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Metadata

Metadata is data about data: descriptions, owners, types, freshness and lineage.

Written by Reflective Data experts · updated Oct 5, 2026

It makes datasets findable and trustworthy. Good metadata tells you what a column means, who owns the table and when it was last refreshed.

Automatically generated metadata, for example from dbt, keeps documentation up to date.

related

Data catalogData governanceData lineage

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