There are several data management and analytics tools that help you manage, analyze, and relate data. For example, you can use a data dictionary to discover the importance of individual data items.
A data catalog is a database that organizes all of your enterprise data. It provides a search engine like user interface that enables you to find and interact with data assets.
Data catalogs are important because they turn a centralized data management paradigm into a community-based data curation process. This helps your organization build a trust in its data assets.
In addition to helping you find and analyze data, a data catalog can also help you to understand and maintain it. Catalogs provide information on the origins, lineage, and usage of data assets. They help you identify data conflicts and track issues to resolution.
Data catalogs also make it easier for you to join data from different sources. You may have multiple data sets that focus on different subjects, but if they are not well-organized, they can be hard to understand.
Data catalogs provide you with the most relevant and useful information about your data. The most basic catalog includes information on the number of files and tables that you have, the maximum value of each, and a description of the column data types.
However, to really understand the data that you have, you should have a proper data access process in place. For example, you should know how to search for and retrieve the most relevant data, and what your response time is for requests.
