The Role of Metadata in Data Organization
Metadata is quite underrated. However, it provides the blueprint for data documentation, governance, and automated controls. Let's discuss what metadata is, the value it has to an organization, and how to bring metadata into your organization's standards.
What is metadata and why should I care?
Metadata is simply data about data - at a high level it indicates what the data is supposed to represent, who created/updated/deleted a given piece of data, and when this change occurred. Metadata exists around the data structure which mostly defines what the data represents and any format rules it follows (i.e. string of length 10 or double with two decimal points). Metadata is also captured within each transaction which usually contains an audit trail for any interactions in the database.
Metadata is the linchpin to keeping your database in a good state and ensure high understandability across your data. Metadata provides the standards to compare against to ensure data quality and are a key metric to monitor to control data changes are as expected. You can imagine how without quality metadata enforcing data governance and active data access monitoring would be very challenging.
Enhanced Searchability
One of the clear benefits from metadata is improved searchability. Your organization will know what data exists where. Sounds like a basic thing you should know, right? As organizations grow it's a common issue to see redundant data repositories appear and the trusted source of information can become blurred. Not understanding exactly what data you have is a large organizational challenge as well as a security and privacy risk. This can all be fixed with accurate and up-to-date metadata documentation.
If you find yourself in this predicament, start with creating policies for documenting metadata in a centralized catalog to identify redundancies and gather an accurate inventory.
Increased Collaboration
With metadata, data and your database becomes less of a mystery and can easily be understood by the entire development team. When there is understanding of the data format and structure across the entire team, development accelerates, and teams realize greater collaboration between DBAs/data engineers and developers. Additionally, when trying to resolve bugs that involve the database, more team members will be qualified to resolve if the entire team has a basic understanding of the database behavior.
To achieve this kind of improvement, metadata documentation should be up-to-date and accessible to the entire team. As an example, all members of a development team should know the following:
- How is one record in the database stored?
- How to know which user made what changes in the database?
- How are records soft or hard deleted from the database?
While in reality, teams practice separation of duties and no developer would ever have access to production data, it is important team members have a basic understanding of the data for better quality software.
Governance Foundation
Metadata will also be the building block of any governance strategy. Data governance is the practice of classifying and regulating data based off of those classifications. The most common area of governance is around privacy or personal information (PI). It is essential to know where PI is in your data and that it is tracked, protected, and accessed in an established manner. Understanding what classification your data falls under all depends on accurate and available metadata.
Metadata on individual datasets will be what is scanned or controlled for data governance. Not only is a database more maintainable with good metadata documentation, but it’s also a necessity for compliance and automated controls. If teams want to automate any governance activity, a sound metadata documentation strategy must be established first for success.
Overall, metadata is something that is only going to become more important as data is an essential building block for our systems and AI. Data with quality metadata tagging will be highly valued in the future as we require more transparency and accuracy.
By Ellie Najewicz