After you create an environment, connection, rule set, and inventory, you mask data.
To maintain Referential Integrity (RI), Delphix Agile Data Masking masks each field on itself. This repeatable masking automatically maintains RI (for verbatim matches), even if it's between applications or platforms.
For example, if you want to match the values between a parent and children, simply select the same algorithm to mask them. This ensures that referential integrity is maintained within the same database. Furthermore, Delphix Agile Data Masking creates the integrity across database platforms (between SQL Server and DB2, for example) or across files (tab-delimited files) and relational data (a column in a SQL Server database)—just select the same masking algorithm.
As a practical example, assume you have an SSN column in a Microsoft SQL Server database, an SSN column in a DB2 database, and an SSN field in a tab-delimited file. If the SSN value was 111111111 across the two databases and the file, and you use the same SSN algorithm for all three, the masked value (for example, 801-01-0838) will be the same for all three.
There are two ways to mask data. You can mask data on-the-fly or you can provision it first and then mask it. The following sections explain these two options.