Data Management

The Top 10 Active Metadata Management Solutions

Explore active metadata management platforms that facilitate data governance, metadata discovery, and efficient lineage tracking for improved data quality.

The Top 10 Active Metadata Management Solutions include:
  • 1. Alation Data Intelligence Platform
  • 2. Altan
  • 3. Alex Solutions
  • 4. Collibra Data Intelligence Platform
  • 5. IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog
  • 6. Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud
  • 7. Manta Data Governance & Compliance
  • 8. Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management
  • 9. Quest Software erwin Data Intelligence
  • 10. Solidatus

Active metadata management solutions enable organizations to discover, classify, and manage their data, improve data quality, manage and enforce data governance policies and automate data delivery. At the bottom line, active metadata management solutions provide businesses with useful context that can inform data-driven decisions.

Active metadata management platforms collect metadata from various data sources, then map the data’s lineage, giving users insight into the source, movement, and transformation of data. They then analyze and enrich the metadata and send it out to different tools in your organization’s tech stack, using machine learning to recommend optimization strategies to improve business operations. By implementing an active metadata management solution, organizations can obtain a unified and comprehensive view of all their data, improve operational decision making, ensure regulatory compliance, increase data quality, and streamline data analytics.

In this article, we’ll explore the best active metadata management solutions designed to help you transform your varied metadata into actionable insights. We’ll highlight the key use cases and features of each solution, including data cataloguing, integration, lineage tracking, governance policies, user interface, and level of machine learning integration.

Alation

Alation’s Data Intelligence Platform helps enterprises grow by enhancing their data fabric with behavioral metadata. The platform achieves this by gathering and integrating metadata from various data sources, then applying powerful analytics tools and providing helpful context that enables data-driven decision-making and operational growth.
One key feature of Alation is its innovative treatment of behavioral metadata, which includes critical social signals, such as data usage patterns. Alation’s unique Behavioral Analysis Engine facilitates this process, providing useful information such as data popularity, search relevance, and usage suggestions, enabling users to derive maximum value from their data.

Alation also provides data lineage services. It gives a detailed visual chart of data lineage, capturing all data flow transformations. This aids not only compliance but also the creation of reliable data pipelines. Its impact analysis function highlights the potential effects of data changes, making clear who might be affected by these adjustments.

Alation ensures that users have access to metadata no matter their tool of choice. Metadata can be accessed within platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Excel, Tableau, and more. Overall, through the two-way exchange of metadata, Alation makes data easily accessible, understandable, and trustworthy.

Alation
Atlan

Altan is a dynamic metadata management platform that ensures a bidirectional flow of metadata, operating on an API-driven architecture. The platform promotes collaboration and an increased understanding of data.

Altan offers a wide range of key features, including the capability to notify downstream consumers of potential issues and the ability to review historical lineage, which aids in regulatory inquiries. Altan can dynamically allocate compute resources x to enhance resource utilization and reduce processing delays. The platform allows users to enrich their internal metadata with pre-existing external metadata for added context.

Altan supports a variety of convenience and security features. These include automated key rotations to enhance data store security, the ability to define large-scale access control policies, and the generation of detailed security and compliance reports. Additionally, users can customize their relevance score for assets, build an exception queue for certification, and gain insights into their data landscape. Altan also purges stale or unused assets and removes duplicate assets.

Altan’s intelligent system facilitates dynamic data pipeline optimization and enables automated data quality control. We recommend this as a platform designed for efficiency and data understanding.

Atlan
Alex solutions logo

Alex is a scalable data management workspace that aims to unify and simplify enterprise data processes. Alex hosts a large data catalog servicing over 280 applications globally. Its Automated Data Catalog encapsulates the entire enterprise in a single workspace, incorporating all applications, making the process of action and value creation more efficient.

Alex emphasizes ease of data visualization with its Data Lineage feature. This tool automatically maps your entire enterprise system with clear visuals. It provides instant remediation with in-built workflows and alerts subject matter experts to allow swift resolution of data issues. The global coordination feature ensures that teams across regions speak the same business language for a uniform knowledge base and faster onboarding.

