“A Trustworthy Dataset Is A Needle in A Haystack”

Satyen is the CEO of Alation. Before Alation, Satyen spent nearly a decade at Oracle, ultimately running the Financial Services Warehousing and Performance Management business where he helped customers get insights out of their systems. Prior to Oracle, Satyen was an Associate with the Texas Pacific Group and an Analyst with Morgan Stanley & Co. Satyen holds a Masters from the University of Oxford and a Bachelors from Columbia College, both in Economics.

Satyen: Much like Amazon helps users buy the right product, a data catalog helps people get the right data. A good data catalog provides rich information on all data within an organization, so members can find a relevant data set, understand what it means and where it came from, trust that it’s accurate and up-to-date, and then put it to use. A modern data catalog will leverage powerful technologies—like crawling and indexing, query log parsing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing—appropriately combined with crowd-sourcing and expert-input, to achieve both broad coverage and high quality of data knowledge. In addition to describing the data, it will also show how it’s been used in the past and ought to be used in the future.

Satyen: Data catalogs are used by data consumers (i.e. people who use data to make reports, models, analyses, products, or decisions) including data analysts, data scientists, statisticians, marketers, product managers, salespeople, customer support personnel, finance and operations workers, and even executives. By making data more searchable and consumable, a data catalog can broaden the data audience and make an organization more data-driven across the board.

Data curators and creators also play a role in populating and enriching the data catalog.