Why a data catalog is a perfect solution for enterprise data management? Some might think it is only a temporary fad, or a useless tool, or something else to make you spend your corporate money. I tell you it is not, and it can come in multiple forms, for all kinds of budgets to solve one of the most relevant problems organizations face today – information assets management.
So, to clearly explain data catalogs I have
an explanation based on three topics- two problems, one solution, and multiple opportunities:
Two problems – Companies today struggle to
manage their data assets and use them to create new solutions, saving time and
resources;
One Solution – the best way to solve these
problems is to create a single source of all your data definitions and descriptions,
with powerful features to organize, document, and query your data on a global
basis. Using a Data catalog you can quickly locate your data, just like you do
with Google today. You can also query your data sources and identify all that
suits your information needs, recombining data into reports and views, saving
hours, or months of work.
Multiple opportunities – Effective and productive
data catalogs – those that give you a real ROI in a short timeframe – result from
the work of serious data architects with deep knowledge of information organization
in companies in general. As opportunities I can mention:
-
Quick location of data (what data
do I have today?) – Using data catalogs allow a company to locate their assets
using freeform queries or keyword queries, according to classification(taxonomy);
this saves thousands of work hours in analysis and design.
-
Direct access to data in any
source – with a single reference one can query their sources and ask practical
questions, like “Show me all reports used by marketing with gross sales”, to
immediately select a report and open it, from anywhere in a company; users can
also query data regardless of their format, from any source or even combining multiple
sources using “federated queries” which work much better than putting all data
in a data lake;
-
Data recombination – by using a
data catalog, a user can recombine data from multiple places and create new
data sets, fit for a variety of applications, such as AI and Data science and
again, saving countless hours of work.
Data Catalogs give a new meaning to the
work of data architects because they show how valuable data architecture can be
to the modern enterprise, by providing real results from managing data. A
simple tool and a good architect can do wonders for your company by providing
actual results, especially by saving time and valuable resources, avoiding
repeated work, and providing faster results for data-related projects than any
other tools in the market today.
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