Use data products

This document is intended for data product consumers who want to discover and use data products for their use cases.

For more information about the architecture and key concepts of data products, see About data products.

Before you begin

  1. Enable the Dataplex, BigQuery APIs.

    Roles required to enable APIs

    To enable APIs, you need the Service Usage Admin IAM role (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin), which contains the serviceusage.services.enable permission. Learn how to grant roles.

    Enable the APIs

Required roles

To get the permissions that you need to search for, access, and use data products, ask your administrator to grant you the following IAM roles on the data product or the project:

For more information about granting roles, see Manage access to projects, folders, and organizations.

You might also be able to get the required permissions through custom roles or other predefined roles.

As a data product consumer, to view the metadata of an asset, you must have the viewer permission to access the corresponding asset in the source system. For example, to search for metadata for a dataset or a table in a data product, you need the BigQuery Metadata Viewer role (roles/bigquery.metadataViewer). For more information, see Required roles for accessing search results.

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Dataplex Universal Catalog Search page.

    Go to Search

  2. Search using keywords or natural language. For more information, see Search for resources.

  3. In the search results, click the data product for which you want to view details. You can review the description, assets, contract, aspects, and other documentation associated with the data product.

Request access to data products

As a data product consumer, if you don't have access to a data product, you can request access by completing the following steps:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Dataplex Universal Catalog Data products page.

    Go to Data products

  2. Click the data product that you want to access.

  3. Click Request access.

  4. In the Request details pane, specify the following:

    • Access type: Select what access are you seeking.
    • Message: Provide a justification for the access request.

  5. Click Submit. A new email draft automatically opens in your default email application (like Gmail or Outlook) with the recipient's address and a pre-filled subject line and message body.

  6. Review the automatically generated email content, which contains your request details.

    To submit the access request to the data product owner for approval, click Send.

    The data product owner receives your email and reviews your request. Wait for an email notification confirming that your access request has been approved or denied.

    Upon approval, you gain access to the data product, and you can begin using it within Dataplex Universal Catalog.

Consume data products

To use a data product, ensure that you are granted necessary permissions. See Request access to data products.

After the data product owner grants you permission, you can access the data product and its assets. For example, if you're granted permissions to access a BigQuery table, you can query it directly in BigQuery to generate insights.

To access and use a data product, follow these steps:

  1. Search for the data product.
  2. In the search results, click the data product that you want to use.
  3. Click the Assets tab.
  4. Click the asset for which you want to view details. This opens the entry details page. You can access details such as schema, insights, and lineage. If the asset is a BigQuery table or view, you can click Open in BigQuery to navigate to the BigQuery studio and query the results.

What's next