Pradip
06 Nov, 2025
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Metadata management with Microsoft Purview in Azure

Metadata Management with Microsoft Purview in Azure

In today’s data-driven world, organizations collect and store massive amounts of data across on-premises systems, cloud platforms, and SaaS applications. Managing this distributed data landscape efficiently requires a unified approach to understanding, governing, and securing data assets.
Microsoft Purview, Azure’s unified data governance solution, provides a comprehensive way to manage metadata, establish data lineage, and ensure compliance across your data estate.

What is Metadata, and Why Should You Care?

Before we dive into Purview, let’s get one thing straight. Metadata is “data about data.” Think of it as a comprehensive label on a container.

A file named Q3_Sales.csv is data.
The information about that file—its author, the date it was created, the column "Total_Revenue" containing sensitive PII, and its source system—that’s metadata.

Without effective metadata management, you’re flying blind. You face:

Data Silos: No unified view of your data estate.
Security Risks: Inability to locate and protect sensitive data.
Compliance Failures: Struggling to meet regulations like GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA.
Low Data Trust: Analysts and scientists waste precious time just finding and understanding data.

What is Microsoft Purview?

Microsoft Purview is a cloud-native data governance and catalog service offered by Azure. It helps organizations:

Discover and classify data across hybrid and multicloud environments.
Manage metadata for better visibility into data assets.
Establish data lineage to track data flow from source to destination.
Ensure compliance with data protection regulations.

Essentially, Microsoft Purview acts as a central metadata repository, providing a single pane of glass for managing all enterprise data.

The Core Pillars of Metadata Management in Purview

1. The Unified Data Map: The Beating Heart

At the core of Purview is the Data Map. This is a scalable foundation that captures all metadata across your data estate. It leverages Apache Atlas under the hood, providing a powerful and open ontology for describing data assets.

How it works: You register your data sources—Azure SQL Database, AWS S3, Salesforce, on-prem SQL Server, etc.—and Purview automatically scans them.
The Result: A centralized catalog of all your data assets, from databases and tables to reports and files.

2. Automated Scanning and Classification

Manually cataloging data is a nightmare. Purview automates this entirely.

Scanning: Purview uses built-in scanning rulesets and credentials to connect to your sources, crawl through them, and extract technical metadata (schema, table names, file types, etc.).
Classification: This is where the magic happens. Purview uses built-in and custom sensitive information types (like Credit Card Numbers, Passport IDs) to automatically label your data. Finding all files containing personal email addresses across 20 different storage accounts becomes a simple search query.

3. Data Lineage: The “Story” of Your Data

Lineage is arguably one of Purview’s most powerful features. It visually answers the question: “Where did this data come from, and how was it transformed?”

For supported Azure services like Azure Data Factory (ADF), Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI, Purview can automatically capture lineage.

When an ADF pipeline copies data from Azure Data Lake Storage to a Synapse data warehouse, that lineage is captured.
When a Power BI report is built from that Synapse table, that lineage is also captured.

This end-to-end view is critical for impact analysis (what reports break if I change this table?), debugging, and building trust in your data.

4. Business Glossary and Sensitivity Labels

Purview bridges the gap between technical metadata and business context.

Business Glossary: Define business terms (like “Customer,” “Active User,” “Net Profit”) and link them to the physical assets in your catalog. This creates a common language that everyone in the organization can understand.
Sensitivity Labels: Directly integrated with the Microsoft Information Protection ecosystem, you can automatically apply sensitivity labels (e.g., “Public,” “Confidential,” “Highly Confidential”) to your data assets. These labels can then enforce protection actions, like encryption or access restrictions, as the data moves across Microsoft 365 and Azure.

Benefits of Metadata Management with Purview

Unified visibility into enterprise data.
Faster and more confident decision-making.
Reduced compliance risks through sensitive data tracking.
Enhanced collaboration between business and IT teams.
Simplified governance across hybrid and multicloud environments.

Conclusion

Microsoft Purview transforms how organizations manage, govern, and utilize data.
With powerful metadata management, automated classification, and lineage tracking, Purview provides a foundation for data trust and compliance in modern enterprises.
If you are looking to enhance your data governance strategy in Azure, Microsoft Purview is the tool to explore.

Learn More with Learnomate Technologies

At Learnomate Technologies, we specialize in enterprise database and cloud learning — from Oracle Database Administration to Azure Data Governance solutions.
Want to master Azure Purview and data management tools?

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🌐 Website: learnomate.orgMetadata management with Microsoft Purview