Harvesting Technical Metadata

To harvest your data source, you need to register your data source as a data asset in your data catalog instance. A data asset is any physical data store or stream of data such as a database, a cloud storage container, or a message stream.

You use the following data sources (accessible using public or private IPs) to create data assets in Data Catalog.

You can also connect to on premise data sources that are connected to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Virtual Cloud Networks (VCNs).

Depending on the type of data asset you create, you use different data structures to browse the data entities. For example, if you create an Oracle Database data asset, you browse through database objects to review the table and view data entities.

The following file types are supported for Oracle Object Storage:

• Comma-Separated Value (CSV) files (.csv, .csv.gz)

  Note
  
  The supported separators are , (comma), \t (tab), | (vertical bar), ; (semicolon).

• XML files (.xml, .xsd)

• Avro files (.avro, .avro.gz)

• Excel files (.xls, .xlsx)

• Apache Parquet files (.parquet, .pq)

• Apache ORC files (.orc)

• Simple JSON files (.json, .json.gz)

If you choose to harvest unsupported file types, the Data Catalog harvester extracts only the basic information from those files, such as names and paths.

A data asset contains one or more data entities. A data entity is a collection of data such as a database table or view, or a single logical file. A data entity normally has many attributes that describe its data. An attribute describes a data item with a name and data type.