Date: March 29, 2018

We are excited to announce the General Availability of CA Test Data Manager 4.5

Release 4.5 delivers a number of powerful new features, including Automated Data Model discovery, which helps users to understand and visualize the relationships between various tables that their applications run on. This new version can be downloaded directly from the CA Support Site. Once logged in you will be able to select the latest version from Download Management. Look for CA Test Data Manager in the search box to speed up your discovery.

So What's New in TDM 4.5? - In Summary:

Automated Data Model Discovery
Allows relationships between tables to be discovered within and between data sources

• Relationship Discovery
• Relationship Editing
• Relationship Visualization & Analysis

PII Data Discovery Enhancements
Usability enhancements to PII data discovery

• Ability to specify scan depth
• Scan filtering
• Heatmap interaction improvements
• and more ..

Enhanced Find and Reserve
Productivity enhancements

• Pre-fetch data from various sources for improved scalability and response time
• Auto-suggest drop downs for search criteria
• Include already reserved data in search results

What is automated Data Model Discovery?

The application data model is the foundation to all the Test Data Management operations. However, discovering the relationships between the different tables in a complex, multiple database application often provides the biggest hurdle to get started with test data management.

TDM Release 4.5 addresses this problem. We have introduced automated data model discovery that will not only automatically discover relationships between tables across disparate but connected data sources, but also provides the ability to add or edit relationships that are not captured in the database metadata. We have also added a rich visualization of these relationships, accompanied by Entity Relationship diagrams that allow both a high level view of the data model, and a drill-down into a specific table. The diagrams provides a zoom capability for easy exploration of specific areas of the model.

This capability allows a Test Data Engineer (TDE) who may only have a limited understanding of their application data model to perform a scan of their application data sources and quickly build a data model which they can use to further understand and analyze the relationships within the model.

Want to learn more?  You can watch the video - or even test drive TDM version 4.5 yourself!

PII Data Discovery Improvements

PII data discovery, a very popular feature among our customer base, has been enhanced to provide greater control over the scan. Users can now specify the depth level of a scan and also provide filters that can either include or exclude tables from the scan list. We have also introduced several enhancements to the heat map to improve ease of use. These include the ability to zoom to a particular table, to filter based on various attributes, to download scan results in CSV format and improved tag management.

Enhanced Find and Reserve

We have enhanced Find and Reserve to add the ability to pre-fetch data referenced by test data models from multiple sources.
Pre-fetching data dramatically improves search performance for the test engineer and leads to a better user experience and improved productivity. Find and Reserve also includes auto suggest drop-downs to help testers quickly complete their search criteria and to view the status of data which matches their search criteria but that has already been reserved.  Information is provided on who reserved the data and when.

For further information, you can find the release notes here.

Best Regards,

Your Test Data Management team