I don’t know how many times you have ever come across the word or terminology about Data catalog. But most probably you have heard it one or two times in your life. Maybe on the internet or maybe you read it some other places. But what actually is a data catalog? A data catalog is a metadata management tool through which many companies to inventory, organize and manage data within their systems. This data catalogs help these companies to improve on data recovery, governing and accessing that data efficiently.
Why is Data catalog Important?
Now that we have understood and defined what a data catalog is, we need to understand the importance of this data catalog to firms and companies and what benefits do these data catalog bring as far as business management is concerned. Let’s look at some of the benefits of Data catalogs. To understand this better we will also look at data lineage tools and data quality tools
- Clarity
One among the importance of data catalog is providing clarity. A good data catalog must be clear and provide a clear understanding of data well enough to help answer the business questions that people need to know from the company.
- Accuracy
A data catalog has a purpose and that purpose is to provide accuracy. Pointing users in the right direction by providing the right and accurate information provided by the company system.
- Speed.
A data catalog should be able to provide data with speed provide quick searches and provide results with ease and in real time
Data catalog Software.
Data catalog software is a simple tool that makes it easier and more efficient to manage data catalogs in companies or firms. There is very many data catalog software available at the moment. When you are looking for data catalog software, you should choose the best, most reliable, and pocket-friendly data catalog software or management tool. As I said, there are several data catalog software available in the world. At this moment, let us look at some of the data catalog software at random.
Various Data Catalog Software or Tools.
- Colibra Catalog
Colibra catalog is one among the best and most efficient Data Catalog software available. With Colibra Catalog, business users are empowered to quickly discover, contribute and govern data that matters so as to help generate impactful insights that help the business to grow. The following are some of the features supported by Colibra data catalog software:
- Automated cataloging
- Business Glossary
- Commenting/Community
- Commercial
- Data Classification
- Data Lineage
- Data Profiling
- Rating assets
- Alation
Alation is a data catalog software where everyone in the organization can easily find data they want to collaborate. Alation’s data catalog uses AI to capture the rich context of enterprise data, including relationships between data sets, analyst usage & trusted insights. In short, Alation is a complete repository for all the data assets & data knowledge in your organization. Alation Data catalog software comes with
- Automated cataloging
- Business Glossary
- Commenting/Community
- Commercial
- Data Classification
- Data Lineage
- Data Profiling
- Rating assets
- Dataedo
Datedo gives you the ability to catalog, document and clearly understand data using data dictionary, business glossary and ERDs. This Data Catalog tool will help you document your existing relational database. Dataedo reads schema and lets you easily describe data element and other database objects which include things like triggers, stored procedures and many more. Dataedo supports:
- Automated cataloging
- Business Glossary
- Commenting/Community
- Commercial
- Data Classification
- Export (HTML,MS Excel, PDF
- IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog
This data catalog is an open intelligent data catalog which helps in managing enterprice data and AI model governance, quality and collaboration. IBM Watson Knowledge data catalog tool enables you to organize, define and also manage enterprise data to provide the right context to drive across imperatives like regulatory compliance to data monetization. Features include:
- Automated cataloging
- Business Glossary
- Commenting/Community
- Commercial
- Data classification
- Data Lineage
- Data Profiling
- Export (XML)
- Free Edition
Just but in brief, some of the other data catalog tools include OvaralEdge, Alteryx Connect, Trueddat, Cloudera Data Calatog, Dta3Sixty Govern, Apache Atlas, Ataccama Metadata Management and Data Catalog, Talend Data Catalog amongst many others.
Metadata Management Tools
Metadata management is the administration of data that describes other data. It involves establishing policies and processes that ensure information can be integrated, accessed, shared, linked, analyzed and maintained to best effect across the organization. The goal of metadata management is to make it easier for a person or program to locate a specific data asset. This requires designing a metadata repository, populating the repository and making it easy to use information in the repository. Now, let us look at some of the widely known Metadata Management tools.
Informatica Metadata Management
This metadata management software is designed to aid enterprises to fully tap the value of all their data with active metadata. Informatica metadata management tool scans the metadata from all of the enterprises data systems including databases and file systems, intergartion tools and processes and analytics and data Science tools. Some of its features include Business Glossary, Change history, Data classification, Data lineage, Data profiling, On premises/Cloud and rating.
Dataedo
This metadata management tool is designed to enable the companies to easily catalog their data in central metadata respository as fast and then annotate each data asest, extract and document table relationships, build business Glossary and map it to to data dictionary, classify sensitive data, visualize data models with ER Diagrams and share documentation with data community in interactive web portal or HTML exports. Some of the features that Dataedo comes with include: Business Glosary, Change History, Data classification and On Premise/cloud (other premises)
IO-Tahoe
Io-Tahoe is an enterprise smart data discovery and AI-driven data catalog product that enables enterprises to accelerate to next-generation data management practices, radically improving data governance and regulatory compliance. It automatically discover data relationships across the enterprise and identifies changes and trends within a data source over a period of time, leveraging Io-Tahoe’s smart data discovery capability to assess changes to metadata.
Some of the features that come with IO-Tahoe metadata tool include: Business Glossary,Change history, Data Classification, Data Lineage, Data profiling, On premises/cloud, Rating and support for workflow.
Other Metadata management Tools
There are many metadata management tools. I cant list them all because the list is quite long. Besides the above mentioned metadata management tools, Iam going to briefly mention some other wel known metadata management tools and they include: Adaptive Metadata Manager,Erwin Data catalog, Oracle enterprise Metadata Management, Alex solutions, TopBraid EDG-Metadata Management, Ataccama metadata management & data catalog, Meta Centre amongst many more others.
