefits for DR and BI scenarios
However I've only found marketing info; nothing technical. From what I can figure out there are 2 approaches:
- A service layer over a production database which abstracts you from the data model (presumably resulting in a different data model presented by that new layer).
- A tool to automate the restore and subsequent manipulation of data which can be used by non-technical users and is faster than using database backups and SQL scripts.
Without seeing any technical information this smells of snake oil to me; but I want to understand it rather than dismissing out of hand.
Keywords: [data-as-a-service] [data-virtualisation] [data-virtualization] [delphix] [denodo]