Another key feature of the Alex platform is its Intelligent Business Glossary, which links physical data items to their corresponding glossary terms, creating clear and transparent processes. It couples these features with powerful dashboards for a quick overview and sharing of relevant information among teams, therefore promoting collaborations. The platform also offers in-built security features, including automatic sensitive data discovery and profiling, which is crucial for data privacy compliance.

Alexis a cloud-native data workspace that can integrate numerous cloud- and on-premises technologies effortlessly. The application is deployable onto all major cloud platforms and can support a wide range of database and application technologies, both cloud-based and physical.

Alex solutions logo
Collibra

Collibra’s Data Intelligence Platform is centered around active metadata to deliver reliable data to all users, for varying uses from a multitude of sources. The platform delivers an extensive enterprise data catalog, permitting easy access to data across all data sources, applications, and tools.

Collibra features adaptive data and analytics governance, automating procedures, workflows, and policies. The platform’s predictive, no-code quality and observability features proactively identify and resolve data issues. Collibra also includes an automates data mapping and lineage, intelligently mapping how data is used, transformed, and streamed across your data landscape. It provides intelligent data access governance, privacy features for compliance, and an extensive range of integrations and APIs.

Collibra’s Data Intelligence Platform unites business and IT operations to deliver dependable data for every user, use case, and source. It further seeks to promote an organizational culture centred around data. Notably, Collibra ensures high-quality data, while adhering to ethical, unbiased, and compliant practices.

Collibra
IBM Logo

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog is a web-based platform that enables users to discover, understand, and analyze data. The platform facilitates the establishment of universal data governance and management processes as users document policies and rules, and track data lineage.

InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog enables teams to search and understand data via visual exploration. It assists in delivering well-governed, clearly defined data and visualizing data flow across your information landscape. InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog also allows for establishing data ownership and documentation, standardizing language and classifications, enhancing governance processes with rules, and monitoring and reporting adoption metrics.

The platform helps teams when setting up a governance framework by documenting governance policies and implementing rules to guide how information should be processed, stored, converted, and transferred. It also enables users to explore data lineage, understanding how data is sourced and consumed across the information landscape.

For additional benefits and data accessibility, Information Governance Catalog integrates with IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog to use curated data sets and extend the established catalog to the cloud. This integration helps data science and analytics teams find the best resources for their objectives while adhering to governance requirements.

IBM Logo
Informatica Logo

Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud is a comprehensive data solution that uses Informatica’s CLAIRE AI Engine to automate the collection, curation, and interpretation of data intelligence. The CLAIRE AI Engine uses models trained on over 14 petabytes of multi-tenant metadata pulled from structures, associations, lineage, and code. The platform uses this data to facilitate data integration, quality regulation, and governance.

Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud centralizes and unifies metadata across diverse data and application landscapes into a singular repository. This enables teams to make informed decisions based on comprehensive, representative metadata. Informatica’s solution also includes a Data Catalog component, which intelligently discovers, classifies, and organizes data to maximize its value and provide a complete metadata overview for a given enterprise. The system is designed to integrate data and applications across multi-cloud and onsite sources effectively, whether in batch or real-time.

Informatica’s platform also offers data quality monitoring, ensuring high-level data quality and governance across every level of an organization. This includes the ability to intelligently discover, classify, and analyze sensitive data. Using these features, organizations can prioritize and remedy potential risks, leading to improved levels of data transparency and protection.

Informatica Logo
Manta

Manta Data Governance & Compliance is designed to enhance organizations’ confidence in their data by boosting precision in reporting, providing a clear view of pivotal calculations, and amplifying the efficiency of data governance frameworks—all on an enterprise scale.

Manta’s Automated Lineage Discovery feature, automates time-consuming and expensive manual processes for data lineage collection and updates. The platform’s semantic layer assures higher accuracy levels, eliminating ambiguities and enabling users to make better-informed decisions when it comes to reporting and forecasting.

