In a world where data analysts spend 50% to 80% of their time searching for and preparing the right datasets, data catalog tools help empower the people within your business to do their job better. With a data catalog, people can search, find and discover datasets they need faster and more easily, and they can see how the dataset fits their needs. This increases productivity and enables organizations to answer important business questions quickly and confidently.

The best data catalog tools provide a comprehensive set of metadata management capabilities to ingest and make accessible all of your enterprise’s metadata at scale. This includes unified views of your data ecosystem for metadata producers (data engineers, data scientists) and data consumers (data analysts, BI users). Data catalogs also offer features to enable collaborative use of data such as group projects and annotations.

Most importantly, the best data catalog tools are able to automate processes around metadata curation and search. A good metadata management system will incorporate advanced technology such as AI to ingest, classify, and organize metadata at the source, and then automatically tag, link, and assign business context to datasets for quick access. It can also track data changes, including source to destination, and provide data lineage for rapid troubleshooting and root cause analysis. A data catalog that supports these kinds of processes is a powerful tool for improving team productivity and enabling active governance. This is the primary value proposition of a data catalog.