Four years ago, the company that German software engineer Ralf Wisser worked for needed a tool to remove outdated data from its production databases. “We couldn’t find an appropriate tool,” Wisser recalls, “so I created Jailer.”
Jailer lets you move a subset of relational data from one RDBMS to another, in a way that the data subset remains referentially intact. “It’s not simply copying some rows from one table to another, but copying a complete graph of interrelated business objects spread over several tables, so that the applications can work with it,” Wisser says. “The main use case is to copy production data into staging and development databases, allowing testers and developers to use (anonymized) production data as test data without having to cope with clones of the entire production database.”
Jailer also lets you safely remove data from a database after it has been copied. “This allows you to move data that is no longer business-relevant from production databases into an archive, thus preventing the database from infinitely growing in size.” The software also lets users browse through a relational data model.
Wisser says he made Jailer open source software because he likes the open source approach. “I use a lot of open source tools and wanted to contribute a tool to the open source world. I also like the user feedback, which really helps me to improve the tool.”
In fact, Wisser says, user feedback will determine where he expends effort on future development. “The best way to help me with the project is to suggest new features via e-mail or the project’s forums.”