New from Talend Data Inventory: Create data APIs in minutes

A major innovation in data sharing

It’s official — Self-Service Data APIs are available as a new feature of Data Inventory! Highly skilled and less-technical users can now make their datasets available to applications and partners via APIs in just a few clicks. 

Self-Service Data APIs empower every permissioned employee to leverage data across the business to generate valuable insights or even extend data availability beyond the organization to trusted partners. Data engineers can easily create compliant APIs to operationalize data in other applications, like Salesforce or SAP. Citizen integrators can quickly expose data for use in custom applications, while data analysts can share trusted datasets for use with visualization tools like Tableau, Power BI, Looker, and more.

Productivity, security, agility: Self-Service Data APIs are the gift that keeps on giving for business

Implementing Data as a Service APIs often requires logging a ticket and waiting for the ask to be done by a specialized API developer. With this new self-service capability, technical roles can boost productivity and focus on more strategic projects while data consumers throughout the organization get faster access to healthy data.

Improved security is another important advantage of this new functionality. First, data owners no longer give and manage direct access to databases. Instead, they give access to the API giving access to data. Second, REST APIs are far more friendly for B2B use cases as they rely on HTTPS (which is firewall-friendly) and they can be relayed by an API Management solution to reach a vast consumer ecosystem.

Data APIs are also an important tool in standardizing how data is shared and in eliminating silos within an organization. In fact, using APIs can reduce traditional IT costs by 42% and lead to a 12X increase in productivity[1]. This highly optimized self-service workflow helps strengthen overall business agility.

Make data available in minutes

Let's say a particular business case calls for an augmented customer credit rating dataset to be created. The work done here could also potentially provide value to others in the company. With the Self-Service Data API feature, you can share that data in just four easy steps:

1. Enter the detailed view of the dataset.

2. Name the API and define the primary key of the dataset.

3. Define the consumers who are allowed to access the data though the API.

4. Click “Enable API”.

Work done! The API is up and running, the endpoint deployed to a Talend processing engine.

Almost everyone can benefit from this new feature. A use case could be a developer building an application that accesses existing customer data. Rather than creating their own dataset, they reach out to the dataset owner, who creates an API to give access to the customer dataset from Data Inventory. This saves time for both teams. It is faster for the new app developer to build an app using a standards-based API — and the dataset owner saves time since they get requests from several groups to the same dataset and can now simply share the same API with them.

Technical user need-to-knows

• REST APIs are automatically generated.

• REST APIs generated are OData-compliant, so they are instantly consumable by applications and tools supporting this standard, including Salesforce, PowerBI, Tableau, and Excel.

• An OAS 3 file is also generated for each API so they can also be easily consumed by integration tools, Mobile Application Development Platforms (MADPs), or API management tools.

Improving data quality is always important, but data loses its business value when it languishes in silos or warehouses. This new Self-Service Data APIs feature in Talend Data Inventory is just one more way that Talend is committed to providing intelligent, game-changing capabilities that take the work out of working with data.   

Self-Service Data APIs are available to all customers using Talend Data Inventory.  For more information about this new product innovation, please visit https://www.qlik.com/us/products/talend-data-inventory.

1  https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/what-it-really-takes-to-capture-the-value-of-apis