A comprehensive data catalog is essential for any company that wants its people to be able to find, understand and trust its own data. This is why many companies spend significant amounts of money on data lakes and warehouses, as well as supporting infrastructure such as cloud computing and security services. In addition, many organizations spend a lot of time and effort on training for data scientists and other data employees so they can effectively use their new tools and gain value from them.
Choosing the right data catalog tool can help you maximize this investment and improve the productivity of your people. To choose the best one for your needs, consider what features are important to the users you expect to be using it. A good data catalog should provide a search experience similar to that offered by Netflix, Amazon and other popular commercial online experiences where you can search for metadata and then receive recommendations and/or warnings based on the results of those searches.
Additionally, your ideal tool should enable you to easily track and manage all kinds of metadata such as attributes like the business glossary, data lineage or the status of any given dataset (e.g., approved for use, in production or in review). It should also support data profiling that stops incorrect and inconsistent data sets from polluting your data lake or data warehouse.
It is also important to look for a data catalog that supports your deployment needs such as on-premise and/or multi-cloud solutions, and provides a variety of ways to access the data it catalogues. This includes APIs for easy integration with other data management software. You also want your data catalog to include built-in governance that optimizes self-service and limits risk.
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