The July 2026 release of Data Governance and Catalog includes the following new features and enhancements.
Natural Language Search
To simplify asset discovery, you can search using natural language phrases instead of constructing complex keywords or rigidly structured queries. Data Governance and Catalog interprets your natural language search and returns matching assets and related results based on your query.
In the search results page, you can view your query, explanation of how it was interpreted, and the generated query used to retrieve results, providing transparency into the AI reasoning process. Save your natural language search queries as a saved search for future use or for sharing with your team.
Unstructured data discovery and classification
You can catalog, discover, and classify unstructured documents alongside your structured data assets in Data Governance and Catalog to gain complete visibility across your data landscape.
This release includes the following key capabilities:
•Catalog and discover unstructured documents, including PDFs, Word documents, and text files.
•Automatically classify unstructured documents into categories using the new Document type classification available in Metadata Command Center.
•You can classify unstructured documents using the document classification capability for the following catalog sources:
- Amazon S3
- Databricks
- File System
- Google Cloud Storage
- Hadoop Distributed File System
- Microsoft OneDrive
- Microsoft SharePoint Online
- Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
- Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
- Microsoft Fabric OneLake
- Oracle Cloud Object Storage
- SFTP File System
Handle unrecognized files during metadata extraction
You can now configure how Metadata Command Center handles files with unrecognized formats during metadata extraction from the following catalog sources:
•Amazon S3
•Databricks
•File System
•Google Cloud Storage
•Hadoop Distributed File System
•Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
•Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
•Microsoft Fabric OneLake
•Microsoft OneDrive
•Microsoft SharePoint Online
•Oracle Cloud Object Storage
•SFTP File System
You can configure the catalog sources to treat all unrecognized file formats as either structured or unstructured files. Optionally, you can define specific path-level exceptions to override whether the unrecognized files should be treated as structured or unstructured files.
For information about handling unrecognized files, see the corresponding catalog source help.
Enhanced catalog sources
This release includes the following enhancements to catalog sources:
Microsoft Power BI
You can now extract PaginatedReportDataset objects that connect to Power BI datasets which use DAX and MDX queries.
When you run a metadata extraction job on Microsoft Azure Data Factory pipelines, the job uses operational metadata from trigger runs to generate lineage for pipelines.