Data governance
Data governance is the set of rules and roles for a company's data: who owns each dataset, who can see it, what each number means and how long it's kept.
Select any words here to ask your Maestro about them.
You share a file of 10,000 customers with names and emails removed. It keeps ZIP code, gender and full birth date. How many are the only one with their combination?
What it decides: who owns each dataset, what each number means (one definition of "active customer" or revenue, ideally in a semantic layer), who can see what, how quality is checked and how long data is kept.
Why it matters: without rules, every team computes its KPIs its own way, and personal data ends up where it shouldn't. And removing names is only the first step to making a file anonymous.
Where it lives: in a data catalog that documents each table in the warehouse or the lake, its owner and its lineage (where it comes from and where it goes).
How it's used
A governance entry
Table: customers
- Owner: Priya in Operations. She approves changes and answers questions
- Active customer: bought in the last 90 days, not counting returns
- marked: Access: Sales sees name and city; email and phone only Customer SupportEach team sees what its work needs, and nothing more.
- Kept: 5 years after the last purchase, then deleted
When to look closer
A deletion request
Deletion request
- Rosa asks you to delete her data
- marked: DELETE FROM customers WHERE customer_id = 4821
Rosa asks you to delete her data, and you delete her row from the customers table. Is it gone?
Ask your Maestro about Data governance
It answers from the free course page closest to this word, the way it answers while you study.
You: What does "Data governance" mean, in plain words?
Your Maestro: I'll explain it with a case of yours: it sticks better than a definition. Who decides today which customer data each team can see?
Asking about: Answers from the page "What do you compare a KPI against? The target, last week and the trend"
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Related terms
- Semantic layer
A semantic layer defines each business metric, what it counts and how to calculate it, in one place that dashboards, reports and AI agents all read from.
- KPI (key performance indicator)
A KPI is a number a team tracks to know whether it's doing well at what matters most, like monthly sales or orders delivered on time. It only works if it's well defined, so two people who calculate it get the same answer.
- Data lake
A data lake is a place where a company stores its data as files, as it arrives and untransformed, and decides later how to read it.
- Data warehouse
A data warehouse is a database built for analysis: it brings data from many systems into one place, keeps its history and organizes it for queries.