You can create a subset of production data if you need a small, targeted, and referentially intact copy of the production data to use in a nonproduction environment.

In the source data, customer information exists in multiple tables. You need data from more than one table when you create a subset of specific customers. The source data does not contain physical keys. You created logical constraints to create relationships between these tables. To ensure that the subset operation includes all the related tables, create an entity to use in the subset operation. An entity defines a set of related tables. The entity defines the structure for copying related data to the subset database. When you include the entity in the subset operation, the operation considers all tables in the entity.

An entity consists of a driving table and related tables. A driving table is the starting point for defining relationships between tables in the entity. TDM defines the tables that relate to the driving table based on physical and logical constraints. You can add tables that have cyclic or circular relationships within the table or between tables. You must add a staging connection before you can add these tables to an entity.

If you perform data discovery in TDM, you can run an entity profile to discover possible entities in the data. You can also manually create entities. In this lesson you manually create an entity. When you create an entity, select parameters to filter data in the columns that you want to include in the subset database. In this lesson, we create a data subset that contains information on customers with customer IDs greater than 100. The subset data would therefore include all data related to the specific customers.

In this lesson, you perform the following task:

Create an entity named CUSTOMER_DATA_ENTITY with the CUSTOMER table as the driving table.

Before you start this lesson, complete the earlier lessons in this tutorial.

Set aside 15 minutes to complete the tasks in this lesson.