A centralized repository that stores metadata and helps users discover, understand, and manage data assets across the organization.
Data Catalog helps data scientists find customer datasets by searching for 'customer behavior' and seeing what tables, descriptions, and owners are available.
All provide a managed metadata catalog to inventory datasets (tables, files, topics), enable search and discovery, track schema and lineage (to varying degrees), and support governance. AWS Glue Data Catalog is tightly integrated with Glue/Athena/Lake Formation; Microsoft Purview focuses on enterprise data governance across Azure and multi-cloud; Google Dataplex Data Catalog unifies metadata and governance for data lakes/warehouses on Google Cloud; OCI Data Catalog provides metadata management and discovery for Oracle Cloud data assets.