GAME

An award-winning metadata integration engine and code generating suite of tools, GAME provides an application development and deployment framework for custom applications in much the same way as commercial applications come with metadata driven application frameworks. GAME can be used to develop and support advanced decision support environments with mapping from source data to a normalized data warehouse and from the warehouse to dimensional cubes.

Team Meta developed GAME and use its common metadata driven application framework across a number of BC Government Ministries. This has allowed for significant cost reduction through the reuse of enterprise data models, common application development frameworks and application components. The Province of BC retains the intellectual property rights to GAME.

WHAT IS GAME?

GAME is a collection of architecture frameworks and patterns, metadata stores, generators, implementation objects, open source and commercial products/tools that are integrated to meet the needs of various applications that are based on the infrastructure. GAME has integrated a number of extract, transform and load (ETL) tooling approaches including OWB generated code, GAME generated code, hand coded programs and Talend (an open source ETL Java generator). Business intelligence / query tools including Oracle Express, Oracle Reports, Oracle XML Publisher, Oracle Discoverer, JasperReports (open source), BRIO, and various SQL query tools can be integrated with GAME. The current web front-end is based on Google Widgets Toolkit running on Oracle XML Publisher or JasperReports.

GAME was developed to provide metadata driven application architecture. It began as a set of metadata extensions to Oracle Designer to provide support for OLAP metadata specifications and data quality rules on a BC Government data warehouse project and evolved from there to be used on various development projects.

GAME can be used to develop and support advanced decision support environments with mapping from source data to a normalized data warehouse and from the normalized warehouse to dimensional cubes. It supports automating data loads into warehouses and generates dimensions, facts and cubes – the data products that warehouse users need. GAME is used by developers, in conjunction with Oracle Designer, to specify the models for the components that they want generated.  End users never access GAME itself, they use the products that are generated from it.  GAME supports the generation of standard dimensional objects that can be integrated with any BI tool that users choose.

GAME is based on the assumption that data and information assets are the most important assets to be managed, enriched and protected in an IT environment; and that it is practical to have a standard, metadata based approach to delivering the data management and application processing layers of any application, in order to provide effective support for data standards, data quality and data access control.

GAME’s underlying structure assumes that BC Government Oracle database standards are being used and will remain an effective basis for data management for years to come.

GAME is in use at the BC Vital Statistics Agency, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Advanced Education and Ministry of Health.

GAME FEATURES

ADVANCED SECURITY, AUDITING AND PRIVACY PROTECTION 


All personally identifying or sensitive client data in metadata is formally classified. These advanced security definitions are used by the infrastructure to deliver sophisticated security services including fine grained auditing, user access, and record and column suppression, including the ability to provide anonymized identifers that can be used for person-specific research.

SEAMLESS INTEGRATION WITH OPEN SOURCE AND COMMERCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TOOLS

We build our clients’ data warehouse infrastructures to include web-based reporting interfaces capable of delivering both Open Source JasperReports and Oracle XML Publisher reports in a variety of formats that support advanced security, report scheduling, output caching and rich descriptive report metadata.

As well, to ease information product deployment, Team Meta has developed a metadata gateway into Oracle Discoverer end user layer; and have assisted our clients to publish business metadata to WIKIs and Java based web portals for easy user access, review and comment.

ROBUST PROCESS MANAGEMENT WITH ORACLE SCHEDULER SERVICES


We integrate our clients’ data warehouse infrastructures with Oracle Scheduler Services to reduce operational complexity and cost. Discreet load operations are bundled into logical units of work using Oracle Scheduler to ensure data quality and load performance and parallel job schedules. Data load processes are metadata driven and monitored for data quality throughout source, stage, target and OLAP refresh processes. The overall complexity and cost of data warehouse operations to our clients has been dramatically reduced using this approach.