Why Enterprises Are Embracing the ‘Catalog of Catalogs’ Strategy

Data is being produced, consumed, and transformed faster than ever—across cloud platforms, regions, departments, and tools. Data leaders today are orchestrating data ecosystems that are incredibly complex and include many silos across regions, applications and databases.

And while they have invested in data cataloging related to specific warehouses or applications (e.g. Databricks and Unity), there’s a growing realization: each individual catalog is solving a local problem, but they’re likely creating global silos.

What Is a Catalog of Catalogs?

A Catalog of Catalogs is an enterprise-wide metadata layer that unifies, links, and coordinates all other data catalogs—whether they’re platform-native (like Unity Catalog in Databricks or Polaris in Snowflake) or domain-specific (like Salesforce’s metadata or application-specific catalogs). It acts as a metadata hub, connecting these “spokes” in a federated but consistent architecture.

It’s not about replacing existing catalogs. It’s about elevating them into a connected framework that enables global visibility, governance, and control—without sacrificing local flexibility.

Why Do I Need “Another” Catalog?  Well…

Most large enterprises today are already multi-cloud, multi-vendor, and globally distributed. They use Databricks for data science, Snowflake for warehousing, BigQuery for analytics, Informatica for governance, and Salesforce for customer insights. And each tool comes with its own cataloging mechanism.

These vendor-specific catalogs do a great job within their domain—but:

• They don’t talk to each other.
• They can’t enforce or inherit corporate-wide policies.
• They replicate metadata work across tools.
• They make governance fragmented and auditability difficult.

So, when you ask, “Where is my critical data?”, “Who has access?”, or “What does our global data policy require in Europe versus India?”—you may get inconsistent answers from different teams.

The Catalog of Catalogs strategy can solve this chaos.

A Hub-and-Spoke Model for Metadata

The idea is for the master enterprise catalog to be the source of truth – the “hub” that defines policies, SLAs, classifications, and enterprise standards. The “spokes” (like Databricks Unity, Polaris, or Informatica catalogs) reflect and execute these policies locally, adjusted for the platform’s capabilities and regulatory context.

Let’s say your organization operates in 17 countries, each with its own data regulations. The enterprise catalog holds the global policy – for instance, data retention of 5 years for financial data. Local catalogs can then interpret and enforce this depending on the jurisdiction: perhaps it’s 7 years in Germany or 3 years in Singapore.

This approach isn’t just about compliance. It’s also about efficiency.

Efficiency Through Reuse and Interoperability

With a Catalog of Catalogs, you don’t need to duplicate work across platforms. If you classify a data set in the enterprise catalog, that classification can be propagated to your local catalogs. Automation rules and metadata policies can be inherited rather than rewritten. And importantly, access controls can be centralized in design and localized in enforcement.

For example:

• A single data sensitivity policy can be defined once and pushed down to Snowflake, Databricks, and others.
• Data lineage defined in one tool can be surfaced enterprise-wide for impact analysis.
• Search and discovery become unified, so your analysts don’t need to jump from one platform to another.

This synergy improves not just productivity, but also governance, compliance, and decision-making.

How Pentaho Makes the Catalog of Catalogs Vision Come to Life

At the heart of this strategy is the need for an open, flexible, metadata-aware approach, which aligns directly with how we’ve developed Pentaho Data Catalog (PDC).

PDC enables the operationalization of the Catalog of Catalogs strategy – not just through integration, but through intelligent orchestration. We don’t lock you into a proprietary framework. Instead, our storage- and catalog-agnostic approach is built to work with other leading catalogs. Pentaho Data Catalog can act as that enterprise metadata hub, helping you to:

• Connect with local catalogs via open APIs
• Synchronize metadata, classifications, and policies across tools and catalogs
• Capture lineage, trust scores, and quality indicators
• Apply role-based governance that maps to business domains and regulatory needs
• Create a single pane of glass for all data products, wherever they reside.
• And with smart metadata views, users can see different “views” of a dataset depending on geography, compliance, or SLA

We support integration with many catalog and ETL/ELT vendors and are working on a near-term roadmap for connections to even more of the emerging catalogs like those from Databricks and Snowflake.

The Age of the Catalog

As enterprises accelerate their AI and data-driven strategies, metadata consistency and governance at scale will become a non-negotiable foundation. A Catalog of Catalogs approach isn’t just an architectural choice—it’s a strategic imperative for agility, trust, and control in a decentralized data world.

By adopting a hub-and-spoke model powered by open platforms like Pentaho, organizations can finally break down silos while respecting the strengths of their existing tools.

Because in a world of many catalogs, you don’t just need another one—you need one that makes them all work together.

Learn more about how Pentaho can help drive your enterprise cataloging strategy. Visit Pentaho Data Catalog.