Data cataloging is a critical component of any data or metadata management strategy. Central to data cataloging is metadata connectivity. It helps establish the unified metadata foundation required to drive successful data-driven digital transformation initiatives with intelligence and automation.
At Informatica, we have been working with many of the leading Global 2000 enterprises to help them intelligently catalog and govern all their data at scale across a highly complex data landscape. The Informatica AI-powered Enterprise Data Catalog offers the broadest and deepest metadata connectivity.
Our customers across verticals and geographies have hundreds if not thousands of data sources spread across on-premises and multi-cloud environments, creating a complex data landscape. These data sources include many of the industry’s leading:
In addition to these mainstream data sources, for a large majority of enterprises, a significant chunk of their data and metadata also resides in what we refer to as secondary data sources. These include proprietary solutions, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and various file formats such as JSON, XML, and CSV files.
A key hurdle that comes with many of these secondary data sources is that they contain a lot of custom content and custom code that is difficult to surface and even harder to extract. In regulated industries, this often becomes a big problem, as enterprises need access to all their metadata and the ability to obtain data lineage at a granular level for regulatory compliance and reporting purposes.
Often, enterprises are either forced to leave this valuable data untapped, creating gaps in their ability to extract value from it, or they end up embarking on time-consuming and costly IT-led initiatives to build and maintain makeshift metadata connectors that require extensive manual manipulation and lengthy programming and scripting cycles with limited automation and virtually no ability to scale.
Our goal has always been to enable our customers to scan and extract metadata and data lineage with in-depth information at a granular level from all their primary and secondary data sources so that they can build the most holistic and complete data catalog to support their business imperatives such as:
To this effect, over the summer, we added advanced scanners to our ever-growing list of metadata connectors. The Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Scanners allow our customers to:
To address the secondary data sources, our Enterprise Data Catalog customers can leverage the Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Metadata Custom Loader. The Advanced Custom Metadata Loader is specifically designed to easily surface, scan, and extract metadata and data lineage from proprietary solutions (these are either home-grown or vendor-based solutions that have been heavily customized over the years), custom code, and custom content residing in relational databases, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and various file formats such as XML, JSON, and CSV files.
For instance, with the Advanced Custom Metadata Loader, users can rapidly define custom metadata models and populate them automatically, including importing metadata in any form. Moreover, existing data lineage documentation that may reside in Excel spreadsheets or other data sources such as relational databases or CSV files can be directly loaded into the Enterprise Data Catalog without requiring any additional custom modeling or programming.
The Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Custom Metadata Loader allows users to:
To learn more, I invite you to read the Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Custom Metadata Loader datasheet and watch the on-demand webinar: Leave No Metadata Behind where experts from Informatica and Westpac Bank discuss best practices for extracting metadata from complex enterprise systems with the help of the Enterprise Data Catalog Advanced Scanners.
