89: Kyle Hailey & Brett Stevens: Test Data Virtualization • Test Guild

Test Data Virtualization

I feel that test data management is one of the biggest challenges to creating reliable test automation across multiple environments. One solution I’ve been hearing more and more about is virtual data. So this episode is all about test data management using data virtualization.

Discover how virtualization can revolutionize the way you approach all your DevOps and test management efforts with Kyle and Brett from Delphix.

About Kyle and Brett

Kyle is a technical evangelist working at Delphix, the industry leading data virtualizationcompany, along with well known software, kernel and filesystem designers to take corporate data management to a new level of agility. He also manages the free developer edition of Delphix called Delphix Express.

Brett Stevens is a Product Marketing Manager at Delphix.
Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

Data virtualization is an integrated data masking and delivery solution. It virtualizes data across the application life cycle. So today you might have multiple copies of production data sets for development testing, training, reporting back up, disaster recovery, and the issue is that making all those copies consumes both storage and also time and people. There’s a lot of inefficient processes that go into provisioning a database. Data virtualization is basically a way to reduce the consumption of those infrastructure resources and then also stream line the delivery of that data to the application teams.
One of the reasons why enterprises are looking towards test data management strategies, you might be testing, using stale data, or even maybe corrupted data that’s been modified by testing, so you’d be able to refresh in a matter of minutes from the latest source. The other innovative feature to data virtualization is the power of a reset, reset going back to a previous baseline that you can bookmarks as of any point in time, so that way you could create a bunch of bookmarks following a test and just quickly revert to that period of time.
In addition to creating this bookmarks, creating a copy of a data set we call it branching off of the main copy, it occupies basically no space, so you could run a unit test in parallel without interfering with the work another team might be doing.
If I’m a QA person and I find a bug, I log the bug and the developer can’t reproduce it because they’re on a different data set, what I’d like is a technology that has branching so that the QA person can basically bookmark their data and continue working on it. They bookmark the data where that bug can be reproduced. Then the developer can spin up a copy in a couple of minutes of that exact same data. That would be branching of data.
One of our biggest healthcare companies is actually using data virtualization for HIPAA compliance. Something on the order of 5,000-6,000 virtual databases that are … Many of which are masked.
I would also stress having build in data masking capabilities, because if you look at the year 2015 there was something like a hundred seventy million records stolen, I think there’s around seven hundred plus data breaches. The average cost of data breaches isn’t cheap. It’s something around the order of 3.5 million. I think the need for data masking in that market is growing. Part of that need, data virtualization technology, should have built in masking.

Resources

Connect with Kyle & Brett

Twitter:@virtdata
Blog:http://datavirtualizer.com/delphix/
Company: Delphix

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