Data Governance & Catalog
This domain tests how Informatica Cloud Data Governance and Catalog (CDGC) connects business definitions to technical metadata, and how governance artifacts are created, linked, searched, and stewarded. Expect questions that ask you to distinguish glossary objects from catalog assets, interpret lineage direction, and select the right governance action.
Core rules and concepts
- Business Glossary holds terms, categories, custom attributes, and relationships such as synonyms, related terms, and parent/child hierarchies. Terms can be linked to catalog assets and columns, bridging business and technical metadata.
- Data Catalog contains discovered assets from connections, such as tables, views, columns, files, and reports. Metadata ingestion jobs, often run through a Secure Agent for on-premises sources, populate the catalog; the catalog describes metadata, not the underlying data values.
- Lineage shows upstream and downstream flow. Direction matters: source systems feed targets, and column-level lineage is available where the source and scanner support it.
- Search and stewardship use global search with facets such as asset type, connection, domain, and certification. Roles commonly include administrator, steward, and viewer; stewards link terms, certify assets, and manage comments and ratings.
- Data quality rules and scorecards attach to assets and report profiling or rule results; a quality score is not the same as a certification status.
Worked example
A steward creates the glossary term Customer ID and links it to the column CUSTOMER_ID in CRM.CUSTOMER. Lineage shows CRM.CUSTOMER feeding DW.DIM_CUSTOMER. A search for “Customer ID” should surface the glossary term and its linked technical column. The term does not rename the column, and lineage does not flow from the warehouse dimension back to the CRM source unless you are reading downstream direction.
Traps that cost marks
Do not treat a glossary term as a catalog asset; they are linked, not identical. Do not assume all sources have column-level lineage. Do not confuse certification with data quality scoring. Do not reverse upstream and downstream when reading lineage. Do not assume CDGC changes source data; it governs metadata and definitions.