Datameer Spotlight and Data Catalogs

A data catalog is a solution that captures, manages, and organizes information about data assets and allow users – technical and business – to find data assets and gain knowledge about the assets. There are two loose categories of these solutions:
The modern data catalogs focus on the latter – building more business-relevant information about data and putting it in business savvy analysts’ hands to share knowledge about the data. Often, these catalogs also include governance features.
A modern data catalog captures three core sets of information about data assets:
Suppliers of data catalogs include IBM, Reltio, Unifi Software, Alation, Collibra, Informatica, and Waterline Data.
Data catalogs can be employed across a variety of business use cases within an organization.
They are typically used in three ways:
The existing data catalog tools on the market tend to have come from a heritage of one of these three applications. They will typically have stronger features to support that application.
Spotlight contains key capabilities to help analytic professionals to find, create, collaborate, publish and use trusted analytics assets. Among the functionality is:
Spotlight is different from a data catalog in three ways:
Spotlight is specifically designed for analytics teams to answer new, ad-hoc business questions faster, deeper manner while facilitating greater use and sharing of analytics assets and expanding knowledge around those assets.
Datameer Spotlight is highly complementary to and interoperable with enterprise data catalogs. Customers can continue to reap benefits from their investment in data catalogs and the aforementioned applications they support.
Datameer Spotlight focuses on the use of analytics assets within its’ domain and the analytic results. It is NOT designed to be an all-encompassing catalog and facilitator of any data asset. All the features in Datameer Spotlight are designed to help answer analytic questions faster and build knowledge and trust around the assets being used.
If a customer uses a data catalog, it remains the central single version of the truth for all data assets across the entire enterprise, regardless of use – analytics, applications, etc.
The data catalog’s core objective remains true: making any data asset documented and facilitating better management and use of those assets.
Datameer Spotlight can work cooperatively with enterprise data catalogs to support better management, use, and knowledge around data assets. With connectors between Datameer Spotlight and data catalogs in-place, Datameer Spotlight can exchange information with the data catalogs, including:
Datameer Spotlight also pushes down security and governance to the analytics asset source and comply with those rules in place. If the data catalog is used to put governance policies in place for assets, then Datameer Spotlight would transparently adhere to those policies.
A cooperative environment between Datameer Spotlight and data catalogs provides customers with many benefits: