Our Director of Engineering explains one of the possible use cases of Manta Tools – super-fast onboarding of fresh additions to your team.
Imagine that you have a new analyst in your BI department, and she is just about to study the whole architecture. To help her better understand your environment, you assign her a simple change request to analyze. It is necessary to add a new column to one of the core tables, so new data marts can use its values. You need to know just two (supposedly simple) things:
- What data marts currently use the values in this table?
- Are they going to be affected by this change?
She gets a document describing every table in the core – its business purpose, a list of columns, and also information on which tables it is filled from and which tables or views use its data. She easily finds the information about the requested table. Since she is new to your team, she wants to double check the results, so she looks at the scripts that are, according to the documentation, responsible for transforming the data from this table for the other ones.
Surprisingly, she finds that one of the data marts is no longer filled from this table, but two others that are not mentioned in the documentation are using values from several of its columns.
Nobody keeps documentation up-to-date
How could this have happened? Did somebody forget to update the documentation? Maybe there was not enough time during the last project to properly document all the changes. It’s so time consuming and also boring for developers to keep the documentation up-to-date, but it is crucial for analyzing the impacts of further changes!
Manta Flow can save you a lot of time and effort when you want to have your documentation ready for new developers or for change request analyses. The up-to-date documentation is accessible instantly and is always accurate.
Interested? Ask for a technical demo and we will show you how! You can also have some fun with our online demos. And do not forget to follow us on Twitter.