Data engineering·Governance, privacy and meaning
you search for 'revenue', find eleven tables with that word in them, and can see which one is actually used by the finance dashboard.
Data catalogue
Also calledcatalog, metadata catalogue
A searchable inventory of datasets with their schemas, owners, lineage, freshness and usage. Its value is disproportionately in usage statistics: 'this table is queried four hundred times a day and that one twice a year' answers the question a description never will. A catalogue populated by hand decays within months, so the ones that work are the ones fed automatically from the warehouse and the orchestrator.