With this lineage technology, users gain full transparency, helping teams to gain a higher level of in their data. Manta also offers comprehensive regulatory compliance support for regulations including CCPA/CPRA, CDPA, BCBS 239, BASEL II/III, MiFID II/MiFIR, GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX. It generates a clear snapshot of the data processed by an organization to maintain compliance, avoiding any potential financial penalties for non-adherence.

Finally, Manta offers out-of-the-box integrations with numerous leading data governance solutions, ensuring smooth deployment, integration, and ongoing management.

Manta
Oracle Logo

Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management (OEMM) is a versatile platform that provides comprehensive management of metadata. OEMM’s functions merge metadata from various providers to deliver a complete data trajectory from source to report. It is compatible with a range of metadata providers, including databases, data modelling tools, and ETL engines.

OEMM effectively reduces data risk and enhances data trust within organizations. It provides detailed lineage reports that identify potential impacts of data changes on downstream and upstream applications. Alongside the Business Glossary and added transparency provided by OEMM, organizations can achieve increased confidence in their data.

The platform also supports and promotes data collaboration within teams. OEMM allows annotations, tagging, feedback comments, and review boards. It also facilitates metadata tagging with labels, multimedia attachments, and linking URLs for email and social networking, all presented in a business-friendly user interface with search-driven metadata catalogues.

OEMM aids in standardizing data and ensuring compliance by offering support to various metadata standards. The platform’s text search features and metadata browser enhance user experience for easier exploration of metadata, and its compatibility with a range of technologies enables a more streamlined lifecycle change management.

Oracle Logo
Erwin by Quest

Quest Software’s erwin Data Intelligence solution is an integrated platform for data management that aids in the discovery, understanding, governance, and sharing of valuable and trusted data within organizations. It offers an enterprise-wide view of available data assets, advice on their application, and mechanisms to ensure adherence to data policies and best practices. Its central data catalog harvests metadata from an assortment of data sources, processes, applications, and data models to simplify access and understanding for all data users.

The erwin Data Intelligence platform provides several key features: erwin Data Catalog automates metadata management and data mapping to provide a comprehensive view of your data landscape. erwin Data Quality improves data trust and quality through automation that monitors and manages data profiling, scoring, and remediation. erwin Data Literacy encourages management of business glossary, data stewardship, customized workflows, and facilitates data discovery and collaboration to promote data literacy and governance. erwin Data Marketplace creates a central point for discovering, comparing, and sharing enterprise data.

erwin Data Intelligence is a popular metadata management tool for data analysts, data architects, data stewards, and risk and compliance teams. It satisfies the increasing need for timely and accurate data intelligence within the rapidly evolving data landscape by providing user-friendly asset discovery, data shopping and collaboration.

Erwin by Quest
Solidatus

Solidatus is a versatile data management solution that enables immediate visualization of data flows across an organization, allowing users to locate, understand, and manage data. Solidatus acts as a center for metadata management. It integrates metadata updates from various systems and sources and provides full version history change management functionality.

Solidatus is designed with flexibility in mind. It can be utilized for more than just standard metadata management, expanding to model processes, regulations, organizations, and permissions. The visual representation of data lineage enriched with metadata allows users to track data origins, history, and future directions, and an intuitive query language facilitates rapid insight acquisition.

With a simple user interface, Solidatus encourages rapid adoption across organizations, delivering quick results without the need for complex training. It is constructed with the integral federated approach to data management, including easily integrated data dictionaries, business glossaries and asset inventories. It also allows for central collation and distribution of common terms and synonyms.

Solidatus allows teams to build complete migration strategies, experimenting with current views and assessing the impact of changes in regulations, new data sources, and organizations. The platform supports diverse cloud services architecture, allowing visualization of complex data relationships while avoiding vendor lock-in. Overall, Solidatus assists in mitigating the risks associated with data breaches by mapping privacy, access, and retention rules across all business platforms, increasing efficiency and time management in the process.

Solidatus
The Top 10 Active Metadata Management Solutions