What is a Data Catalog?

A data catalog allows an organization to discover and record the facts about its data, where that data is held and how it used. William Brewer explains the details. Read more

Effective Data Governance: Being Grown Up About Data

William Brewer explains how to make data governance a continuous organizational activity, based on well-established standards and practices, rather than a knee-jerk response, and which skills and tools will help you achieve compliance, including SQL Data Catalog for discovery and classification of data held in SQL Server. Read more

How to Classify and Protect your Development Data Automatically using SQL Data Catalog and Data Masker Command Line

Chris Unwin describes a classification-driven static data masking process, using SQL Data Catalog to classify all the different types of data, its purpose and sensitivity, and then command line automation to generate the masking set that Data Masker for SQL Server can use to protect this data. Read more

Evaluating SQL Data Catalog using Docker Containers

Richard Macaskill shows how to use Docker Compose to get SQL Data Catalog up and running in a container, in your SQL Server test lab, and then use it to evaluate its data discovery and categorization capabilities on a containerized SQL Server instance. Read more

Data Categorization for AdventureWorks using SQL Data Catalog

Josh Smith shows how to use SQL Data Catalog to perform a 'first cut' data classification for one your SQL Server databases, identifying all columns that are likely to hold personal or otherwise sensitive data. Read more

The Need for a Data Catalog

In the event of a breach of personal data, any organization must produce proof that they understand what data they hold and where, and how it is being used, and that they have enforced the required standards for access control and security. To make all this possible, it is essential to build a complete model of the data and its lineage, and a data catalog is the first step in this process. Read more

Practical steps for end-to-end data protection

If you plan to make production data available for development and test purposes, you'll need to understand which columns contain personal or sensitive data, create a data catalog to record those decisions, devise and implement a data masking, and then provision the sanitized database copies. Richard Macaskill show how to automate as much of this process as possible. Read more

The Data Catalog comes of Age

Nowadays, it isn’t just banks and multinational corporations who have to be rigorous about data. Even modest organisations who would previously been unable to afford the storage, tooling and processing power required, now have sophisticated data processing capabilities within their reach. Like the superhero of the comics, with such power comes responsibility; companies soon reach Read more