Delphix

Delphix keeps hold of a single, continuously updated copy of each of your production databases that you can provision virtual copies against as required. You can refresh, reset, or rewind your personal copies at any time, and you can also bookmark, branch and share them. Notably, provisioning is incremental, meaning that when your production database is updated, only those updates (and not entire datasets) will be pushed out to your virtual copies during a refresh. Even then, refreshes are strictly on demand: your users are given the freedom to decide if and when they need an update. In addition, multiple databases can be provisioned in a synchronised fashion. This could be used, for example, to facilitate integration testing for apps that use data from multiple data sources. What’s more, the platform’s “data time machine” functionality provides a complete record of all production deltas, meaning that at any time you can look back and see exactly what changed, and when, in your production data.

If your data sources contain sensitive data, you will also need to profile and mask it. In Delphix, this functionality is generally applied when you first create a copy of any given production database, creating a masked version of it that desensitised virtual copies can subsequently be provisioned from. Moreover, profiling and masking in Delphix can be leveraged on structured and unstructured data alike, can be scheduled or run on-demand, and come equipped with preconfigured templates tailored to some common use cases, including applications (such as SAP) and regulations (such as GDPR). It also supports tokenisation, audit and compliance reporting, and stand-alone masking (without data virtualisation). Finally, if you already have a preferred data masking solution, you may use that instead.

Delphix also provides the Data Control Tower, a single location for controlling your data automation efforts across your Delphix deployment and enterprise-wide. Automation in this case is API-driven: Delphix even describes its platform as “API-first”.

Data virtualisation provides several advantages over other test data management approaches, most notably that it allows you to leverage a complete (and compliant) copy of your real production data, without worrying about representative subsets and the like. It also lends itself very well to efficient provisioning and operationalisation of test data, and from there to DevOps, reinforced by the product integrations and self-service capabilities provided by Delphix.

In terms of functionality, we would rate the product’s masking and profiling capabilities as capable, but not exceptional, although being primarily policy driven, we acknowledge that they can be applied effectively to a large quantity of data and data sources. Moreover, the data virtualisation, data masking, and data profiling capabilities Delphix offers are all automated, highly scalable, and provided as part of a single platform, making Delphix a one-stop-shop for virtualisation-driven test data management.

Delphix is also interesting for the fact that it offers specific, point functionality that is well suited to test data management, but at the same time does not limit itself to that space. Indeed, although it must be said that accelerating application development is the company’s most common use case, we are told that they are increasingly in demand as part of broader CI/CD toolchains. Given this, the product’s heightened emphasis on integration makes a lot of sense, with the addition of comprehensive APIs in particular allowing it to be leveraged remotely and/or via application code. The upshot of all this being that you can use Delphix to provision test data wherever in your toolchain that you happen to need it: a powerful capability.

The Bottom Line

Delphix is no longer the only vendor that offers generalised test data management predicated primarily on the merits of data virtualisation. In this sense, it has lost the advantage of exclusivity. That said, it is still the most mature and well-known solution of its kind, and it almost certainly has the most experience working with large enterprises. This gives it an appeal all its own.