
Chapter 7 Capturing Business Metadata from Existing Data
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7.2.5 DBMS System Catalogs
A splendid source of technical metadata is the directories of information that
come with a database management system (DBMS), usually known as the
System Catalog or System Tables.
The DBMS system catalogs contain a wealth of metadata, usually all techni-
cal. Examples include the data type used to represent an attribute, the length of
the field, and whether or not the field allows null values. As in the case of other
sources, the challenge of reading a DBMS’s system catalog entails separating out
what technical metadata is useful and what is not. Like ERP s ...