How can I get Consistency in Masking

Waltz

I'm masking a table that has a field with FULLNAME and I'm trying to use a SUBSTITUTION Rule. So John Brown will be masked to Henry Clay and Mary Jane will changed to Betty White.  The challenge I have is that I need all instances to John Brown to change to the same value.  How can that be achieved?

Ben_P

Hi Waltz, thank you for your post.

You can achieve what you're looking for by using a Sync Manager rule.

Please see our documentation on how to create a sync manager rule here https://documentation.red-gate.com/dms/data-masker-help/masking-rules/sync-manager-rules 
(As it notes, you can use a sync manager rule to " mask unique combinations data consistently, i.e. every "Alan Smith" becomes "Anita Radcliffe" in all tables...")

Waltz

The Sync Manager seems gears for use across multiple tables - I'm just masking one table.  See example below:

BEFORE				AFTER
ID	Contact	Dept		ID	Contact	Dept
1	James Brown	Finance		1	John Doe	Finance
2	Henry Clay	HR		2	Mickey Mantle	HR
3	James Brown	HR		3	John Doe	HR
4	Henry Clay	Sales		4	Mickey Mantle	Sales
5	James Brown	Collections		5	John Doe	Collections

Ben_P

Hi Waltz

The sync manager rule will work with a single table as well and you won't need to make a temporary table. 

When you first convert the substitution rule to a sync manager, it will actually only apply to the one target table (you would need to edit the rule to add other targets in order to apply to multiple tables).

Karolina28

This is very useful information.

graded

Create a lookup table mapping original names to masked values. Look up each name and use the corresponding masked value. This ensures all instances of the same name are replaced consistently.

muzammil

To ensure consistent masking of names like "John Brown" to the same value such as "Henry Clay" across all instances, you can use a substitution rule with a deterministic algorithm or mapping table. This guarantees repeatable outputs for the same input. In contexts like managing data for applications or games such as asphalt nitro mod menu apk similar techniques can be applied to maintain consistency in sensitive data handling or user personalization.