All the technical properties for a data asset are ingested and populated in Purview's data map during the scanning process, and are then available for discovery using the data catalog application. These properties include file names, table names, data types, size, etc. However, organizations often require additional context to be populated on data assets. This context is specific to the organization and also differs based on the nature of the data. For example - An organization 'Adatum Corporation' would like to have additional properties of 'Cost center' and 'Profit center' on all their financial data sets which are stored in Azure Data lake Gen 2, whereas they would like to have an additional property of 'Data accuracy risk' on their sales data sets which are managed using Azure SQL. Also, the value of 'Cost center' and 'Profit center' will differ if the financial data set belongs to North America vs Europe. For Adatum Corporation, the 'Cost center' value is 80 for North America and 42 for Europe.
In order to support the above and provide customers flexibility Microsoft Purview supports 'Managed Attributes' capability in Purview's data catalog. We are excited to announce the General Availability of this feature and it is now available to all customers in all Microsoft Purview-supported regions.
Using managed attributes you can define key-value pairs, group them together and also associate them to specific asset types like ADLS, SQL, etc. Additionally, you can search the data assets using managed attributes keys and values. In the above example, a data consumer in 'Adatum Corporation' would like to discover all the data sets which belong to the cost center of 80. Also, you can filter the search results using the key-value pairs of managed attributes.
To learn more about this capability, see our documentation here.
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