Search the Microsoft Purview Data Catalog

After data is scanned and ingested into the Microsoft Purview Data Map, data consumers need to easily find the data needed for their analytics or governance workloads. Data discovery can be time consuming because you might not know where to find the data that you want. Even after finding the data, you could have doubts about whether you can trust the data and take a dependency on it.

The goal of search in Microsoft Purview is to speed up the process of quickly finding the data that matters. This article outlines how to search the Microsoft Purview Data Catalog to quickly find the data you're looking for.

Searching the catalog

The search bar can be accessed from the Microsoft Purview portal's main page, or you can open the Data Catalog solution, and find the search bar on the Overview page.

Once you select the search bar, you'll be presented with your search history and the items recently accessed in the data catalog. This allows you to quickly pick up from previous data exploration that was already done.

Enter in keywords that help narrow down your search such as name, data type, classifications, and glossary terms. As you enter in search keywords, Microsoft Purview dynamically suggests results and searches that could fit your needs. To complete your search, select "View search results" or press "Enter".

Once you enter in your search, Microsoft Purview returns a list of data assets, and glossary terms a user is a data reader for to that matched to the keywords entered in.

Your keyword will be highlighted in the return results, so you can see where the term was found in the asset. In the example below, the search term was 'Sales'.

The Microsoft Purview relevance engine sorts through all the matches and ranks them based on what it believes their usefulness is to a user. For example, a data consumer is likely more interested in a table curated by a data steward that matches on multiple keywords than an unannotated folder. Many factors determine an asset’s relevance score and the Microsoft Purview search team is constantly tuning the relevance engine to ensure the top search results have value to you.

Filter results

If the top results don’t include the assets you're looking for, you can filter your results using the filter pane to the left of the search results. You can select the filter button to open and close the filter pane.

Then select any filter category you would like to narrow your results by, and select any values you would like to narrow results to. For some filters, you can select the ellipses to choose between an AND condition or an OR condition.

Available filters

• *Activity - allows you refine your search to attributes created or updated within a certain timeframe.
• Asset type refines your search to specified asset types. For example: dashboards, files, glossary terms, or metamodel assets.
• Assigned term - refines your search to assets with the selected terms applied.
• Classification - refines your search to assets with certain classifications.
• Collection - refines your search by assets in a specific collection.
• Contact - refines your search to assets that have selected users listed as a contact.
• Data source type - refines your search to assets from specified source types. For example: Azure Blob Storage or Power BI.
• Endorsement - refines your search to assets with specified endorsements, like Certified or Promoted.
• Label - refines your search to assets with specific security labels.
• *Managed attributes - refines your search to assets with specified managed attributes. Attributes will be listed under their attribute group, and use operators to help search for specific values. For example: Equals or Doesn't equal.
• Rating - refines your search to only data assets with a specified rating.
• *Tags - refines your search to assets with selected tags.

View assets

From the search results page, you can select an asset to view details such as schema, lineage, and classifications. To learn more about the asset details page, see manage catalog assets.

Searching Microsoft Purview in connected services

Once you register your Microsoft Purview instance to an Azure Data Factory or an Azure Synapse Analytics workspace, you can search the Microsoft Purview Data Catalog directly from those services. To learn more, see Discover data in ADF using Microsoft Purview and Discover data in Synapse using Microsoft Purview.

Bulk edit search results

If you're looking to make changes to multiple assets returned by search, Microsoft Purview lets you modify glossary terms, classifications, and contacts in bulk. To learn more, see the bulk edit assets guide.

Browse the data catalog

While searching is great if you know what you're looking for, there are times where data consumers wish to explore the data available to them. The Microsoft Purview Data Catalog offers a browse experience that enables users to explore what data is available to them either by collection or through traversing the hierarchy of each data source in the catalog. For more information, see browse the data catalog.

Search query syntax

All search queries consist of keywords and operators. A keyword is a something that would be part of an asset's properties. Potential keywords can be a classification, glossary term, asset description, or an asset name. A keyword can be just a part of the property you're looking to match to. Use keywords and the operators to ensure Microsoft Purview returns the assets you're looking for.

Certain characters including spaces, dashes, and commas are interpreted as delimiters. Searching a string like hive-database is the same as searching two keywords hive database.

The following table contains the operators that can be used to compose a search query. Operators can be combined as many times as need in a single query.

Known limitations

• Grouping isn't supported within a field search. Customers should use operators to connect field searches. For example,name:(alice AND bob) is invalid search syntax, but name:alice AND name:bob is supported.

Next steps

• How to create and manage glossary terms
• How to import and export glossary terms
• How to manage term templates for business glossary