The Data Masker Tools Tab

The Tools tab provides a series of buttons which offer tools and utilities that provide additional functionality to the Data Masker software. Most of the buttons launch forms which contain their own detailed help files so the discussion below will provide only a quick summary.

What the buttons in the Tools tab do

Rule Status Report

Launches a form which provides the ability to save a report of the configuration of the current masking rules. The rule status report produced could be used as printed documentation detailing the structure of the rules.

Rule Run Statistics Report

Launches a form which provides the ability to save a report listing the statistics and timings of the current masking run. A rule run report could be used to provide a permanent record of the execution of the rules.

Schema Comparator

The Schema Comparison tool is designed to compare the schema structure stored in the Rule Controller with the real structure in the schema to which the Rule Controller connects. The output of the tool is a very readable report which details the changes. More information on this topic can be found on the Schema Comparison tool help page.

Data Viewer

The Data Viewer tool displays the data in a table or shows the values returned by a user specified query. Besides quickly showing the data present in the table the Data Viewer tool also has the ability to find all columns which are empty (containing all nulls or blank values) and can display a list of all distinct values in a column (or columns) in the table.

Column Finder

A handy utility to browse the database table structure and find columns based on user specified search criteria (including wild cards and full regex). This tool is useful when analyzing a database in order to find tables and columns which might require masking.

Create New Log File Now

Forces the Data Masker software to create a new log file and all actions of the Data Masker software will subsequently be recorded in that log file. Note that the previous log file is not overwritten or deleted when a new log file is created, the log files are timestamped and will remain in the log directory until manually removed. There is also an option on the Misc. Setup tab which can enable the creation of a new log file for each masking set run.

View Log File Now

Each time the Data Masker software starts it creates a new log file in which it records its actions. This button will open the current log file in a text editor.