Getting started with the Tonic Structural free trial

If you are a user who wants to set up an account in an existing Tonic Structural Cloud or self-hosted organization, go to Creating a new account in an existing organization.

About the Structural free trial

The Structural 14-day free trial allows you to explore and experiment in Structural Cloud before you decide whether to purchase Structural.

When you sign up for a free trial, Structural automatically creates a sample workspace for you to use. You can also create a workspace that uses your own database or files. The free trial provides tools to introduce you to Structural and to guide you through configuring and completing a data generation.

Structural tracks and displays the amount of time remaining in your free trial. You can request a demonstration and contact support.

When the free trial period ends, you can continue to use Structural to configure workspaces. You can no longer generate data or train models. Contact Tonic.ai to discuss purchasing a Structural license, or select the option to start a Structural Cloud pay-as-you-go subscription.

Signing up for the free trial

To start a new free trial of Structural:

  1. Click Create Account.

On the Create your account dialog, to create an account, either:

  • To use a corporate Google email address to create the account, click Create account using Google.

  • To create a new Structural account, enter your email address, create and confirm a Structural password, then click Create Account. You cannot use a public email address for a free trial account.

Structural sends an activation link to your email address.

After you activate your account and log in, Structural next prompts you to select the use case that best matches why you are exploring Structural. If none of the provided use cases fits, use the Other option to tell us about your use case.

After you select a use case, click Next. The Create Your Workspace panel displays.

Creating your first free trial workspace

After you set up your free trial account and select your use case, Structural provides a wizard to guide you through workspace creation.

A workspace consists of:

  • Connection information for the source and destination databases.

  • Configuration for the transformation from source to destination data.

  • A history of the jobs that you run to transform source data to destination data.

The workspace creation wizard for free trial users includes the following steps.

Skipping workspace creation and going to the sample workspace

Structural automatically creates a sample PostgreSQL workspace that you can use to explore Structural features and functions.

Each step in the free trial workspace wizard includes an option to skip the workspace setup and go to the sample workspace.

When you click Go to sample workspace, Tonic displays Privacy Hub for the sample workspace. It also displays the Getting Started panel with links to resources to help you get started.

Provide a name for your workspace

If you choose to create a workspace, then the first step is to provide a name for the workspace.

In the field provided, enter the name to use for your first workspace, then click Next.

The Invite others to Tonic panel displays.

Invite other users to Structural and your workspace

Under Invite others to Tonic, you can optionally invite other users with the same corporate email domain to start their own Structural free trial. The users that you invite are able to view and edit your workspace.

For example, you might want to invite other users if you don't have access to the connection information for the source data. You can invite a user who does have access. They can then update the workspace configuration to add the connection details.

To continue without inviting other users, click Skip this step.

To invite users:

  1. For each user to invite, enter the email address, then press Enter. The email addresses must have the same corporate email domain as your email address.

  2. After you create the list of users to invite, click Next.

The Add source data connection view displays.

Supported data connectors for free trial workspaces

The final step in the workspace creation is to provide the source data to use for your workspace.

Structural provides data connectors that allow you to connect to an existing database. Each data connector allows you to connect to a specific type of database. Structural supports several types of application databases, data warehouses, and Spark data solutions.

You can also use the file connector. For a file connector workspace, the source data consists of groups of files selected from either Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or a local file system. The files in a file group must have the same type and structure. Each file group becomes a "table" in the source data.

Not all of the data connectors that Structural supports are available for the free trial.

For the first workspace that you create using the free trial wizard, you can choose:

For subsequent workspaces that you create from Workspaces view, you can also choose:

Connecting to a database

To connect to an existing database, on the Add source data connection panel, click the data connector to use, then click Add connection details.

Use the connection details fields to provide the connection information for your source data. The specific fields depend on the type of data connector that you select.

After you provide the connection details, to test the connection, click Test Connection.

To save your workspace, click Save.

Structural displays Privacy Hub, which summarizes the protection status for the source data.

It also displays the Getting Started panel with links to resources to help you get started.

Using the file connector

To create a file connector workspace that uses local files, on the Add source data connection panel, click Local Files, then click Continue.

Structural displays the File Groups view, where you can set up the file groups for the workspace.

It also displays the Getting Started panel with links to resources to help you get started.

After you create at least one file group, you can start to use the other Structural features and functions.

Free trial resources

The Structural free trial includes a couple of resources to introduce you to Structural and to guide you through the tasks for your first data generation.

Getting Started Guide panel

The Getting Started Guide panel provides access to Structural information and support resources.

The Getting Started Guide panel displays automatically when you first start the free trial. To display the Getting Started Guide panel manually, in the Structural heading, click Getting Started.

The Getting Started Guide panel provides links to Structural instructional videos and this Structural documentation. It also contains links to request a Structural demo, contact Tonic.ai support, and purchase a Structural Cloud pay-as-you-go subscription.

Quick start checklist

The quick start checklist displays when you are in the sample workspace. It provides a quick list of basic tasks to perform in order to complete your first Structural data generation.

  1. Create an account - You completed this step when you signed up for Structural.

  2. Apply generators to modify dataset - Assign a generator to at least one column in the workspace source data. Structural uses the assigned generators to transform the column data.

  3. Connect to destination database - Specify where Structural writes the transformed data for the workspace. By default, for workspaces that use data connectors that Ephemeral supports, Structural writes to a Tonic Ephemeral output database. This includes the sample workspace. Tonic provides the database credentials to the user.

