What is a data catalog?

A data catalog is a searchable inventory of an organization's data assets, tables, columns, and reports, along with definitions, ownership, and how they relate to each other. It's built so someone can find and understand a piece of data without asking whoever created it, and so two teams don't invent two different definitions for the same metric.

How it works

A catalog typically indexes what tables and columns exist, lets people search by name or keyword, and attaches business context: what a column means, who owns it, what it's used for, and often where it came from (lineage) and how fresh it is. Some catalogs auto-discover tables by scanning a warehouse; others rely on people to register and describe assets by hand.

Why it matters

Without a catalog, definitions live in people's heads or scattered documents, and the same metric gets calculated three different ways by three different teams because nobody could find the existing definition. A catalog centralizes that, so "active customer" means one thing everywhere it's used.

What OptimaFlo has today

OptimaFlo's closest feature is a workspace business glossary: user-defined terms with a definition, category, synonyms, column associations, a SQL formula, and business rules, searchable and filterable by category, with CSV import. It's used to enrich the AI team's prompts with your business language at query time, rather than as a browsable inventory of every table. Separately, OptimaFlo runs a Polaris catalog under the hood that tracks Iceberg table metadata and locations for the query engines, but that's a technical table catalog, not something you browse the way you would a catalog product like Alation or Collibra. If "data catalog" means a full asset inventory with auto-discovery across every table, that's not what OptimaFlo ships today.

Related terms

• Data lineage: Traces where a table's data came from, a piece of context a full catalog usually surfaces alongside a definition.
• Data governance: The access-control and audit layer a catalog often sits next to, defining who can see and use what.