Metadata catalog
A metadata catalog is a system that organizes and exposes descriptive information about data assets to support their discovery, evaluation, governance, and management.
Effective Data Analysis
A data catalog is an inventory and discovery system that describes available data, its relationships, its provenance, and its ownership.
- How it is used
- Supports data discovery, interpretation, and self-service analytics across public repositories and organizational data warehouses.
- How deep it goes
- Explains catalog contents and practical uses, but stops short of implementation details for building a catalog.
- Examples
- Uses public dataset catalogs, a survey codebook, warehouse information schemas, lineage graphs, and example queries.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate available variables, relationships, uses, and limitations before selecting data for an analytical question.
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Architecting an Apache Iceberg Lakehouse
A data catalog is a system that stores and exposes metadata for discovering, describing, and governing data assets.
- How it is used
- Coordinates Iceberg table discovery, access, governance, lineage, and recovery across users, engines, and storage.
- How deep it goes
- Explains logical-name resolution, governance, backend tradeoffs, and failure recovery without descending into catalog protocol internals.
- Examples
- Uses AWS Glue, Nessie, Apache Polaris, Gravitino, BigLake, OneLake, and notebook workflows as implementation examples.
- What you can do after
- Operate/configure catalog-backed Iceberg access, compare backend resilience and governance, and restore a table from a known metadata location.
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Related concepts
- metadatauses · Metadata is information that describes, identifies, or provides context about other data, resources, or artifacts.
- Apache Gravitinoincludes · An open-source catalog and metadata-management system designed to provide unified access to distributed data assets.
- Apache Iceberguses · Apache Iceberg is an open table format for managing large analytical datasets with metadata, schema evolution, snapshots, and transactional operations across distributed or object storage.
- datasetuses · A dataset is an organized collection of related data items, records, or observations treated as a unit for storage, processing, analysis, or computation.
- AWS Glueincludes · AWS Glue is a managed cloud service for discovering, preparing, integrating, and moving data between sources and destinations.
- Project Nessieincludes · Project Nessie is an open-source transactional catalog service that provides Git-like branching and versioning for data, metadata, and data lakes.
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