For the final part of this chapter, let's look at how the Studio uses "metadata". Metadata is defined as "data about data". It describes the data, but isn't the data itself. In the Studio context, metadata refers to reusable configurations that describe the data, its attributes, or its containers. For example, we could define metadata in the Studio that describes an XML schema, a web service definition, or an FTP connection. Once defined, these configurations can be used across multiple Studio jobs.
The benefit of metadata components is that they save developers time as they are defined once and used many times. They also provide a single place to update configurations for many jobs. For example, if the password to an FTP account changes and this FTP connection is used in 10 different jobs, the details would have to be updated 10 times. However, if you store this configuration in a single metadata component, it only needs to be updated once.
Let's work through an example of metadata...