Data Catalog

The Sybase Data Federation data catalog is the shared, hierarchical directory where data owners and administrators can register their data sources, files, queries, and data integration services, and set access control and other policies. The data catalog is distributed and can scale across an enterprise. By interconnecting Data Federation domains, administrators can create data catalogs that span multiple enterprises while maintaining strict access control policies.

Application developers and end users who need access to data use the data catalog to browse or search for the data sources or services they need, access the data directly, or invoke data integration services, subject to access control policies.

You can view and access the contents of the data catalog in various ways: through WorkSpace Data Federation’s Enterprise Explorer view, through the Data Federation web user interface (web UI), through the Data Federation command line interface (also called the commmand client or CLI), or via web services/SOAP.

Every object in a Data Federation domain has an entry in the data catalog. This includes obvious things like database operations, SQL views, data services, data catalog directories, and files. It also includes servers, user accounts, authentication services, groups, and search services. A core catalog structure is created with each Data Federation domain; that structure can be extended and customized to suit your organization’s needs.

Every object in the system therefore has a catalog name, or path. Data Federation’s APIs, commands and user interfaces also recognize so-called “qualified names” for certain types of objects—these are merely syntactic shorthand for catalog paths.

The list of top-level Data Federation directories (folders) appears in WorkSpace Data Federation's Enterprise Explorer view when you expand a connected Grid Domain Controller (GDC).

Data Catalog Entries
Each data catalog entry is a logical representation of a physical data source or data service.
Data Catalog Naming Structure
The primary name of an object in the Sybase Data Federation data catalog is represented in the same way as a Unix filename—a forward-slash-separated pathname. Many objects also have shorter qualified names.
Data Catalog Distribution Among Grid Servers
Each data catalog entry has a home server—the grid server where the information about that object is stored. But the data catalog itself, and all the services and objects that it contains, are distributed among the various servers that comprise your Data Federation domain.
Data Catalog Organization Strategies
With an efficient data catalog organization, you can enable users to find relevant information more easily and increase the potential for re-use of provisioned data assets and data integration services.

Parent topic: Basics