  4. Generate data - Run the data generation process to use the assigned generators to transform the source data.

The checklist displays automatically when you are in the sample workspace. To hide and display the checklist, click the checklist icon at the bottom left of the Structural application.

Each task is linked to the Structural location where you can complete the task.

Tonic automatically detects when you complete each step, and marks it as completed on the checklist.

Assigning a generator

To get value out of the data generation process, you assign generators to the data columns.

A generator indicates how to transform the data in a column. For example, for a column that contains a name value, you might assign the Name generator, which indicates how to generate a replacement name in the generation output.

Applying all recommendations

In the sample workspace, on the quick start checklist, click Apply generators to modify dataset.

In Privacy Hub, Structural displays the Recommended Generators by Sensitivity Type panel, which displays a list of sensitive columns that Structural detected, along with the suggested generators to apply.

After reviewing, to apply all of the suggested generators, click Apply All. For more information about using this panel, go to Reviewing and applying recommended generators.

Selecting a generator

You can also choose to apply an individual generator manually. You can do this from Privacy Hub, Database View, or Table View.

To display Database View, on the workspace management view, click Database View.

On Database View, in the column list, the Applied Generator column lists the currently assigned generator for each column. For a new workspace, the columns are all assigned the Passthrough generator. The Passthrough generator simply passes the source value through to the destination data without masking it.

Click a column that is marked as Passthrough. For example, the customers.Marital_Status column. The column configuration panel displays. To select a generator, click the generator dropdown. The list contains generators that can be assigned to the column based on the column data type. For customers.Marital_Status, the Categorical generator is a good option.

For Passthrough columns that Structural identified as containing sensitive data, the column displays the type of sensitive data, such as a name, email address, or location.

In Database View, click one of those columns. For example, the customers.email column is marked as containing an email address.

For customers.Email, click the Email label. Instead of the column configuration panel, you see a panel that indicates the type of sensitive data and the recommended generator. For customers.Email, the recommended generator is Email. To assign the Email generator, click Apply recommendation. The column configuration panel displays with the generator assigned.

Configuring the destination location

To run a data generation, Structural must have a destination for the transformed data.

Available output options

If the data connector supports Tonic Ephemeral, then in free trial workspaces, Structural can write the transformed data to an Ephemeral database. This option is selected by default. The Ephemeral database expires after 48 hours. When you run the data generation, Structural also if needed creates an Ephemeral free trial account for you.

The other output options are:

Displaying the current destination configuration

For the sample workspace, to view the current destination configuration, in the quick start checklist, click Connect to destination database.

Tonic displays the workspace details view for the workspace, open to the Destination Settings section.

To display the details view for any workspace, on the workspace management view, click Settings.

Confirming or changing the destination configuration

Ephemeral database

By default, the sample workspace, as well as any other PostgreSQL or MySQL workspace, writes the transformed data to an Ephemeral database. The database expires after 48 hours. If you do not already have an Ephemeral account, then Structural creates an Ephemeral free trial account for you.

After you run data generation, Tonic provides the credentials that you need to connect to the database. If it created a new Ephemeral free trial account, then it also sends you an activation email message.

For this option, you do not need to change the workspace configuration.

You can also choose to write the transformed data either to a destination database or to a container repository.

Destination database

To write the data to a destination database, click Database Server. Structural displays the configuration fields for the destination database.

For information on how to configure the destination database for a PostgreSQL workspace, go to the PostgreSQL workspace configuration information.

Container repository

To write the data to a data volume in a container repository, click Container Repository. Structural displays the configuration fields to select a base image and provide the details about the repository.

For details, go to Writing data generation output to a container repository.

Running data generation

After you complete the preceding steps, you can run your first data generation.

The data generation process uses the assigned generators to transform the source data. It writes the transformed data to the configured destination location.

For a local files workspace, it writes the files to the Structural application database.

Starting the generation

For the sample workspace, in the quick start checklist, click Generate data. The Generate Data option is also available at the top right of the workspace management view.

Structural displays the Confirm Generation panel.

For other workspaces, in the Tonic heading, click Generate Data.

The Confirm Generation panel provides access to the current destination configuration, along with other advanced generation options such as subsetting and upsert. It also indicates if there are any issues that prevent you from starting the data generation. For example, if the workspace does not have a configured destination, then Structural cannot run the data generation.

To start the data generation, click Run Generation. For more information about running data generation, go to Running a data generation job.

For a new Tonic Ephemeral account, the first time that you run data generation, you also receive an activation email message for the account.

Viewing the job details and connecting to an Ephemeral database

To view the job status and details:

  1. Click Job History.

  2. In the list, click the data generation job.

For a data generation that writes the output to an Ephemeral database, the Data Available in Tonic Ephemeral panel provides access to the database connection information.

To display the connection details, click Connecting to your database.

The connection details include:

  • The database location and credentials. Each field contains a copy icon to allow you to copy the value.

  • SSH tunnel information, including instructions on how to create an SSH tunnel from your local machine to the Ephemeral database.

After you complete the checklist

For the sample workspace, when you run the data generation, you complete the getting started checklist.

Structural displays a panel with options to chat with our sales team, schedule a demo, or purchase a subscription.

You can also continue to get to know Structural and experiment with other Structural features such as subsetting or using composite generators to mask more complex values such as JSON or XML.

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