Data catalog tools help business and data analysts locate, organize and leverage the company’s data assets across their enterprise. This allows them to quickly find relevant information and make decisions that drive efficiency, growth and profitability.

A robust data catalog software should provide the following capabilities:

Powerful search to easily explore datasets. It should support faceted and natural language search as well as advanced searches by parameters including name, size, time, owner and format.

Embedded data governance and guided data stewardship features: A good data catalog should enable data stewards to easily create data pipelines for analytics, machine learning and AI processes while also providing a set of granular controls for data privacy and security.

Business glossary to avoid misunderstandings: A strong data catalog should provide a business glossary, which helps users avoid misinterpretations of common terms and understanding the relationships between key business entities and metrics. This helps decrease the amount of back and forth in your organization, reducing the likelihood of errors caused by inaccurate terminology or a lack of understanding.

Visualize data lineage to understand where your data is coming from and where it’s going: A powerful catalog should provide data lineage visualization that lets you trace data lineages and track down duplicated data sets.

Efficient data curation: A good data catalog should support a robust data curation feature that automatically captures metadata from multiple sources and ingests it into the catalog.

Simplified compliance: A strong data catalog should help simplify compliance by profiling data assets, inferring their relevance to specific regulations and tagging them for future reference.