Dataplex Universal Catalog is a unified, intelligent data governance solution that helpsyou manage, understand, and use your data assets in your organization. By usingAI, Dataplex Universal Catalog simplifies working with data distributed acrossvarious systems, letting you focus on gaining valuable insights.

For example, consider a global retail company that generates large amounts ofsales, inventory, and customer data and stores it in Cloud Storage,Spanner, and Pub/Sub. When data is distributed across systemsin this way, it can be complex and time-consuming to manage governance, ensurequality, and maintain compliance. Dataplex Universal Catalog simplifies performingthese processes by providing a central data catalog to discover, profile, validate,track the lineage of, and control access to organizational data assets.

This document describes Dataplex Universal Catalog core featuresand highlights key use cases.

Caution: The Vertex AI, Bigtable, Spanner,Pub/Sub, Dataform, and Dataproc Metastore metadatathat is stored in Dataplex Universal Catalog is changing. For moreinformation, seeChanges to metadata stored inDataplex Universal Catalog.

Dataplex Universal Catalog features for data governance

Dataplex Universal Catalog governs data through the following features:

• Metadata cataloging. Retrieve metadatafor Google Cloud resources (in BigQuery, Cloud SQL,Spanner, Vertex AI, Pub/Sub,Dataform, Dataproc Metastore), and third-party resources youbring into Dataplex Universal Catalog, for an instant data catalog.
• Data discovery. Scan for structuredand unstructured data in Cloud Storage buckets to extract and catalogtheir metadata.
• Data insights. Use AI to generate naturallanguage questions about your data, to uncover patterns, assess data quality,and perform statistical analyses.
• Data profiling. Identify commoncharacteristics of the column data in your BigQuery tables, forexample, typical data values, data distribution, and null counts, which caninform data classification and quality assurance.
• Data quality. Define andmeasure the quality of the data in your BigQuery tables, byvalidating data against organizational policies and logging alerts if datadoesn't meet quality criteria.
• Business glossary. Managebusiness-related terminology and definitions across your organization, andattach terms to table columns to promote a consistent understanding of datausage.
• Data lineage. Track how data movesthrough your systems: where it comes from, where it is passed to, and whattransformations are applied to it.

Dataplex Universal Catalog supports an end-to-end data lifecycle, from distributeddiscovery to business insights. Governance features are also available throughBigQuery.

Use cases

You can use Dataplex Universal Catalog to do the following:

• Discover and understand your data. Dataplex Universal Catalogprovides visibility over your data resources across the organization. It letsyou find relevant resources for data consumption needs. It provides contextfor data resources, which helps you understand the suitability of dataresources for your data consumer's needs.

• Enable data governance and data management. Dataplex Universal Catalogsupplies metadata that can inform and power your data governance and datamanagement capabilities.

• Create a central data catalog.Dataplex Universal Catalog stores and provides access to metadata thatis automatically harvested from your Google Cloud resources. You canintegrate your own metadata from non-Google Cloud systems. You can enrich allmetadata with additional business and technical metadata annotations.

Get started with Dataplex Universal Catalog

If this is your first time working with Dataplex Universal Catalog, consider following a quickstart:

• Add metadata to a BigQuery table

• Track data lineage for a BigQuery table

What's next

• Learn aboutdata governance.
• Learn aboutmetadata management in Dataplex Universal Catalog.
• Learn how tosearch for data assets.
• Learn how tomanage entries and ingest custom sources.
• Learn how toimport metadata into Dataplex Universal Catalog.
• Learn aboutBigQuery governance.