Page 159 - Building Big Data Applications

158 Building Big Data Applications

FIGURE 9.1 (A) Data management stages. (B) Sixth sense advisors perspective.

From a database perspective, metadata describes the content of every attribute in
every table as defined during the design phase of the database. This provides the de-
velopers, data architects, business intelligence architects, analysts and users a concise
roadmap of what data is stored within the database and in which table.
Metadata changes in the lifetime of a database, when changes occur within the
business such as mergers and acquisitions, new system deployment, and integration
between legacy and new applications. To maintain the metadata associated with the
data, we need to implement business and technology processes and governance policies.
Many enterprises today do not track the lifecycle of metadata, which will cost them when
data is brought back from backups or data is restored from an archive database, and
nobody can quite decipher the contents and its relationships, hierarchies, and business
processing rules.