Comparison
Data cataloguevsData governance
Data catalogue
you search for 'revenue', find eleven tables with that word in them, and can see which one is actually used by the finance dashboard.
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.
Full entry →Data governance
somebody has to be able to answer what data you hold, where it came from, who may see it and when it gets deleted.
The set of agreements and controls covering ownership, access, meaning, quality and lifecycle of data. It has a bad reputation because it is often implemented as a committee and a spreadsheet, and it becomes real when it is implemented as defaults in tooling — access requests, retention on tables, owners in the catalogue. The forcing function is usually external: an audit, a breach or a regulator's question that takes three weeks to answer.
Full entry →