The Microsoft Purview product team is constantly listening to customer feedback about the data governance challenges that slow teams down. One of the most persistent pain points — understanding the true shape of large-scale data lakes where thousands of files represent a single logical dataset — has driven a highly requested capability. We are pleased to announce that Advanced Resource Sets are now generally available for all Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog customers.
The Problem It Solves
Anyone managing a modern data lake knows the clutter: a single partitioned dataset like a daily transaction log might manifest as hundreds or thousands of individual files in Azure Data Lake Storage or Amazon S3. Without intelligent grouping, each of those files appears as a separate asset in the catalog. The result is a flood of noise — a catalog that technically contains your data estate but makes it nearly impossible to reason about it at a logical level.
Data stewards end up buried in meaningless entries. Analysts searching for "the transactions table" find thousands of file-level hits instead of one clean, actionable asset. Governance efforts stall because nobody can agree on what the estate looks like.
Advanced Resource Sets directly address this by grouping those physically separate but logically related files into a single, representative catalog asset — giving your teams a clean, meaningful view of the data landscape.
What Advanced Resource Sets Actually Do
The standard resource set capability in Purview already groups files using naming pattern heuristics. Advanced Resource Sets go significantly further, and this is where it gets interesting.
- Custom pattern configuration allows data curators to define precisely how partitioned datasets should be grouped — whether that is by date partition, region, environment, or any other dimension embedded in your file naming conventions. You are no longer relying solely on out-of-the-box heuristics.
- Partition schema surfacing means Purview now extracts and displays the partition dimensions themselves as metadata on the resource set asset. Instead of knowing only that "a resource set called transactions exists," your teams can see "that resource set is partitioned by year, month, and region." That is the difference between a data inventory and a genuinely useful data catalog.
- Accurate asset counts ensure that your catalog's asset metrics reflect logical datasets rather than raw file counts — giving leadership and governance teams a truthful picture of the data estate's scale.
Getting Started — Simpler Than You Might Expect
Enabling Advanced Resource Sets requires no additional connectors or infrastructure changes. The feature is activated and configured directly within the Microsoft Purview Governance Portal. At a high level:
- Sign in with an account that has Data Curator role in the default domain.
- Open Account settings in Microsoft Purview.
- Use the toggle to enable or disable Advanced resource sets.Figure 1: Account settings to enable Advanced Resource Sets
- Define custom pattern rules by going to Data Map -> Source Management -> Pattern Rules
- Trigger a rescan (or allow scheduled scans to run). Purview will re-evaluate existing assets and collapse file-level entries into properly grouped resource sets with partition schema metadata attached.
What You Can Do With It
Once configured, Advanced Resource Sets surface in the Unified Catalog alongside all other scanned assets — but now at the right level of abstraction for your data consumers and governance teams.
- Data discoverability improves immediately. Analysts searching the catalog find logical datasets, not file fragments. They can evaluate partition coverage, understand data freshness based on partition metadata, and make confident decisions about whether an asset meets their needs before requesting access.
- Governance accuracy follows naturally. Data owners can apply classifications, sensitivity labels, and glossary terms to a single representative asset rather than chasing down hundreds of file-level entries.
Ready to enable Advanced Resource Sets in your environment? Head to the Microsoft Purview Portal, navigate to account settings. Full documentation is available at Microsoft Learn: Manage resource sets.
Microsoft