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What is a Data catalog?
A data catalog serves as a comprehensive repository of metadata, providing crucial insights into the data within your organization. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the description and understanding of data, enabling individuals to locate information essential for problem-solving, research, and the identification of relationships between various data assets.
A typical data catalog encompasses three key types of metadata:
Technical Metadata: This includes essential technical details such as schema, tables, and file names, offering a granular view of the structural components of the data.
Business Metadata: Encompassing business-related information, this category shares details such as business descriptions, classifications, and fit-for-use ratings, providing a contextual understanding of the data's business significance.
Operational Metadata: This specifies operational details like the last refresh date of the data, frequency of access, and the users who accessed it. These details offer insights into the data's currency and usage patterns.
Moreover, a robust data catalog incorporates lineage information, mapping out the journey of data as it moves through and transforms within the organization.
Organizations find a data catalog essential when they:
Struggle with data overload in expansive data lakes, making it challenging to locate, update, and maintain specific information efficiently.
Need to share a multitude of valuable analytics data and must ensure the use of accurate data for constructing analytic models.
Are subject to regulatory compliance requirements, necessitating precise tracking and documentation of data processes.
Rely on inefficient methods like spreadsheets or email repositories, facing challenges in keeping up with the ever-growing volume of data in the cloud and third-party databases.
A well-implemented data catalog is a strategic asset for organizations dealing with diverse data challenges, providing clarity, accessibility, and governance in the complex landscape of data management.
A data catalog empowers organizations by facilitating the easy discovery and understanding of business-ready data. To be truly consumer-ready, a data catalog must address fundamental questions, catering to users' diverse information needs:
What do you need?
Users often seek information for various purposes, from problem-solving to researching to monitoring data impacts in their environment.
What is it?
An effective data catalog not only reveals the nature of a piece of data but also includes attributions, associations, relationships, and lineage presented in a consistent metamodel.
What is the outcome?
The goal of a data catalog is to enable users to swiftly discover, profile, request access, and commence work with data.
Who is responsible?
Creating and maintaining an accurate data catalog falls under the purview of a data steward and other subject matter or technical experts.
How is it maintained?
Maintenance involves collective efforts. A data steward oversees certification, scoring, quality, and standards. The catalog itself is designed to be self-sustaining through AI, ML, auto-curation, or workflows that empower stewards to manage information.
Users actively seek data to solve problems, conduct research, and monitor data impacts. The data catalog facilitates user feedback, streamlining the process of identifying other affected data in case of issues. Users need to search for available data and navigate through various policies related to regulatory compliance. A data catalog aligns with the organization's data governance policy, ensuring data availability while adhering to policies. Users utilize the catalog to search for data, uncovering an asset path that outlines the system's location, down to the data element and category within the data domain.
Key Elements of Data Catalog
When considering the elements of a data catalog, it is crucial to ensure that it effectively empowers the business to achieve its expected outcomes. In the exploration of data catalog solutions, five key elements should be prioritized:
INTUITIVE USER INTERFACE:
The data catalog should feature an intuitive user interface to encourage widespread usage. A user-friendly design ensures that individuals can easily navigate and utilize the catalog effectively.
BUSINESS CONTEXT:
An integral component is the incorporation of a business context within the data catalog. This involves illustrating how data correlates with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and business objectives throughout various layers of the organization. Understanding the business significance of data is vital for informed decision-making.
EXTENSIVE INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR DATA:
Beyond technical details, a comprehensive data catalog should provide extensive information about your data. This includes not only technical information such as schema and file names but also encompasses broader insights into the business relevance and usage context of the data.
GOVERNANCE AND STEWARDSHIP:
To ensure data accuracy and compliance, robust governance and stewardship mechanisms must be integrated into the data catalog. This involves implementing standards, certifications, and quality controls to maintain the integrity of the data.
AUTOMATION, ADMINISTRATION, AND INTEGRATION:
A high-performing data catalog should minimize the time investment required from users. This is achieved through automation, streamlined administration processes, and seamless integration with other tools. Users should be able to interact with the catalog efficiently without extensive manual efforts.
Finally, the goal of a data catalog is to serve as a strategic asset for the business, facilitating the seamless discovery, understanding, and utilization of data. By prioritizing these essential elements, organizations can ensure that their chosen data catalog solution aligns with their objectives and optimally supports their data-driven initiatives.
The Relationship Between Data Governance and the Data Catalog
In the relationship between data governance and the data catalog, the catalog plays a crucial role in extracting technical metadata from applications. This involves gathering information from the data layer and establishing a framework of governance around it. This strategic approach aligns metadata with key business objectives, metrics, and various data points related to different processes.
The technology layer comes into play next, facilitating reporting and compliance processes. It enables the execution of analytics and the extraction of valuable insights by bringing together these diverse elements. The outcome is the ability to effectively document and showcase the tangible value of your data catalog and data governance practices in achieving business goals.
Data Catalog Use Cases
A proficient data catalog, designed to be user-friendly and clear, lays the basis for users to efficiently access the data they require. Various examples strongly illustrate the importance of a data catalog:
OVERWHELMED BY SPREADSHEETS:
Numerous organizations fight to manage extensive amounts of data using Excel. Attempts to catalog and inventory reports, extracted from SQL, and manually loaded into Excel, result in a challenging situation. While the data might be visible, extracting meaningful information becomes a nightmare due to the large volume of reports and diverse data elements. Managing such data manually is nearly impossible, emphasizing the need to transition from Excel to a data catalog. This challenge intensifies in larger organizations where a single piece of data is utilized across multiple systems, requiring transformation to meet specific environmental requirements.
RESPONDING TO UNIQUE DATA CATALOG REQUIREMENTS:
A data catalog serves as a versatile tool offering diverse views into an organization's data. Recognizing that individuals approach data differently, a data catalog provides flexibility in how essential data is viewed and controlled, accommodating the unique perspectives of various roles within the organization. In cases where a well-built warehouse model is in place but concerns about compliance arise, a data catalog proves essential by providing flexible views for extracting specific information, addressing issues like tagging personal information or understanding security risks.
MEETING REGULATORY COMPLIANCE:
Compliance becomes a paramount concern, underscoring the necessity of a data catalog. Un-cataloged data is ungoverned, posing a substantial risk. For compliance, a data catalog should contain information on data usage, lifecycle stages, links to data packages, security classifications, and flags for personal information under privacy regulations. Through the example of a retailer using the SCORE system, a data catalog ensures visibility into data context during audits, demonstrating ownership, accountability, and traceability.
OPTIMIZING OPERATIONS:
A data reference model, demonstrating how data flows within an organization or a specific process, becomes instrumental in facilitating communication between business and IT. Utilizing a SCORE model as an example, cataloging enables the design and implementation of processes by capturing the flow of information between different organizations. This proactive approach allows for issue identification before production, optimizing overall operations.
The Data Catalog is a part of Data360 Govern Solution from our partner Precisely which will help you find, understand, and trust in data. To find out more, please visit our Data Governance solution page or contact our sales team directly at sales@adsotech.com