Perforce Delphix DevOps Data Platform for Test Data Management & Masking

We are using Perforce Delphix for test data management, where we perform data masking, virtualization, and create VDBs from Perforce Delphix for data virtualization.

For example, I work for a banking client that has a lot of PII information, which stands for personal identifiable information. We use Perforce Delphix to connect to the database, analyze the data for PII, and identify all the PII fields such as first name, last name, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. We finalize the list of PII columns and perform masking by identifying different masking algorithms. The masking algorithms ensure that if you want to mask a mobile number, it appears in the same format as a ten-digit number, but it is not real-time data. Similarly, if there is a customer named Samantha Prabhu, we replace it with something else such as Richa Joshi, ensuring that the data is altered and not live customer information. For virtualization, we use Perforce Delphix to virtualize data and create different VDBs. Given that database sizes in production environments can be in terabytes, we cannot take the entire dataset into the testing environment for various testing or developmental purposes, so we create VDBs. The VDBs can reduce the data size, such as one terabyte being shrunk to one GB, enabling its use for diverse purposes including analysis and providing the VDB to testing or development teams for business and analytics. We use a virtualization engine to transfer the data from production to testing environments in a smaller subset.

It is an everyday task to mask the data for different databases across various applications in banking clients, where multiple applications hold different kinds of PII. We need to analyze the databases using Perforce Delphix and perform masking daily, and for virtualization, the same applies. We take snapshots, record the data, and maintain copies as VDB and PDB in our virtualization engine for access when needed, such as when testing requires a subset of six-month-old data. If we have that data in our VDB, it can be quickly provided to the testing team for their purposes without lengthy authorization processes related to data extraction from production.

Test data management is crucial in the testing and development life cycle, as correct data drives the development of valuable features in applications. Quality data is essential for effective testing, enabling the discovery of issues and bugs. Perforce Delphix is a valuable tool that ensures the delivery of compliant data that does not violate data protection policies such as GDPR or HIPAA, thereby protecting customer information while providing high-quality test data that resembles live production data but is masked. Perforce Delphix helps prevent data loss and fines associated with data protection violations, improving the organization by ensuring compliance and facilitating quick access to quality data that saves time and costs during development and testing.

Perforce Delphix ensures that compliance requirements related to GDPR and other data protection policies are met by masking personal identifiable information such as names and addresses. As a result, the organization avoids hefty fines similar to what Facebook faced due to compliance issues.

The best feature in Perforce Delphix is virtualization, as it allows for a multitude of VDBs that do not consume physical space on your server. You can create multiple VDBs, distribute that data through PDBs to various testing teams for testing purposes, and provide the same dataset in different VDBs to development teams for their activities. Additionally, masking is another standout feature, enabling identification and scanning for PII, data profiling, and subsequently performing masking with customizable rules. The third notable feature is the ability to roll back data; if the deployed masked data malfunctions, you can revert to a previous version, correct any issues, and reload it.

An improvement for Perforce Delphix could be in subsetting, as it currently lacks variety in its subsetting rules. When retrieving data, it can be limited to specific time frames, without options for country or state specificity, which would be beneficial. Additionally, there is a need for features to facilitate synthetic data generation in testing environments.

Occasionally, issues arise with VDBs, which can become corrupted, making data retrieval impossible and possibly resulting in data loss. There should be a more robust mechanism for retrieving VDBs to mitigate the risk of crashing and potential data loss.

I have been using Perforce Delphix for the past five years.

In my experience, Perforce Delphix is very stable.

Perforce Delphix's scalability is good as it integrates well with current CI/CD pipelines and provides solutions for various applications, enabling the creation of pipelines that trigger jobs directly within Perforce Delphix for refreshes and other automation tasks.

Customer support from Perforce Delphix is excellent, as they are very helpful and provide timely solutions.

I previously used Broadcom TDM, which is a competitive test data management tool known for its excellent features in data masking, data subsetting, and synthetic data generation, surpassing Perforce Delphix in several areas except for virtualization.

There is a return on investment for Perforce Delphix, but I do not have specific metrics available to quantify savings in time, money, or manpower.

The pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Perforce Delphix are substantial, making it unaffordable for small organizations and startups. It is mainly utilized by larger clients such as banking and healthcare providers capable of funding such an investment.

We evaluated options such as Informatica TDM and Tonic tool, but their performance was inadequate for handling large datasets, leading us to choose Perforce Delphix.

The rollback feature is useful when you need to mask data from a specific period, and upon refreshing the data into the testing environment, if it becomes corrupted, effectively stopping progress. The rollback allows you to return to a previous version, rectify the problem, and refresh the data again, thereby saving significant time during testing as you can correct issues without lengthy delays.

My advice for those looking into using Perforce Delphix is to learn how to create different masking rules prior to using the tool, ensuring familiarity with the interface and a basic understanding of data administration. I give Perforce Delphix an overall rating of 8.5 out of 10.

My main use case for Perforce Delphix was refreshing production databases.

The best features Perforce Delphix offers are quick and easy production-like database management. Refreshing databases is easy and efficient. For example, before using Perforce Delphix, we exported and imported databases to refresh production databases for test cases, but after we implemented Perforce Delphix, we refreshed them more efficiently and quickly.

Refreshing UAT databases takes nearly five minutes with Perforce Delphix, but before that, we exported and imported them along with importing the schema. Perforce Delphix has positively impacted my organization as I saved considerable time.

I am not currently using Perforce Delphix, so I cannot comment on how it can be improved. I cannot recall any needed improvements from my past experience with Perforce Delphix. Since I have not used Perforce Delphix for nearly five or six years, I cannot add anything specifically about needed improvements.

I have been working in my current field for nearly 10 years.

Perforce Delphix is stable in my experience. After we tested it in our company, other companies tested it and implemented it to their production environment.

Perforce Delphix reduces storage, so it takes about five minutes to make a UAT test environment, and I did not notice any issues as our data or usage grew.

The customer support for Perforce Delphix, based on my experience, is initially not easy to reach, but in the succession stage, it is easy to reach support.

Perforce Delphix was the first program that we used for refreshing databases.

I used Perforce Delphix for nearly two or three years. I found it easy to use.

I used Perforce Delphix during my junior years, but I left it because I began working at another company.

I have not seen a return on investment from using Perforce Delphix, and I am not the one in charge of investment or licensing information.

I do not know the licensing information or setup cost for Perforce Delphix because I am not the one in charge of that.

I did not evaluate any other options before choosing Perforce Delphix.

My advice to others looking into using Perforce Delphix is that it reduces time, is easy to implement, and also reduces storage. I would give this product a rating of 9 out of 10.

My main use case for Perforce Delphix is data anonymization of Workday. Workday is a platform where the company's data is stored in different files containing personal details, health details, and other critical document information. For testing and development purposes, we use the lower environment. In the lower environment, we need the same sample of data, but an anonymized version. Perforce Delphix helps us anonymize the data into a deterministic value, which we then use for testing and development purposes.

Perforce Delphix offers massive storage savings and useful algorithms as its best features. The tool uses real-time personal identifiable data, including national IDs and national ID algorithms, along with multiple types of algorithms for particular use cases.

I rely on the national ID feature most in Perforce Delphix. In Workday, we use different countries' national IDs, which have specific formats. Perforce Delphix has its own connectors to fetch data from the real-time environment, using that particular format to produce deterministic data. The national ID feature is very useful for me to anonymize national IDs.

Perforce Delphix offers email ID formats that can be produced in different variations depending on the vendor or the client. Beyond email IDs, hierarchy can be utilized along with different name formats, local languages, and various employee IDs. This flexibility is very valuable.

Perforce Delphix has positively impacted my organization by improving efficiency. The process that used to take almost 48 hours has been reduced by 40 hours due to Perforce Delphix, allowing us to complete our work in just eight hours. This reduces one full-time effort of an employee, allowing that person to focus on other areas. In terms of cost savings and improving efficiency, it helps significantly.

I believe the data generation part should be included in Perforce Delphix, as it would be helpful for other organizations as well. Data generation is the main improvement I feel Perforce Delphix can make. It would be beneficial if we could provide a format and Perforce Delphix could reply with hundreds or millions of records.

