What to Look for in a Data Catalog

There’s no mistaking it: Data catalogs are hot. The product category has exploded in recent years as a way to drive data discovery and, increasingly, to control access to data. But how do you select the right data catalog for your particular needs? Potential answers to this question could be found at the recent Eckerson Group CDO TechVent on data catalogs.

At the most basic level, the core function of a data catalog is to provide a bridge between how business talks about data and how that data is technically stored. Nearly every data catalog in the market–and there are close to 100 of them now–can do that.

But not every data catalog is the same, and there are important differences among the various offerings. According to Lauren LeRoy, the director product marketing at BigID, the use case should dictate the type of data catalog that would best fit a user.

“If you know the problem you’re trying to solve, then you know what kind of catalog you’re looking for,” LeRoy said during the vendor panel for the Eckerson Group CDO TechVent on data catalogs, which took place December 15. “We all talk about data catalogs, but what each catalog offers is a little bit different…On the BigID side it’s all based on discovery. How do you discover your data at scale [and] add classification?”

Every data catalog customer wants to get value from their purchase. But desiring that isn’t quite enough to get you there. According to Mitesh Shah, the vice president of product marketing for Alation, a successful adoption requires clarity about what the customer is trying to achieve.

There are two product characteristics that are important to gaining customer traction, starting with the user interface being “dead simple” to use. “You really want to make sure that the product is simplifying people’s lives and not making it more difficult,” Shah said.

The second factor is the intelligence of the product under the hood. “You want to make sure that technology is applying machine learning, as Sanjeev [Mohan] mentioned earlier, and making sure that it’s simplifying things.”

At data catalog offered data.world, the company is “relentlessly focused on adoption,” said Tim Gasper, vice president of product. That focus stems in part due to the large number of data catalog projects gone bad, he said.

“So many times, we see these sort of failure stories of companies trying to implement a catalog, but it’s only for five or 10 users, or it’s a very specialized use case, and ultimately they don’t end up getting the adoption that they need for it, [not] to be just sticky, but actually to have an impact in the organization,” Gasper said.

Data catalogs may bare a heavier load in data literacy than other tool types because they are one of the primary new ways that people are discovering and interacting with data in their organizations. Perhaps that gives data catalog developers a greater responsibility to be a positive force for data literacy, according to Jeffrey Giles, the principle architect at Sandhill Consultants, an implementation partner for data governance and catalog provider erwin (now owned by Quest Software).

“You can teach people how the tool works. ‘Click this menu item, fill in this box, click this button, and it does stuff,’” Giles said. “But I find a lot of people [say], why am I doing that? What does all this mean? How do I get value out of this?’ That kind of starts sometimes with education about data literacy, to orient them towards how the tool creates business value to you, not necessarily that I could type something in and go find the definition of something.”

While the workflow details ultimately are important, a more important discussion may occur around how data is defined in the first place. “Let’s say ‘customer’ is not really related to something called a ‘wholesale customer’ or a ‘retail customer.