Tonic.ai product updates: October 2024

We're excited to share the latest updates and announcements designed to improve your experience with our products. This month's issue includes:

• Structural releases to support your DORA scores
  • Job Scheduler in Structural 🗓️
  • Sensitivity scan expands customizability 🔏
  • Salesforce subsetting performance enhancements 🤏
  • Improved Snowflake performance ❄️
• Textual’s global support and visibility
  • Multi-lingual support in Textual 🌍
• Strengthened security
  • Support for AWS Assume Role on Structural 👤

Structural releases to support your DORA scores

We recently published an article on how Tonic Ephemeral can help you maximize your DORA scores, and it got us thinking about the many product enhancements we’ve released this summer that will help you further your team ace your DORA metrics. Here’s the latest from Tonic Structural for optimizing developer speed, product quality, and security.

Job Scheduler in Structural 🗓️

Anticipate your team’s needs for frequent data refreshes and keep your DORA metrics on point with Structural’s new job scheduler. This feature allows you to schedule data generation jobs from within the Structural UI. It couldn’t be easier: input a schedule (see our docs for instructions) to automatically kick off generation jobs on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis—or whatever custom schedule works for you. This capability has long been available via API, but we’ve brought it into the UI by popular demand. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Sensitivity scan expands customizability 🔏

Structural’s custom sensitivity scan continues to expand, recently bringing 3 key enhancements. The sensitivity scan has been customizable for a few months, allowing you to tell Structural where to find sensitive information based on column name, and now it also supports Regex. [Insert mic drop] How does it work? Simply specify a regular expression to match your sensitive column names in order to create custom sensitivity rules.

But wait—there’s more. While you’re creating your custom sensitivity rules, it’s now even easier to find and protect your organization’s sensitive data with the new ‘Test Results’ preview function. The preview will dynamically update to display any matching columns based on the rules you specify, unlocking faster location and protection of the data you’re looking for (or didn’t know you were looking for!).

And if you’re the type of person who prefers bulk actions (who doesn’t like saving time?), you can now create custom sensitivity rules from the Bulk Edit option of Structural’s Database View. No need to leave the workspace you’re actively working in to create an organization-wide sensitivity rule, saving you (and others) time for future PII protection.

Salesforce subsetting performance enhancements 🤏

For those of you making use of our Salesforce connector, subsetting is a key feature. It enables you to use the smaller, and cheaper, Salesforce sandboxes. We’ve been hard at work making sure our subsetting algorithm is as efficient as possible, and we recently released some improvements to speed up its performance. In internal tests, subsetting in Salesforce now runs 3-4x faster thanks to these optimizations. For those of you already using the connector, there’s nothing you need to do besides update to the newest version of Structural. And for those of you who haven’t tried the connector yet, what are you waiting for?

Improved Snowflake performance ❄️

Over the last few weeks, we’ve doubled down on optimizing Structural’s performance with Snowflake. These efforts have improved the experience for all Snowflake users by better utilizing table parallelism and compression. Additionally, we improved the performance for those customers using a separate destination S3 bucket. And lastly, we added a new Structural setting that gives you the ability to manage the creation of the destination schema within Snowflake (TONIC_SNOWFLAKE_SKIP_CREATE_DB). Faster test data generation means faster development means better DORA scores.

Textual's global support and visibility

Multi-lingual support in Textual 🌍

Textual customers with unstructured data in languages besides English can benefit from improved sensitive entity detection. Textual Cloud now supports 9 languages, including Chinese, German, and Spanish. In addition, self-hosted customers can enable support for 23 languages. When multi-lingual support is enabled, Textual automatically detects the language and applies the correct entity detection model. We’re meeting your data where it lives and how it speaks to further data privacy as a universal right.

Strengthened product security

Support for the AWS Assume Role on Structural 👤

Are you using Tonic Structural to connect to Amazon S3? For file connector workspaces that write files to S3, you can now configure Structural to use a specified Assume Role. This option allows for different input / output roles, enabling you to stay up to date with security best practices. Maximized data security FTW.

Small Updates; Big Impacts

Often it's the little things that matter most. Here's a round up of our smaller releases:

• Upload your Tonic Structural license as a file rather than pasting in the long string. No more copy/paste pain.
• Structural’s detector for city names now ignores misleading values that are not city names. Which is pretty magical when you consider the sorts of city names that exist out there. ✨
• From the Access Management tab of Structural Settings, users with permission to manage Structural access can now restore deleted users.
• Structural has expanded its native sensitive data detection to include the following additional sensitivity types: US driver’s license number, passport number, marital status, GPS coordinates, non-birthday dates (admission date, discharge date, date of death), US license plate, money amount, and usernames. No PII left behind…
• Textual now offers more realistic synthetic values for non-standard date formats identified as DATE_TIME entities (e.g. third of March 2024) to capture all the ways dates appear in your data
• Textual supports a new entity type (HEALTHCARE_ID) for identifiers associated with healthcare, such as patient numbers, strengthening your ability to ensure HIPAA compliance.

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.