Have you heard about one of the newest additions to Azure services, Azure Purview? This new addition to Azure services is currently in Preview and is a unified data governance tool that lets you easily create a map of your data landscape. I’m here to tell you more about Purview and share one of my favorite features.

In my video included in this post, I’ll walk you through a demo of how to utilize Azure Purview.

  • I’ll start with a view of a fictional data map. On that map, I have data centers and can group my data centers together.
  • I can also add many different data sources such as SQL Servers, Teradata, Hive Metastore, SAP, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Azure SQL Databases, Power BI, as well as others, and the list is growing every day.
  • It allows for classification of sensitive data and there are built in systems classifications, as well as create custom classifications. So, if you store bank routing numbers, for example, Purview already knows what that is and how it should be formatted. You can then apply this classification to that field in the data map.
  • An example for a custom classification might be in a Police Department, where you may want to have a classification for the computer-aided dispatch and case numbers. And almost every organization has a custom employee ID. You can create those classifications and find them in multiple systems by using the automated data discovery process.
  • Purview creates a catalog that is easily searchable by your business users. They simple enter in a term and the interface will show matches and suggestions for different assets and places they can find them.
  • In my opinion, the coolest feature is the data lineage. Here’s how it works:
    • In my demo I have an example of a Power BI Campaign Analytics dashboard. It we start at the dashboard and work our way back, we’ll see there are two visualizations, campaign revenue and digital campaigns.
    • We can see that those come from a dataset that is embedded in the Power BI workspace. It also shows that both datasets come from some final data that had a prep and transform associated to it, along with showing the five different data sources.
    • The benefit here is being able to show our users where the data comes from, what happens to it, where it ends up and how it gets used can help them to understand the complexity of the data.

I am a strong proponent of data governance, but few organizations do it as it seems like a giant undertaking. I feel it’s one of the most foundational activities an organization can take to increase their data literacy and IQ. That’s why Purview is so exciting! It allows businesses to easily start cataloging their data and will show immediate value to the stakeholders in the organization.

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