Informatica CDGC Foundation cheat sheet

CDGC (Cloud Data Governance and Catalog) is Informatica's cloud-native metadata management service; it catalogs assets across sources, profiles them, and applies governance policies and business glossaries.

Core asset types: Catalog Source (connection to a system), Catalog Asset (table, file, topic, report, dashboard, etc.), Column/Field, and Glossary Term; relationships between assets are captured as lineage and association links.

The governance workflow chain is: discover and catalog assets, profile data quality, classify with business terms and policies, review/approve, then monitor via dashboards.

Business Glossary terms link to technical assets via manual association or automated matching; a term can map to many assets and an asset can carry multiple terms.

Classification uses data classification rules (regex, pattern, ML-based) to tag sensitive columns; discovered classifications feed policy enforcement and masking decisions.

Lineage in CDGC is column-level and asset-level, derived from scanning jobs; lineage appears only after a successful catalog job run and can be filtered by source, asset type, or direction (upstream/downstream).

Data quality in CDGC uses profiling results (row counts, null counts, distinct counts, value frequency) and scorecards; quality scores roll up from column to asset to domain level.

Roles matter: Administrator configures sources and users, Steward curates glossary and assets, Viewer consumes dashboards; permissions are scoped by domain and asset.

CDGC is part of the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC); it shares the platform's organization, user management, and metering model with other IDMC services.

Catalog jobs scan source metadata; schedule them to run after schema changes so lineage and asset inventory stay current, and review job logs for failed or partial scans.

Glossary structure: Glossary > Category > Term > (optional) custom attributes; terms can have synonyms, related terms, and status (Draft, Approved, Published).

Policy types in CDGC include data access policies, masking policies, and usage policies; policies are evaluated against classification tags and asset attributes.

Search is central to the catalog: users find assets by name, description, term, classification, or lineage; metadata completeness (descriptions, owners, terms) drives search quality.

Domain scoping: assets and glossary content can be organized into governance domains so that stewards see only their area of responsibility.

Profiling vs. classification: profiling measures data (statistics, quality), classification infers meaning/sensitivity (PII, financial, health); both run as jobs and produce results attached to the asset.

A term's approval status controls whether it can be published to the glossary and used in downstream matching; unapproved terms remain visible only to stewards.

Lineage gaps usually indicate missing or failed catalog jobs, unsupported source types, or SQL the parser cannot resolve (dynamic SQL, temp tables).