We're excited to share the latest updates and announcements designed to improve your experience with our products. This month's issue includes:
- Tonic Textual's evolution into the secure data lakehouse for LLMs 🚀
- Spin up Oracle databases on Tonic Ephemeral ✅
- Automated column linking suggestions on Tonic Structural 🔗
- Subsetting for Db2 LUW on Structural 🤏
- Support for Avro via Structural's File Connector 🗃️
- Streamlined Collection View for NoSQL DBs on Structural 📄
Tonic Textual: the secure data lakehouse for LLMs 🚀
We’re excited to share that Tonic Textual has evolved with expanded capabilities, propelling it into new uses: meet the world’s first secure data lakehouse for LLMs. Leverage Textual’s ML-powered data detection, redaction, and synthesis capabilities to activate your unstructured data for generative AI.
Textual is now optimized to transform and enrich unstructured data for use in AI development. Using proprietary NER models, the platform extracts named entities, protects those entities via de-identification and synthesis, and outputs secure data and valuable metadata in a ready-to-consume JSON format. Sign up for a free trial to get started today.
Spin up Oracle databases on Tonic Ephemeral ✅
Our new solution for spinning up (and down) ephemeral databases on demand now supports Oracle, in addition to PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Server. Tonic Ephemeral makes it easy for developers to spin up fully populated test and development databases for ephemeral test environments so you can work more efficiently while keeping costs under control. You can set Ephemeral as your destination database within Tonic Structural, to generate and output de-identified Oracle data directly into an ephemeral Oracle database. The powerful pairing of Ephemeral + Structural is particularly effective for subsetting use cases, when your developers need rapid access to a small chunk of data for a small amount of time. We're currently offering free trials of Ephemeral—sign up here to get started.
Automated linking suggestions on Structural 🔗
Column linking is one of Structural’s most powerful capabilities for keeping your test data realistic and in sync, but it can be hard to figure out which columns should be linked. Sounds like a job for a little automation! Now, as part of the sensitivity scan, Structural provides suggestions on which address columns to link. This is one of linking’s most common use cases. We’d welcome your feedback and your own suggestions for which column types you’d like Structural to recommend linking.
Subsetting for Db2 LUW on Structural 🤏
You may have seen that we recently added support for Db2 LUW for Tonic Structural. Hot off the press, subsetting for Db2 LUW is now available, as well!
Db2 LUW is one of IBM’s flagship data management platforms, and the ability to subset down its data footprint to use in lower environments is a key driver of cost-savings and increased productivity. Our patented subsetter enables you to create targeted datasets using simple percentages or custom WHERE clauses, and its Graph View offers real-time visibility into your subset’s configuration to ensure that you’re including all the data and tables you need. Sign up for a free trial of Tonic Structural to test out subsetting on your Db2 LUW data.
Support for Avro via Structural's File Connector 🗃️
JSON and Parquet and Avro, oh my! The list of supported file types for Tonic Structural’s File Connector continues to grow, with the recent addition of .avro file types.
The File connector eliminates the need to connect to a database and allows you to transform data found in flat files uploaded from S3 file storage, Google file storage, or files stored on your local computer. The use cases abound. That file you received via email from your customer that needs to be de-identified before you can pass it onto other teams for testing or analysis? Toss it into Structural. Need to send a safe, realistic dataset to an external contractor or partner? Structural is here for you.
Streamlined Collection View for NoSQL DBs 📄
Our document-based connectors are even easier to use, thanks to a number of upgrades. You can now apply filters in the hybrid document collection view, to filter by data type, applied generator, etc. Filtering makes it easier to search for the fields that you need to protect and ensure they have the best possible generator applied.
You can also search by value in the single document view. Do you know the value that exists in the document, but not the names of the fields? Use this new search toggle to get the full list of fields that have that value and ensure that the appropriate generator is applied.
Lastly, for our API users, we’ve added an endpoint that we’re all pretty excited about: the ability to get all the paths in your Mongo collection. Just hit the new `api/collection/{workspaceId}/paths` endpoint and it will return an array of fields including the field name and data type. This is particularly useful for those of you dynamically adding generators to your mongo fields. Go, Mongo, go!
Small Updates; Big Impacts
Often it's the little things that matter most. Here's a round up of our smaller releases:
- In line with PostgreSQL, Tonic is deprecating support for PostgreSQL version 12 for the Tonic metadata database in November 2024. Please upgrade to PostgreSQL version 13+ to avoid interruptions in your workflows. Instructions on how to upgrade versions are here.
- You can now enable or disable self-consistency for all columns within a sensitivity category directly from the recommended generators panel on Privacy Hub. One small toggle for the UI; one giant leap for your efficiency.
- When applied to a numeric type column, the SSN generator now by default generates values without hyphens to better align with the look and feel of your data in production.
- We improved Structural’s sensitivity scan detection to reduce the false positives on fields detected as having names. Less bad name-calling = better performance.
- If you’re a power user of the Conditional generator’s IS IN operator, you can reap the benefits of recently improved performance.
- Last but not least, the Upsert option for workspaces is now out of beta. 🎉
As always, we'd love to hear your feedback on our products. What do you need? What do you love? What could be better? Send us a note at hello@tonic.ai! And for all the latest updates, be sure to check out our complete release notes in our product docs.
