What is a data catalog?
A data catalog is a searchable inventory of an organisation's data assets, tables, datasets, reports, that records what each contains, where it lives, who owns it and how it can be used. It helps people discover, understand and trust data by centralising its metadata and documentation.
As data spreads across systems, people struggle to find and trust it. A data catalog solves discovery by cataloguing assets with their metadata: descriptions, owners, schemas, lineage, quality and usage.
A catalog typically offers:
- Search find the right dataset quickly.
- Business context definitions and ownership.
- Lineage where data came from and what depends on it.
- Trust signals freshness, quality, certification.
Catalogs improve governance and reduce duplicated effort, but they are a separate system to populate and keep current, and they still leave the actual querying to other tools.
iDBQuery approaches discovery from the query side. When you connect a source, its schema introspection inventories the tables and columns, and its semantic layer learns what they mean, so much of the understanding a catalog provides is generated automatically. More importantly, you do not have to find and interpret the right dataset yourself, you ask a plain-language question, and iDBQuery locates the relevant data across your sources, writes the query, and returns a cited answer. It complements a catalog by making the underlying data directly and understandably queryable, rather than only documented.
Updated 2026-06-22