In today’s data-driven world, organizations face increasing data governance challenges in managing and utilizing their data assets effectively. With the sheer volume of data being generated, it is essential to maintain data health by ensuring that data is accurate, accessible, and secure – but it isn’t always easy.
Reltio Master Data Management Match Rules
As a Solutions Architect at Reltio, I get asked a lot of the same questions over and over. In the two Reltio blogs below I cover some of the best practices of Match Rule design and answer some frequently asked questions
Continue reading on the Reltio Community Blog at the links below
Easily Create Reltio Test Users with Gmail Aliases
Setting up multiple email addresses in order to create user accounts for testing is a pain. You have to manage not only the username and password for each account but also for the relevant email. Fortunately Gmail has a handy trick that allows you to append a plus (“+”) and a string to your current email to create an on the fly alias. For example:
jsnipes+testuser@reltio.com will send an email to the same address as jsnipes@reltio.com
Considerations
- Choose a username without a “+” if possible. If you need to use this account with postman it will make it so that you do not have to replace the “+” with the encoding “%2B”
- For security, be sure to give all your test users unique and secure passwords. I recommend a password manager like Bitwarden for generating passwords and keeping them organized
- The plus trick works for Outlook users with some tinkering in powershell. If that isn’t an option aliases can be created ahead of time
- Be sure to clean up your test users after you are done just in case!
Reltio Hackathon 2021
I just wrapped up competing in Reltio’s 2021 Hackathon. This was only the second hackathon I’ve competed in, but it won’t be my last. 22 teams competed across 3 continents to build creative solutions around the Reltio product.
The Ideas
One of the cool things about an internal hackathon is ideas are easy to come by. While working at Reltio I’ve kept a backlog in Trello of ideas I would like to build. Some of which I already had started designing or prototyping. The 3 big ideas I considered were…
- Continuous integration and documentation for Reltio configurations. Currently we manually update a git repo and excel doc for each update. The plan was to build a process that listens for configuration updates and keeps git and the excel docs up to date.
- Migration Manager. Migrations between environments are manual, complicated, and error prone. The idea was to build a tool to automate and track the various pieces.
- Reltio Developer Tools. Reltio troubleshooting requires lots of REST API calls that forces you to leave your browser for postman. A chrome extension to quickly execute common tasks would speed things up significantly.
After gathering my crack team, we landed on the Developer Tools chrome extension. We chose this idea because it had the largest potential customer base and would make an impact for my team (Professional Services) regardless of the outcome.
The Execution
Unlike traditional hackathons, where you have a day or two in the same room with your team, we built our prototype between meetings and on evenings over zoom. We settled on 6 features and a design that was easily extensible for the future.
- Get URI – Grabs the unique ID of your current record
- Get JSON – Grabs the json version of your current record
- Recleanse – Triggers every cleanser relevant to your record. Super useful when troubleshooting cleanser configs
- Reindex – Recreates the elastic search version of the record from the system of record. This is a swiss army knife in Reltio, but particularly useful for triggering an SQS message on demand.
- Clone – Copies the current record
- Clone To – Copies the current record to another tenant/environment
Outcome
22 teams presented over zoom to a panel of judges, who narrowed the field to 6 finalists.
We were lucky enough to make it to the final round. We were provided with a coach from the product team to help us hone our pitch and given some more time to make some finishing touches. The final pitch happened in person in Atlanta.
We completed all 6 of our use cases and by our estimates Reltio Developer Tools would save around 41 hours and $5000 per project implementation between development time and customer enablement. Some tasks, like cloning an entity were 25 times faster than before.
Cloning an entity before Reltio DevTools
Cloning an entity with Reltio DevTools
On the day of the final presentation we pitched 5th out of the 6 teams. It was humbling to see the hard work and other incredible projects we were in consideration with. While proud of what we had accomplished, we by no means expected to win. But after the judges traded notes, we were chosen as the winner!
What I Learned
I believe we were chosen as a finalist because we had a true working prototype when other teams were showing mostly wireframes. By the time of the final presentation, we no longer had the most developed tool or shipped code, which I expected to hurt us. As the judges explained their decision, I learned there was much more to consider. Here are a few things that differentiated us.
- Our problem to be solved was clear
- We knew who our customer was
- We field tested our tool with our customer and solicited feedback
- We made firm measurables tied to money and time
- We were aligned with company goals and values. Namely, breakthrough simplicity
None of these differentiators were in our source code. The who and why turned out to be more important than what we built. This isn’t to say we didn’t build a great product, we did, but if I were to compete again I would focus even more energy into our idea choice and pitch rather than the build.
One of the prizes for winning is getting to be a coach for the next hackathon. I’m looking forward to helping another team apply these learnings next year.
Introduction to Profiles in Reltio
Data managers fill a critical role between end users and database administrators. They understand both business uses for data and have the technical knowledge to form the raw data into something useful. This is done by matching data from different sources and forming relationships to model how different obejcts interact. Reltio assists data managers in matching entities, modeling relationships, and tracking interactions.
It is important to understand the differences between crosswalks, entities, and profiles in Reltio. These terms are often used interchangeably when describing data but have discrete definitions. Below we will explore each in turn….