Microsoft Purview Data Map: Everything you need to know

In today’s data-driven landscape, managing and leveraging data effectively is crucial for any organization.

Purview’s Unified Data Catalog is designed to help companies achieve comprehensive data governance, ensuring that data is secure, compliant, and valuable. We take a look at what the Data Map feature is and how to implement it in your organization.

Purview Data Map lays the foundation for data discovery and governance. It captures metadata about those already present in analytics, SaaS, and operating systems in hybrid, on-premises, and multi-cloud environments.

This map is kept up to date by its integrated scanning and classification system, and all Microsoft Purview accounts have a data map that starts with a unit of capacity and can grow elastically.

Data Map is composed of two parts: metadata storage and operations performance, which are represented as a unit of capability (UC).

In the platform, there is a set of roles that are managed at the Domain, Collection, and Data Source level:

• Domain admins: can edit the domain and its details, add users and groups, create collections, and assign administrators.
• Collection admins: can edit the collection, its details, and add new children. They can also manage other roles within the collection.
• Datasource admins: can manage data sources and data scanners.

In addition, all roles can be adjusted to the required level of the organizational hierarchy.

Data Map is becoming a critical component that enables organizations to discover, classify and understand their data landscape. By providing a visual representation of data assets across the enterprise, it helps users locate and manage data efficiently.

As such, it facilitates federated governance, enabling centralized policy development and self-service access and maintenance.

It supports a wide variety of data sources, ensuring complete coverage of an organization’s data estate, with the following benefits:

• Microsoft Fabric: integrates seamlessly with Fabric, allowing users to manage their entire data estate, including items such as Power BI reports, pipelines, and data warehouses.
• Cloud storage: includes services such as Azure Blob Storage and Amazon S3 for storing large amounts of unstructured data.
• Databases: covers relational databases such as Azure SQL Database and Oracle, as well as NoSQL databases such as Azure Cosmos DB and MongoDB.
• Big data and analytics: supports cloud-based data warehousing solutions such as Azure Synapse Analytics and Snowflake.
• File system: Encompasses file storage services such as Azure Files and HDFS for distributed file systems.
• Enterprise applications: integrates with enterprise systems such as SAP HANA and SAP Business Warehouse for comprehensive data management.

Therefore, by supporting multiple data sources, Data Map allows you to comprehensively map your organization’s data landscape, regardless of its location. This translates into better data governance, improved data quality, and more efficient data management.

Ensuring data quality is essential for reliable decision-making and AI-based insights. Purview offers robust capabilities that help organizations assess and improve the quality of data assets. By leveraging these data quality concepts, high-quality standards can be maintained, ensuring that data is accurate, complete, and consistent.

It is best to start with a data map of as little as one unit of capacity, which automatically scales with load. For most organizations, this feature translates into greater savings and a lower price to initiate data governance projects.

Meanwhile, with enhanced scanning and ingestion, the population of data assets, their classification, and lineage can be tracked and controlled during the scanning and ingest processes.

1. Go to the Azure portal, then up to the Microsoft Purview accounts page, and select your account.
2. Click on “Overview” and scroll down to look at the ‘Monitoring’ section for the “Datamap Capacity Units”, and “Datamap Storage Size” metrics for different time periods.
3. For other configurations, navigate to “Monitoring”- “Metrics” to view the data map capacity units and data map storage size.
4. Select the Data Map Capacity Units to view the capacity unit usage for the last 24 hours. There, you will notice that when you hover over the line graph, the Data Map capacity units consumed at that time and day are displayed.
5. Select the local time at the top right of the screen to modify the time range displayed for the graph.
6. Customize the chart type and select this new one to add the storage size of the data map.

In short, Data Map offers a unique opportunity for customers to start their data governance process.

Data quality and emerging technologies.

Implementing a comprehensive data quality framework ensures a reliable foundation for your information systems, fostering confidence in your data and the decisions derived from it. That’s why at Plain Concepts, we offer you a Data Adoption Framework to become a data-driven enterprise.

We help you to discover how to get value from your data, to control and analyze all your data sources, and use data to make intelligent decisions and accelerate your business:

• Data analytics and strategy assessment: We evaluate data technology for architecture synthesis and implementation planning.
• Modern analytics and data warehouse assessment: We provide you with a clear view of the modern data warehousing model through understanding best practices on how to prepare data for analysis.
• Exploratory data analysis assessment: We look at the data before making assumptions, so you get a better understanding of the available data sets.
• Digital Twin and Smart Factory Accelerator: We create a framework to deliver integrated digital twin manufacturing and supply chain solutions in the cloud.

We will formalize the strategy that best suits you and its subsequent technological implementation. Our advanced analysis services will help you unleash the full potential of your data and turn it into actionable information, identifying patterns and trends that can inform your decisions and boost your business.

Extract the full potential of your data now!