Overview of Data Catalog with BigQuery

Caution: Data Catalog isdeprecated in favor ofDataplex Universal Catalog. Dataplex Universal Catalog is also integrated with BigQuery, offering similar capabilities. SeeManage aspects and enrich metadata for details on enriching your data with aspects, which are the equivalent of Data Catalog tags.

This document provides an overview of how Data Catalog relates to BigQuery.

Data Catalog is a fully managed, scalable metadata management service.

Data Catalog use cases

BigQuery uses Data Catalog to perform the following use cases:

• Visualizing data lineage.
• Searching for resources for which you have access.
• Tagging resources with metadata.

For a more complete description of Data Catalog, seeWhat is Data Catalog.

How Data Catalog works

Data Catalog can catalog metadata from BigQuery data sources. After your metadata is cataloged, you can add your own metadata to these data sources by using tags. For a given BigQuery project, Data Catalog automatically catalogs BigQuery metadata about datasets, tables, views, and models. Data Catalog handles two types of metadata:technical metadata andbusiness metadata. To learn more about metadata, seeData Catalog metadata.

Search and discovery

Data Catalog offers a powerful predicate-based searchexperience for technical and business metadata that's associated with a Data Catalog entry that represents a BigQuery data source. Youmust have the permissions to read the metadata for a resource so that you canapply search and discovery on the metadata. Data Catalog does notindex the data within a resource. Data Catalog only indexes themetadata that describes a BigQuery data source.

Data Catalog controls some metadata such as user-generated tags.For all metadata sourced from BigQuery,Data Catalog is a read-only service that reflects the metadataand permissions provided by BigQuery. You can make edits inBigQuery to add, update, or delete the metadata of a dataentry.

To learn more about Data Catalog search, seeSearch for BigQuery resources.

Access Data Catalog

You can access Data Catalog functionality by using the following interfaces:

• TheBigQuery page in theGoogle Cloud console

• TheDataplex page in theGoogle Cloud console

• TheGoogle Cloud CLI

• Data Catalog APIs

• Cloud Client Libraries

What's next

• To get started with Data Catalog and BigQuery, seeWork with Data Catalog.