analytics-dictionary / term / data infrastructure

Data catalog

A data catalog is an organised inventory of your data assets, with descriptions, owners and lineage.

Written by Reflective Data experts · updated Oct 5, 2026

It helps people find the right table, understand what it means and judge whether to trust it. Many teams start with the documentation generated from their dbt project.

Catalogs only help if the descriptions are maintained.

Data governance Data lineage dbt

// how we can help

We design, build and optimise data warehouses and the cloud infrastructure around them. Data infrastructure services → · Managed data pipelines

Apache Airflow

Apache Airflow is an open-source platform for authoring, scheduling and monitoring data workflows.

data-replication.md

Data replication

Data replication copies data from one system to another, to keep a second copy up to…

data-mesh.md

Data mesh

Data mesh is an approach where business domains own and publish their own data as products,…

data-retention.md

Data retention

Data retention policies define how long different data is kept before it is deleted or archived.

apache-kafka.md

Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source platform for streaming events between systems in real time.

metadata.md

Metadata

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

← full analytics dictionary