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Asset details page in the Microsoft Purview Data Catalog

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  • 7 minutes to read

This article discusses how assets are displayed in the Microsoft Purview Data Catalog. It describes how you can view relevant information or take action on assets in your catalog.

Prerequisites

  • Set up your data sources and scan the assets into your catalog.
  • Or Use the Microsoft Purview Atlas APIs to ingest assets into the catalog.

Open an asset details page

You can discover your assets in the Microsoft Purview Data Catalog by either:

Once you find the asset you're looking for, you can view all of the asset information or take action on them as described in following sections.

Asset details tabs explained

Asset details tabs

  • Overview - An asset's basic details like description, classification, hierarchy, and glossary terms.
  • Properties - The technical metadata and relationships discovered in the data source.
  • Schema - The schema of the asset including column names, data types, column level classifications, terms, and descriptions are represented in the schema tab.
  • Lineage - This tab contains lineage graph details for assets where it's available.
  • Contacts - Every asset can have an assigned owner and expert that can be viewed and managed from the contacts tab.
  • Related - This tab lets you navigate through the technical hierarchy of assets that are related to the current asset you're viewing.

Asset overview

The overview section of the asset details gives a summarized view of an asset. The sections that follow explains the different parts of the overview page.

Screenshot that shows the asset details overview page.

Asset description

An asset description gives a synopsis of what the asset represents. You can add or update an asset description by editing the asset.

Adding rich text to a description

Microsoft Purview enables users to add rich formatting to asset descriptions such as adding bolding, underlining, or italicizing text. Users can also create tables, bulleted lists, or hyperlinks to external resources.

Screenshot that shows the rich text editor.

Below are the rich text formatting options:

Name Description Shortcut key
Bold Make your text bold. Adding the '*' character around text will also bold it. Ctrl+B
Italic Italicize your text. Adding the '_' character around text will also italicize it. Ctrl+I
Underline Underline your text. Ctrl+U
Bullets Create a bulleted list. Adding the '-' character before text will also create a bulleted list.
Numbering Create a numbered list Adding the '1' character before text will also create a bulleted list.
Heading Add a formatted heading
Font size Change the size of your text. The default size is 12.
Decrease indent Move your paragraph closer to the margin.
Increase indent Move your paragraph farther away from the margin.
Add hyperlink Create a link in your document for quick access to web pages and files.
Remove hyperlink Change a link to plain text.
Quote Add quote text
Add table Add a table to your content.
Edit table Insert or delete a column or row from a table
Clear formatting Remove all formatting from a selection of text, leaving only the normal, unformatted text.
Undo Undo changes you made to the content. Ctrl+Z
Redo Redo changes you made to the content. Ctrl+Y

Note

Updating a description with the rich text editor updates the userDescription field of an entity. If you have already added an asset description before the release of this feature, that description is stored in the description field. When overwriting a plain text description with rich text, the entity model will persist both userDescription and description. The asset details overview page will only show userDescription. The description field can't be edited in the Microsoft Purview studio user experience.

Classifications

Classifications identify the kind of data being represented by an asset or column such as "ABA routing number", "Email Address", or "U.S. Passport number". These attributes can be assigned during scans or added manually. For a full list of classifications, see the supported classifications in Microsoft Purview. You can see classifications assigned both to the asset and columns in the schema from the overview page.which you can also view as part of the schema.

Glossary terms

Glossary terms are a managed vocabulary for business terms that can be used to categorize and relate assets across your organization. For more information, see the business glossary page. You can view the assigned glossary terms for an asset in the overview section. If you're a data curator on the asset, you can add or remove a glossary term on an asset by editing the asset.

Collection hierarchy

In Microsoft Purview, collections organize assets and data sources. They also manage access across the Microsoft Purview governance portal. You can view an assets containing collection under the Collection path section.

Asset hierarchy

You can view the full asset hierarchy within the overview tab. As an example: if you navigate to a SQL table, then you can see the schema, database, and the server the table belongs to.

Asset actions

Below are a list of actions you can take from an asset details page. Actions available to you vary depending on your permissions and the type of asset you're looking at. Available actions are generally available on the global actions bar.

Screenshot that shows actions available on the asset details page.

Editing assets

If you're a data curator on the collection containing an asset, you can edit an asset by selecting the edit icon on the top-left corner of the asset.

At the asset level you can edit or add a description, classification, or glossary term by staying on the overview tab of the edit screen.

You can navigate to the schema tab on the edit screen to update column name, data type, column level classification, terms, or asset description.

You can navigate to the contact tab of the edit screen to update owners and experts on the asset. You can search by full name, email or alias of the person within your Azure active directory.

Scan behavior after editing assets

Microsoft Purview works to reflect the truth of the source system whenever possible. For example, if you edit a column and later it's deleted from the source table. A scan will remove the column metadata from the asset in Microsoft Purview.

Both column-level and asset-level updates such as adding a description, glossary term or classification don't impact scan updates. Scans will update new columns and classifications regardless if these changes are made.

If you update the name or data type of a column, subsequent scans won't update the asset schema. New columns and classifications won't be detected.

Request access to data

If a self-service data access workflow has been created, you can request access to a desired asset directly from the asset details page! To learn more about Microsoft Purview's data policy applications, see how to enable data use management.

Open in Power BI

Microsoft Purview makes it easy to work with useful data you find the data catalog. You can open certain assets in Power BI Desktop from the asset details page. Power BI Desktop integration is supported for the following sources.

  • Azure Blob Storage
  • Azure Cosmos DB
  • Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
  • Azure Dedicated SQL pool (formerly SQL DW)
  • Azure SQL Database
  • Azure SQL Managed Instance
  • Azure Synapse Analytics
  • Azure Database for MySQL
  • Azure Database for PostgreSQL
  • Oracle DB
  • SQL Server
  • Teradata

Deleting assets

If you're a data curator on the collection containing an asset, you can delete an asset by selecting the delete icon under the name of the asset.

Important

You cannot delete an asset that has child assets.

Currently, Microsoft Purview doesn't support cascaded deletes. For example, if you attempt to delete a storage account asset in your catalog the containers, folders and files within them will still exist in the data map and the the storage account asset will still exist in relation to them.

Any asset you delete using the delete button is permanently deleted in Microsoft Purview. However, if you run a full scan on the source from which the asset was ingested into the catalog, then the asset is reingested and you can discover it using the Microsoft Purview catalog.

If you have a scheduled scan (weekly or monthly) on the source, the deleted asset won't get re-ingested into the catalog unless the asset is modified by an end user since the previous run of the scan. For example, say you manually delete a SQL table from the Microsoft Purview Data Map. Later, a data engineer adds a new column to the source table. When Microsoft Purview scans the database, the table will be reingested into the data map and be discoverable in the data catalog.

Next steps