Data Catalogs Need a Major Upgrade

Tools for data catalogs, metadata and the semantic layer are not meeting requirements for self-service business intelligence, analytics, artificial intelligence and related data preparation and integration. According to a 2020 survey included in TDWI’s “Evolving from Traditional Business Intelligence to Modern Business Analytics,” 49% believe their tools, platforms and cloud services need a major upgrade in order to meet their requirements in this area. On a similar note, 43% believe a major upgrade is needed to meet governance and data lineage tracking requirements. Access to real-time data is an area that continues to miss the mark as expectations are much higher than what today’s data warehouses are delivering.

Overall, few respondents were very satisfied that requirements are being met, but some areas are at least not doing too poorly. Only 18% believe “ease of use” needs a lot of work, while scalability, query performance and security also did better relatively well. However, while vendors have been meeting these table-stakes requirements, that has not helped them gain quick adoption of a wide range of self-service capabilities. Still, only 50% of respondents say people can access reports with little or no IT intervention, and that’s the most common type of self-service activity.

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Further Reading

• The TDWI report was sponsored by GrapeCity’s Wyn Enterprises, which provides self-service BI reports, Denodo, a data virtualization company, and the data catalog and governance firm Alation. Although the results for some questions are not earth-shattering, it is worth looking at the answer choices for the ones about:
  • Goals of a centralized data catalog, glossary, or metadata repository
  • Actions being taken to improve users’ trust in the data
• The Growing Importance of Metadata Management Systems by Assaf Araki of Intel Capital and Ben Lorica of Gradient Flow is worth a peek.

Feature image via Pixabay.