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The Meta Integration® Model Bridge (MIMB) product provides MITI's metadata movement solution. MIMB users are typically database and software developers who want to move their metadata (models) between various tools from different vendors, across methodologies.
Large corporation usually use many databases and data management tools and it is mission critical for them to properly document and manage the flow of data between all the tools and systems.
The same applies to metadata. Metadata can be located underneath all these design tools, databases, ETL tools and OLAP/BI tools from many different vendors, and it is critical to understand and manage the flow of metadata between all of them.
The tools vendors themselves can provide some of these metadata movements,
for example database modeling tools can provide bi-directional integration between
UML object modeling and physical data modeling.
Similarly, BI vendors provide the forward engineering from their dimensional
modeling tool to their report authoring tool.
However, large corporations use best-of-breed tools from many vendors and using the right tool at the right time requires seemless metadata flows between them. In such case, Meta Integration® Model Bridge (MIMB) can play a key role implementing all the metadata movement required for the integration of the various development tools.
The enterprise metadata flow scenarios can be summarized in a generic way in the following diagram.
MIMB offers a hub (repository) and spokes (bridges) architecture, where transient metadata (from tool A to tool B) is temporarily stored within the non persistent Meta Integration Repository (MIR). In other words, the MIMB architecture does not use the persistent MIR repository on a relational databases, therefore offers very fast metadata movement solutions.
The MIMB bridges are called "import" and "export" bridges from the MIMB perspective, which is different than the source and destination tool perspective, as shown on the diagram below. Refer to the Supported Tools page for the complete list, this page also features links to the bridges specification pages.
MIMB and its bridges have been designed as "Plug and Play" metadata components that can be embedded easily in various tools, using the MIMB SDK for C++, Java or VisualBasic. The MIMB bridges are available in the following Meta Integration tools:
The MIMB bridges are also seamlessly embedded inside various tools from partner vendors such as:
MIMB and its metadata bridges can be used to forward engineer the relational metadata
found in many popular database design tools and ETL tools into OLAP and BI metadata
that can be imported into the leading BI and OLAP tool on the market.
As shown on the image above, this forward engineering process involves two metadata layers:
MIMB supports both:
MIMB and its metadata bridges can also be used to reverse engineer OLAP/BI metadata
into a relational schema, directly available for import into database design tools or ETL tools.
This kind of metadata engineering process is especially useful when analysts have spent a lot of time creating metadata in BI tools, setting business names and business descriptions on numerous database artifacts and they would like to reuse this metadata to document the structure of the database in the form of a database model, or reuse this business metadata to help drive the ETL process.
As shown on the image above, the business properties can be migrated from the OLAP/BI layer to the relational layer, so that the relational metadata loaded into the target design tool or ETL tool provides much better insight to the user.
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