Plexara
Catalog Governance
One Rule
Everything Under Catalog Is Your Catalog
A product that stores knowledge of its own and also shows you a data catalog has an obvious way to go wrong: two piles of similar looking things and a reader who has to guess which pile holds the thing they want. One sentence settles it, and it holds as the surfaces grow.
Under Catalog
Your DataHub catalog
Tables and their metadata, context documents, the tag vocabulary, the domains, and the business glossary. Read and written live against the catalog itself, so an edit made here is the edit everyone sees in DataHub.
Outside Catalog
The portal’s own store
Canonical knowledge pages and the changesets that record what a promotion wrote. These are the portal’s own records, so they sit alongside Catalog rather than inside it.
The catalog connection is chosen once, at the top of the section, and applies to every tab underneath it. Switching it returns each tab to its list, because an open table, document, tag, domain, or glossary term belongs to the catalog it was read from.
Every surface is addressable. A single entity keeps its own link, so a reference to Net Revenue from anywhere in the portal opens that term in the tab that manages it, and a refresh or a browser back lands where you were rather than at the top of the section.
Surfaces
The Described Things, Then the Words That Describe Them
Five tabs, in the order they are best read in. Tables and context documents are the things being described. Tags, domains, and the glossary are the vocabularies doing the describing, and each governs the vocabulary itself rather than one table’s copy of it.
Tables
The described thing
Open a table to see its description, tags, owners, glossary terms, domain, and columns, and edit each facet in place. Descriptions are markdown in a split source and preview editor. Tags, terms, and domains come from name search, so attaching Revenue means typing Reven and picking it rather than typing an identifier. Tables originate in your source systems, so this is metadata curation and there is no table create or delete.
Context Docs
The explanation that outgrew a field
Markdown notes attached to a dataset, a glossary term, a glossary node, or a container. The migration history behind a column that means two things depending on the date, or the reconciliation procedure a table is part of. The attachment is the point: a note in a wiki is a note somebody has to find, and a note attached to the table arrives with the table.
Tags
The vocabulary itself
Not the tags on the table you were just looking at, but the tag vocabulary. Create a tag, say what it means, retire it, and open one to see which tables carry it and which knowledge pages reference it. Every carrier links straight into the table editor, so answering what certified actually means here takes one screen.
Domains
The business areas
The areas your catalog is grouped into. Create one, describe it in markdown, retire it, and move tables in and out. A table has at most one domain, so adding a table that already sits in another one moves it rather than giving it a second, and the form says so before you pick.
Glossary
The definitions the business argues about
Active customer, net revenue, fiscal quarter: the terms every team uses confidently and no two teams define identically. A tree, walked one branch at a time. A term shows its definition, a breadcrumb of where it sits, its context documents, the knowledge pages that reference it, and the tables annotated with it, with the ones where a column rather than the table carries the term marked separately.
Access
Two Conditions on Every Write
A catalog write from the portal passes exactly the checks a catalog write from your agent passes, because they are the same checks. Both conditions are enforced on the server regardless of what any screen renders, and every write is recorded in the audit log with the person, the persona, the tool, and the connection.
Gate one
The persona grants the tool
Curating the catalog uses the same catalog tools an agent uses. A persona that is granted them can edit; a persona that is not, cannot. There is no second permission model to keep in step with the first.
Gate two
The connection accepts writes
A connection marked read-only stays read-only for everyone, whatever their persona grants. Pointing the portal at a catalog you do not intend anyone to edit is a property of the connection, not a matter of trusting each screen.
Reading is the floor
An analyst whose persona carries catalog reads and no catalog writes opens the same tables, tags, domains, and terms, with the editing controls absent. Access degrades to reading rather than to a permission error, so the catalog stays useful to the people who only need to consult it. The persona model behind both gates is covered on Governance.
Deletes
A Retirement States What It Touches
Retiring a definition has the widest reach and the least visible consequence, which is the combination that produces regret. Every delete states its effect first, in the units a steward would ask about.
Retire a tag
How many tables in the connection carry it, so retiring an unused label and retiring one the warehouse depends on do not look identical.
Retire a domain
How many tables are in it, and that the retirement removes the domain definition and leaves those tables without one. It touches no table.
Retire a glossary term
How many tables are annotated with it, and that the annotation stays where it is. The definition goes; the labels on the data remain.
Retire a glossary node holding entries
Nothing, because no delete is offered. Removing the node would leave its contents behind, so the honest options are to empty it first or leave it, and the tab says which.
The principle underneath is stricter than warning about an outcome: when the outcome cannot be stated honestly, the action is not offered at all. That is why one button you might expect to find is simply absent.
Knowledge
The Link Runs Both Ways
A tag, a domain, and a glossary term each list the knowledge pages that reference them, so a steward reading Net Revenue sees what has already been written about it without going looking. From the other direction, a knowledge page’s references resolve to real catalog names, so the chip reads Net Revenue rather than the identifier the catalog generated for it.
References you cannot access are omitted from both directions, so the reverse lookup never leaks the existence of a page you were not meant to see. Knowledge capture covers what a promotion writes into the catalog on the other side of that link.
Walk the same five tabs at a practitioner’s pace in lesson 211, or see where Catalog sits among the rest of the workspace in the portal tour.
Stated, not hidden
Two Limits Worth Knowing
The domain list is capped at 100
The catalog’s own list query returns at most 100 domains. A full list means there are domains the page cannot reach, and the page reports it as capped rather than presenting it as complete.
New entries are indexed asynchronously
The catalog builds its search index in the background, so a tag, domain, or term you just created can take a moment to appear in the list. The entry itself exists immediately, and the identifier returned on creation is authoritative while the index catches up.
Both are stated in the interface where they apply, because a steward who knows why a list stops at 100 trusts the other 99 entries more than one who finds out later.