I have been using Perforce Delphix for four years.

Perforce Delphix is stable.

Perforce Delphix's scalability is impressive; it can handle low, medium, and large data sets smoothly.

The customer support for Perforce Delphix is excellent. For a P1 ticket, it gets resolved within two to four hours. For a medium ticket, it is resolved within six to eight hours, and for a P3 ticket, it takes about a day.

I evaluated TDM before choosing Perforce Delphix.

I have seen a return on investment, including money saved, efficiency gained, and fewer employees needed. Everyone can get involved to benefit from this tool.

I do not want to switch to any other tool. I am very likely to continue using Perforce Delphix.

Regarding Perforce Delphix's AI capabilities, the tool does not save any data into it. Perforce Delphix only saves the algorithms and is connected with the target and source systems, which are completely handled by the project team. There is no data storage in Perforce Delphix, ensuring data privacy is achieved.

The accuracy of Perforce Delphix's output is approximately 95%. When checking the output, I observe there are no duplicates, no synonyms, and no errors. The results match what we expected. The accuracy is correct.

My advice for others looking into using Perforce Delphix is that if your organization needs optimization and you have less skilled personnel who are aware of workflows, you can definitely go for Perforce Delphix. The UI is very user-friendly, enabling you to leverage this tool. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

My day-to-day work involves using Perforce Delphix, where I virtualize many databases with the application. This greatly reduces the amount of time I spend on activities such as restoring databases or performing migrations. My daily routine is focused on using Perforce Delphix to automate and speed up my work.

I have a very large database at my current company, where with Perforce Delphix I can update it and have it ready for use by a developer in just one hour. This database is more than 30 terabytes in size, making my work much easier. This activity would take one or two days to update production data to a development environment without the tool. With Perforce Delphix I can accomplish it in an hour.

I have many use cases where Perforce Delphix has been very advantageous for my company, not only in terms of being able to virtualize a very large environment in a short time, but also in terms of being able to virtualize several environments. I can deliver an environment for each project to my developer with low operating cost. With just one server, I can have two or three databases virtualized with Perforce Delphix, which greatly facilitates my developer's work. There is also the value gain, as Perforce Delphix provides very significant savings for my current company. We are able to save a lot on storage.

I currently have a little more than 30 production environments, where most of them have sensitive data. With Perforce Delphix I can virtualize a single environment for masking. I have Perforce Delphix Masking, where I can run a routine to validate sensitive data with Perforce Delphix itself. It also has several algorithms that can perform this masking, keeping the entire environment consistent and masked for my end user.

The best feature that Perforce Delphix offers is virtualization. I can virtualize environments quickly and with integrity. In addition to virtualizing, I can also mask these environments with Perforce Delphix, which is a very useful use case in my company, where I can keep sensitive data masked, using just one tool. One tool to virtualize, and the same tool will mask sensitive data, as well as the ability to have production-like data very quickly. These are the main features of Perforce Delphix.

Today, I mostly use Perforce Delphix for Oracle and SQL Server databases, but I also know of other platforms that can be virtualized, such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. Perforce Delphix is a very complete and very useful tool for my daily work.

The main positive impact of Perforce Delphix on my organization is the delivery of environments with speed. I can deliver a D-1 environment very quickly to my developer, so they always have a copy very close to production, which greatly facilitates their work in developing their software and scripts. It also allows for the ability to virtualize several environments at a low cost.

Perforce Delphix can be optimized. There are things that I can improve in terms of speed or new features, but what Perforce Delphix has today meets my company's needs very well and meets the requirements perfectly. The application is very complete and very easy to handle. I do not have any points to highlight that need improvement. I believe we can adjust a few things here and there, such as speed in integrating some functionalities, but nothing specific. Perforce Delphix is a very complete tool.

I have obtained a very large gain in database virtualization with Perforce Delphix. I can deliver environments very quickly, in a matter of hours or even minutes depending on the size of the production database I want to replicate, taking only minutes. The storage savings are also very large, as Perforce Delphix is able to compress the data and provide very significant savings for my company.

My primary use case for Perforce Delphix is test data management. I use Perforce Delphix to provide masked, production-like data to development and testing teams quickly while maintaining data privacy and compliance. I have hands-on experience in data virtualization, data masking, test data provisioning, and self-service capabilities.

In my current role, I use Perforce Delphix primarily for test data management. We ingest a production database into Perforce Delphix, mask sensitive data using the masking engine, and provision virtual databases to our development and testing teams. This has helped us reduce storage costs, accelerate environment provisioning, and ensure compliance with data privacy requirements.

If I had to pick just a couple of standout features in Perforce Delphix, the first would be data virtualization. It allows us to provision databases in minutes rather than taking hours or days, while significantly reducing storage consumption. This has a direct impact on development and testing efficiency. The second feature I would highlight is data masking. The ability to identify and protect sensitive data while maintaining data integrity is extremely valuable, especially in industries that handle PII/PHI information, mostly in the finance and healthcare sectors. It helps us meet compliance requirements while still providing realistic data to users. I would also like to mention the self-service capability of Perforce Delphix as a bonus feature. Developers and testers can refresh, rewind, and manage their own environments without depending on DBAs, which speeds up the entire software delivery process and reduces manual efforts and intervention.

Among those features, data virtualization has had the biggest impact on our team's productivity. Before using Perforce Delphix, provisioning a new database environment could take several hours or even days, depending on the size of the database and DBA availability. With virtualization, we can provision a virtual database within minutes. This has significantly changed the way our team works. Developers and testers no longer have to wait for environment creation or a refresh, which reduces bottlenecks and accelerates the overall testing cycle. We can provide multiple environments from a single source while consuming much less storage than a traditional or physical database copy. As a result, our team spends less time managing infrastructure and more time focusing on development, testing, and issue resolution. It has improved agility, shortened release timelines, and increased overall productivity across development, QA, and support teams.

One thing that surprised me about Perforce Delphix was how much time it saved once it was fully implemented. Initially, I looked at it mainly as a test data management solution, but it ended up improving multiple areas, including environment provisioning, storage optimization, and data security. Another feature that I think is often overlooked is the self-service capability. Giving the development and QA teams the ability to provision, refresh, and rewind environments on their own reduces dependency on DBAs. That speeds up the entire delivery process. Organizations get the most value from Perforce Delphix when they use both virtualization and masking together. Virtualization provides fast access to data, while masking ensures that sensitive information remains protected. Combining those capabilities helps teams move faster without compromising compliance or security.

Perforce Delphix has had a significant positive impact on our organization, particularly in test data management projects and environment provisioning. One of the most noticeable improvements has been the reduction in time required for provisioning the test environment. What previously took hours and days can now be completed in minutes through virtualization. We have also seen considerable storage savings because multiple virtual databases can be created from a single source without maintaining full physical copies. This has reduced infrastructure costs and simplified environment management. From a compliance perspective, the masking capability has helped us protect sensitive PII and PHI data while still providing realistic test data to the management and QA teams. This has improved our security posture and reduced compliance risk. Overall, the key outcomes have been faster delivery cycles, improved productivity for development and testing teams, reduced storage costs, and better data security. The combination of these benefits has helped the organization deliver projects more efficiently with greater confidence in the quality of the testing.

Overall, my experience with Perforce Delphix has been positive, but there are a few areas where it could be improved. The first area is the user interface and user experience. While the platform is powerful, some administration and configuration tasks can have a learning curve for a new user. A more intuitive UI and guided workflows would help accelerate onboarding. Another area is reporting and monitoring. More built-in dashboards, analytics, and customizable reports would make it easier to track environment usage, storage savings, job performance, and compliance metrics without relying on external tools. I also think there is an opportunity to further enhance cloud-native integration and automation capabilities. As organizations increasingly adopt hybrid and cloud environments, deeper integration with modern DevOps and CI/CD ecosystems would provide additional value. That said, these are enhancement opportunities rather than major concerns. The core capabilities around virtualization, masking, and test data management are strong and continue to deliver significant value to our teams.

