Chapter 48. Metadata Services as a Core Component of the Data Platform
Lohit VijayaRenu
An explosion of unstructured data has introduced new challenges around data discovery, data management, and security for organizations. As the amount of data and the complexity of its usage has increased, considering a unified metadata services as part of your data platform has become even more important. Today, both structured and unstructured data together provide crucial information to derive meaningful business insights. Data engineers should look for the following features in any metadata services they are considering for their organization: discoverability, security control, schema management, and an application interface and service guarantee.
Discoverability
The most obvious and common usage of a metadata service is to provide an interface for users to discover data and its partitions. If a data platform has various storage systems, having a common interface for discovering any dataset will help users build generic solutions. Users should have a well-defined interface for querying the dataset and its partitions, which can be translated to an actual physical location by the metadata service. User applications need not hardcode data locations anymore; instead, they can be exposed to interfaces that can help them discover existing and updated data in different storage systems.
Security ...
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