The Enterprise Data Catalog

Chapter 3. Understand Search: Concepts, Features, and Mechanics

You now know how to organize data in your data catalog: you create your domains, pull or push your data sources into them, and add metadata. Now, you’re ready to search your data catalog.

But why should you search a data catalog? What is it, exactly, you are searching for in a data catalog? And how do you actually search? How good is your simple search? How can you browse through data? And how can you search complex topics? These are the questions I discuss in this chapter.

In this chapter, we will discuss why, what, and how you search a data catalog. We will also cover the mechanics of search in order to deepen your understanding of how a data catalog functions.

First off, let’s discuss the why.

Why Do You Search in a Data Catalog?

Why do you search a data catalog? The short answer is actually “for data discovery.”

If you ask an average employee, “Why do you search a data catalog?” they might say, “Because I need information to solve a problem.” If you ask governance end users, they might say, “Because we need to know what info we have to ensure that we are compliant with laws.” If you ask a data analytics end user, they might say, “Because we want data to analyze trends and make improvements.”

All three answers are correct, and all three answers have to do with data discovery. If you want to know what kind of data you have in your organization, the data catalog is the place to search. It’s where your data discovery ...