Dataplex Universal Catalog is an intelligent data governance solution that helps you unify and manage distributed data at scale, with lower operational overhead. By automating data discovery, cataloging, quality checks, and lineage tracking using AI, Dataplex Universal Catalog helps you build a trusted data foundation for analytics and AI workloads. This unified approach to governance enables your organization to reduce data management costs, improve data quality and trust, and accelerate time-to-insights for better business decisions.
Use cases
Dataplex Universal Catalog addresses common data challenges such as data silos, inconsistent data quality, or difficulty finding the right data for analysis. For example, a retail company can use Dataplex Universal Catalog to unify customer data from Cloud Storage, Spanner, and Pub/Sub into a single catalog. This allows marketing and sales teams to discover and trust customer data for building personalized campaigns and forecasting sales.
As another example, a financial institution can use Dataplex Universal Catalog to enforce data quality rules and track lineage for regulatory reporting, reducing compliance risks. Or a healthcare provider can use Dataplex Universal Catalog to create a governed data sharing environment for researchers while protecting patient privacy.
How Dataplex Universal Catalog works
Dataplex Universal Catalog works by connecting to your data sources across Google Cloud, such as BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, Spanner, and more. It automatically harvests technical metadata from these sources and enriches it with data profiling statistics, data quality scores, and lineage information. You can also integrate metadata from third-party sources and enrich all metadata with business context using a business glossary.
Dataplex Universal Catalog uses AI to power features like natural language data exploration in data insights and automated data quality checks. All metadata is accessible through a centralized catalog, providing access to data discovery, management, and governance across your organization. Governance features are also available through BigQuery.
Get started with Dataplex Universal Catalog
If this is your first time working with Dataplex Universal Catalog, consider following a quickstart:
What's next
- Learn about data governance.
- Learn about metadata management in Dataplex Universal Catalog.
- Learn how to search for data assets.
- Learn how to manage entries and ingest custom sources.
- Learn how to import metadata into Dataplex Universal Catalog.
- Learn about BigQuery governance.
- Follow the codelab: Build the data foundation with Dataplex Universal Catalog metadata.