Main Definition
A data catalog is a centralized, searchable inventory of an organization’s data assets, including metadata such as location, format, ownership, and usage designed to help users and administrators discover and understand available data without manually searching individual systems. It records what data exists, where it lives, who owns it, when it was created or last accessed, and what it contains, making it possible to find, understand, and govern data across an entire environment. Data catalogs are the essential management tool for getting to AI Data Readiness.
Catalogs have existed for years for structured data in databases. However, more than 80% of data in most organizations is unstructured. Cataloging this data is much more challenging, as most of it hides behind a permissioned directory structure, and the data does not lend itself to rows and columns. This data can amount to billions of files (documents, images, research outputs, instrument data) scattered across NAS systems, parallel file systems, and object stores. Traditional database catalogs aren’t built to handle unstructured data.
An Unstructured Data Catalog addresses this by scanning file systems at scale, extracting and enriching metadata from file headers, and building a searchable index across vendors and platforms. This visibility is the foundation for everything else: including lifecycle management, and AI data preparation.
Starfish provides a vendor neutral Unstructured Data Catalog, able to scan tens of billions of files across systems like NetApp, Dell, VAST, Weka, and object stores to build a single searchable index. It transforms scattered, siloed storage systems into a navigable, organization-wide resource, reducing duplicated effort and enabling faster, more confident data-driven decisions.
Related Links
- Unstructured Data Catalogs Transform File Management | Starfish Storage
- Starfish Product: Unstructured Data Catalog | Starfish Storage
- What is a Data Catalog? | IBM
- Data Catalog | Alation
