Introduction¶

Denodo servers expose the information of your data infrastructure as views and web services. These are the data assets you should analyze to obtain valuable information and take better decisions. Large organizations generate a great number of these data resources, so it may be difficult to find the ones that are important for your needs, especially for business users.

The Data Catalog provides several strategies to help you discover your valuable data resources. You can:

• Search by relevant terms in your catalog, using both the metadata of the data resources and their actual data as well.

• Organize your data resources in categories and browse them.

• Receive automatic recommendations of data assets according to your interactions.

• Inspect which data assets are important for other users in your company.

• Navigate through the views related to one view valuable for you.

For any data asset, the Data Catalog shows you all the information available in the Denodo server about it and allows you to enrich this information in many ways:

• You can check the fields that compose a data resource and study how they are built on the fields of other resources.

• Statistics on how other users consume a data resource are available.

• You can improve the descriptions from the Denodo servers.

• You can add tags to them.

• You can extend the metainformation about a data resource with whatever custom property you need.

• In a collaborative way, users can support some data assets or discourage you from using them.

Once you reach an interesting data resource, you can build complex queries and extract the information you need from it. In case a query becomes relevant for you, you can save it for later, share it with other people or deploy it as a view in a Denodo server.