Azure Data Catalog – Details Panel

Microsoft in the news - The SharePoint Virtual Summit

For those of you who live on SQL, but also work with SharePoint, Microsoft is putting on a FREE SharePoint Virtual Summit on May 16, 2017.  This year, the emphasis will be on how to take advantage of SharePoint, OneDrive and the rest of the Office 365 collaboration toolkit. 

Last year, this event drew over 50,000 people world wide.  To save your space for this year’s event, you need to register at:  https://resources.office.com/ww-landing-sharepoint-virtual-summit-2017

ADC – Details Panel Information pane

In my last post, we looked at the asset tiles.  Now let’s look at the details contained in those tiles.  Once in Data Catalog you can enter the details pane by simply clicking a tile.  Regardless of the location of the tile when you choose it, the right-hand side of the application expands out to show you the details of that asset.

 The tile that is highlighted in blue is the tile that has its details pane exposed on the right of the screen.  The universal icon for information (top left of the details pane) identifies the information panel.  We will look at the information panel in sections as each section has a specific purpose.

 As I mentioned in my last post the Name is defaulted to the name of the asset based on the meta data name that was found during the registration process.  This is not always a very descriptive name so the Friendly Name is used to give a more descriptive name. 

For example, you may have a table named DIMAccount.  This may be meaningful to a technology person but not necessarily to a business person.  However, the friendly name “Account dimension” will be more useful and descriptive to more people.  In addition to the Friendly Name, there is a space provided for you to enter a longer description.  This description contains only text values.  If you put a link in here it will only display for you the text of the link.  We will talk about how to put in hyper links in the next post.

The next section allows you to update modify and change the experts and tags that were entered in the registration phase.  If you want to add additional experts you can do it here.  This is also where you can include additional tags for your assets.  Tags added here unique to this asset and do not have to apply across all assets in this data source.

The next panel in the information pane is dedicated to connection information.  This portion of the screen tells you the detail about where the data resides.  You can add in information on how to get access to the data.  There is a link that supplies multiple options for connection string data “View Connection Strings”.

When you choose the Connection Strings link you are presented with all the different options of how to connect to this data.  The small layered paper icon on the top right of each connection string detail, is a widget that will automatically copy the connection string to your clipboard. 

Note the importance of displaying place holders for {User_Name} and {Your_Password_Here}. Not only for its importance in reminding you where to place this information, but also since it does not default to the current users’ administrative names and passwords, this prevents any back-door access to the data. 

This last section is automatically updated by data catalog.  This section tells you who the last person was to update this asset, and when they did it. 

My next post will cover the other fun information available in the details pane beyond the information tab.