Enterprise Data Catalogue Architecture with Unified Catalog and Data Map

An Enterprise Data Catalogue is an enterprise architecture capability rather than the name of one specific product.

Unified Catalog

Unified Catalog provides the business-facing governance experience: Governance Domains, Data Products, Glossary Terms, Critical Data Elements, OKRs, access journeys and data-health context.

Data Map

Data Map provides the technical metadata foundation: registered sources, scanned assets, schemas, classifications, lineage and technical relationships across the data estate.

Architecture implication

For many organisations, Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog and Data Map can provide a major part of the enterprise data catalogue capability. In wider estates they can also sit alongside platform catalogues such as Azure Databricks Unity Catalog.

The architectural goal is a connected experience: technical metadata is collected from source platforms, enriched with business governance context, and exposed in a form that consumers can discover and understand.