Discovery Search in Informatica Analyst Overview
Discovery search finds assets and identifies relationships to other assets in the databases and schemas of the enterprise. Enterprise users can use discovery search to find where the data and metadata exists in the enterprise. You can search for specific assets, such as data objects, rules, and profiles.
If you perform a global search, the Analyst tool performs a text-based search for data objects, data sources, and folders. If you perform discovery search, in addition to the text matches, search results include objects with relationships to the objects that match the search criteria. Discovery search also includes matches based on profile metadata, such as data types and data patterns. For example, you can find objects that contain a specific data pattern and have names that contain a specific keyword.
Discovery search includes the following types of information in the search results:
- Objects in the Model repository
- Finds primary objects related to the objects that match the discovery search criteria. For example, when you search for a profile, the profile results include the data object of the profile.
- Profile warehouse results
- Includes inference results from profiles, such as a data domain or data pattern.
- Business Glossary terms
- Based on the license, includes metadata in the search, such as a business term associated with a rule.
Discovery Search Example
You are a data steward in the enterprise who is responsible for ensuring that sensitive enterprise data is appropriately masked. You might want to identify Personally Identifiable Information (PII) across the schemas and databases on which you or the data architect has performed enterprise discovery. You might have created data domains to identify important data that remains undiscovered in data sources. You perform the search on the "SSN" string. The Analyst tool displays the Social Security data domain and all matching columns from the data sources. In addition, the discovery search string might find additional columns or tables that have "SSN" in their descriptions or names. To narrow down your search, you can filter on mapping specifications to show those mapping specifications that reference the matching data objects. You can apply additional filters to filter additional mapping specifications based on projects or users. You might then want to open the mapping specifications in the results to verify that the mapping specifications meet the privacy policies of the enterprise.