The governance team spent months populating the catalog. Six months later the warehouse has new schemas, the BI tools have new reports, and analysts have stopped checking the entries.

MetaKarta's Data Catalog harvests metadata from the estate across 400+ connectors and keeps it current as the estate changes. The catalog can't drift from the estate it describes.

Where catalogs stall

Most catalogs fill up through manual curation or periodic imports, so they cover only what stewards have time to document. That's rarely most of the estate.

Entries point at tables that were renamed last quarter. New sources never appear. Once analysts find a few stale entries, they go back to asking colleagues, and the documentation work stops paying back.

How the MetaKarta catalog stays current

Active harvesting. MetaKarta harvests metadata from databases, integration platforms, BI tools, and cloud data platforms. New tables, columns, reports, and transformations appear as they're added, changed schemas propagate, and removed assets are flagged.

Incremental refresh. Only what changed gets re-collected. Frequent refreshes stay affordable as the estate grows.

Profiling and classification. Data sampling and profiling surface column statistics and completeness across harvested assets. Automated classification detects PII and sensitive data, and findings route into stewardship workflows and masking enforcement.

Context attached to every entry. A catalog entry carries its lineage, its owner, its glossary term, and its sensitivity label. Context that arrives with receipts.

Data products and social curation. Teams package governed assets as data products and annotate them where other consumers will see the notes.

Versioned history. Every catalog change is logged, attributed, and timestamped, so you can query the catalog as it stood on any past date.

Ask MetaKarta. Business and technical users ask questions about the estate in plain language, through the LLM provider their company already uses. Answers resolve against the governed metadata, link to the underlying assets, and respect existing permissions.

What it delivers

Trusted BI. Reliable AI. Defensible governance.

Trusted BI. Definitions are findable with their lineage attached, so an analyst sees where a number comes from before using it.

Reliable AI. Agents and people read the same governed context, drawn from one shared metadata repository. MetaKarta MCP's Metadata Management Tools serve catalog, lineage, and governance metadata to external AI agents, with per-user access tokens so an agent sees only what its user is authorized to see.

Defensible governance. Ownership and meaning are documented where consumers look, and the history of every entry is on record.

One repository under every capability

The catalog is one view of the shared metadata repository that also drives Data Lineage, Data Governance, and Semantic Hub. A PII tag applied at harvest triggers a stewardship assignment immediately, because both capabilities read the same record.

Lineage comes with every entry without stitching: a table shows where its data came from and every report or model that consumes it. When a business term is bound to a cataloged column, that link carries through to the governed definitions Semantic Hub compiles into BI tools and databases.

Coverage across the estate

400+ native connectors cover every tier of a typical enterprise estate, including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, SAP HANA, Snowflake, Databricks, Informatica PowerCenter, IBM DataStage, Qlik Talend, dbt, Matillion, Power BI, Tableau, MicroStrategy, SAP BusinessObjects, and IBM Cognos.

That connector library comes from nearly 30 years as the OEM metadata engine embedded in Microsoft Purview, Informatica from Salesforce, IBM, Oracle, and Qlik Talend. Those platforms relied on the same engineering to serve their own enterprise customers.

Where teams put it to work

Finding data people can trust. Analysts and engineers search the estate and get the profile, lineage, owner, and governing term in one result. Find it once. Trust it everywhere.

Audit & Compliance. Automated classification replaces table-by-table manual review for GDPR, CCPA, and SOX, and every finding lands in a stewardship workflow with an owner.

Data & BI Platform Migration. Before a cloud move or a BI consolidation, the catalog gives the team a current inventory of what has to move, with dependencies, consumers, and data profile attached.

Metadata Tool Consolidation. A harvested catalog on the same repository as lineage and governance retires the integration jobs that keep a standalone catalog in step with everything else.

Proof points

• Active harvesting across 400+ native connectors, with incremental refresh
• Automated profiling, classification, and PII detection, routed into stewardship workflows
• Lineage, owner, glossary term, and sensitivity label attached to every entry
• Ask MetaKarta for permission-aware, natural-language questions about the estate
• MetaKarta MCP Metadata Management Tools for governed access by external AI agents
• Full version history: every catalog change logged, attributed, and timestamped
• Nearly 30 years as the OEM engine in Microsoft Purview, Informatica from Salesforce, IBM, Oracle, and Qlik Talend

What a current catalog changes

A catalog earns trust when its entries match the estate today, with lineage and ownership attached. MetaKarta's Data Catalog keeps that match through active harvesting, on the same shared metadata repository as Data Lineage, Data Governance, and Semantic Hub.

Get in touch to learn more about keeping your catalog current through active harvesting.