One challenge we have occasionally faced is troubleshooting complex provisioning or masking issues. While Perforce Delphix provides good logging, having more detailed diagnostics, root cause analysis recommendations, and guided troubleshooting workflows would help administrators resolve issues faster. The biggest improvement I would like to see is better troubleshooting and reporting. When an issue occurs, more intelligent diagnostics and recommendations could reduce resolution time. I would appreciate more customizable dashboards and stronger automation around data discovery and masking configuration. Those enhancements would make an already strong platform even easier to manage at scale.

I have been using Perforce Delphix for the last one year.

Overall, I would consider Perforce Delphix to be a stable and reliable platform. In my experience, it has been able to support our day-to-day virtualization, masking, and provisioning activities, which we require for test data management.

Scalability has been one of the strengths of Perforce Delphix in our experience. As our organization added more development, testing, and project teams, Perforce Delphix was able to support the increased demand for test data management and non-production environments without requiring us to create and maintain multiple full database copies.

We have interacted with Perforce Delphix support on a few occasions, typically for complex issues, upgrade-related questions, or troubleshooting scenarios that require deeper product expertise. Overall, the experience has been positive.

I do not describe it as a platform, but our primary approach was traditional database cloning and backup-restore methods, rather than a dedicated test data management platform. Perforce Delphix was the first comprehensive solution we used for virtualization, masking, and test data management at scale.

We have seen positive returns on our investment. As an example, environment provisioning times have improved from hours or days to minutes, and storage requirements for non-production environments have been reduced significantly because we are using virtual copies instead of full physical clones. The biggest ROI for us has been time savings and faster delivery cycles, rather than direct headcount reduction.

One challenge we have occasionally faced is troubleshooting complex provisioning or masking issues. While Perforce Delphix provides good logging, having more detailed diagnostics, root cause analysis recommendations, and guided troubleshooting workflows would help administrators resolve issues faster. The biggest improvement I would like to see is better troubleshooting and reporting. When an issue occurs, more intelligent diagnostics and recommendations could reduce resolution time. I would appreciate more customizable dashboards and stronger automation around data discovery and masking configuration. Those enhancements would make an already strong platform even easier to manage at scale.

My advice would be to start with a clear business problem, invest in proper implementation planning, and take advantage of both the virtualization and masking engine capabilities. Organizations that do this typically see faster provisioning, better data security, and significant productivity gains. I would rate this product a nine out of ten.

My main use case for Perforce Delphix at Dell Technology is to automate refresh, replication, and masking.

We have used Hangfire to automate the Perforce Delphix API for migration, data masking, refresh, replication, SnapSync, Snapshot, and Gold VDB. We are using automation for all steps through Hangfire.

We are using Perforce Delphix to move main production data to non-prod data for our testing, implementation, and development purposes. We need to mask or encrypt the production data to the non-prod environment, which is a very useful tool we have been using for the last eight years in our project.

Data masking is the best feature Perforce Delphix offers in my experience.

It encrypts our entire production data and brings all data to non-prod data with some fake data or masked information that hides all the emails, contact addresses, and other sensitive data.

DCT is also good, as all the engines now come into one portal, which is a good feature.

Perforce Delphix has positively impacted my organization as the migration became fast. Earlier, migration took four months to migrate our data from prod to non-prod, and now it is just a one-day or two-day task.

It helps productivity, and data availability is fast now, which helps development and testing significantly.

They should improve their support system for the API.

I have worked in my current field for 20 years.

Perforce Delphix is stable.

Perforce Delphix's scalability is good and reliable, and we have been happy with this tool for eight years.

Customer support for Perforce Delphix is good. For other databases like SQL and Oracle, it is good, but for other databases like MongoDB and DocumentDB, which we are newly implementing, we are lacking some support. For SQL and Oracle, it is very good, however, we are facing some problems with MongoDB.

I did not previously use a different solution before Perforce Delphix.

We have not used any other solution; we are only using Perforce Delphix.

Employee-wise, it is more reliable because earlier we had about 10 DBAs, and now we can use this tool with only two to three DBAs, which means it has reduced the cost employee-wise.

We are using only Perforce Delphix, so we do not need any other review.

Perforce Delphix is a good tool, and I would give this advice to others looking into using it. I give this product a rating of 10.