The Teradata MDS Interface
Starting with MDS 14.10, most of the features and capabilities found in MetaBrowse, MetaManager and MetaSurf, are being gradually combined in a unified web application called MDS Repository Explorer. This web application lets you access, search, and modify the Teradata MDS repository from within a web browser, eliminating the need to install MDS on every user’s desktop.
The URL to access the Repository Explorer web application is:
http://<HostName>:<port>/<ContextName>
where <HostName> is the name of the host where your web server resides, <port> is the web server’s listener port (and would typically be 8080 for Tomcat), and <ContextName> is the name of the xml context-descriptor file deployed to your web server. For example, for Tomcat, if you have a context-descriptor file named mds.xml moved to the conf/Catalina/localhost folder of your Tomcat installation, and Tomcat resides on a host named midas, the full URL would be http://midas:8080/mds. Navigating here would show the MDS logon page, assuming all your MDS and MDM components are properly installed and configured. Your MDS Administrator should supply you with this information.
Figure 1 shows an example of the interface after you log in.
Figure 1: The MDS Repository Explorer Interface
|
Feature |
Description |
|
A |
Navigation Pane – provides links to various MDS functions and processes. |
|
B |
Masthead contains: |
|
C |
Content Area – displays metamodels, classes, relationships, and other objects, as well as options for creating, modifying, or deleting those objects. There are also controls that let you:  the Content Area.
 the current contents of the Content Area.
 for the current contents of the Content Area.
|
The functionality provided by the initial release of Repository Explorer is described in this guide, and includes the ability to manage MDS Users, Groups, Security Profiles, Systems, Labels and Metamodels (including AIMs, Classes, Properties and Relationships). It also provides for intelligent searching of repository objects both for business and technical users.
Limitations to Repository Explorer for the initial release include: the ability to launch command-line utilities from the web browser; a simple tree-view explorer; the ability to manage Automatic DIM Update (ADU); some advanced functionality currently provided by MetaSurf; as well as some functionality which is more development or Professional Services (PS) oriented; for example, applying labels to objects or adding and removing objects from collections. Note that all the functionality provided by these features is still available as before in MDS, and will be phased into Repository Explorer over the next several releases. For more information on features still available in MDS, but not yet incorporated into Repository Explorer, see Table 1. This table contains links to the Teradata Meta Data Services Administrator Guide (3118-071A), documentation from the 14.00 release.
|
Unavailable Feature |
Documented in: |
|
Ability to run metaload from Repository Explorer |
This task is still done using MetaManager or from the command line. See “Teradata Databases and MetaManager” in Chapter 3 of: Teradata Metadata Services Administrator Guide (3118-071A) |
|
Run metaxml or metaclient from Repository Explorer |
This task is still done using MetaManager, MetaBrowse, or from the command line. See “Running metaclient from MetaBrowse or MetaManager” and “Running metaxml from MetaBrowse or MetaManager” in Chapter 6 of: Teradata Metadata Services Administrator Guide (3118-071A) |
|
Tree-view exploration of repository metadata from Repository Explorer |
This task is still done using MetaBrowse. See “The Tree View” in Chapter 4 of: Teradata Metadata Services Administrator Guide (3118-071A) |
|
Manage Automatic DIM Update (ADU) from Repository Explorer |
This task is still done using MetaManager. See Chapter 7: “Automatic DIM Updates.” |