Benefits of Metadb

Owned by Sharon Beltaine
Last updated: Feb 26, 2024
2 min read

Metadb has been adopted by many academic instititutions all over the world to provide data analytics services for their FOLIO data. This streaming data integration platform can use the FOLIO application server as its data source to provide access to near real-time data in a reporting database that is separate from the main transactional server. The Metadb software is open source and is designed to transform data stored in JSON format into tables, columns, and fields in a database running Postgresql. The reporting database can be used to build and export data reports using common data analytics programming languages, such as SQL and Python. It can also be used with popular data analytics platforms, such as Power BI and Tableau. Metadb is the evolution of the LDP (Library Data Platform) software running on FOLIO reporting database systems since 2021.

 

Key features of Metadb include:

  • open source software with active development, upgrades, and releases

  • extracts, transforms, and loads data from the source server continuously in near real time

  • transfers the data processing load off the transactional system to a separate reporting database

  • most data elements from the data source are extracted into columns

  • transforms MARC data into an easy-to-use columnar format

  • includes a FOLIO interface, the Reporting App, with a query builder and self-service reporting tools

  • adopted and supported by several institutions in the FOLIO community

 

The FOLIO Reporting App provides a FOLIO interface for interacting with a Metadb database. This allows institutions to set up pre-written “canned” queries to be run by users for “self-service” real-time reports. It also includes a Query Builder that enables users to build and save their own data queries, run them, and download results from the Metadb server.