Lesson 2 — Types and Classification Lenses
The three primary Metadata types
Remember them as three questions.
Business Metadata — What does it mean and how is it governed?
Business Metadata describes meaning and approved context: definitions, business rules, calculations, ownership/stewardship, valid values, quality expectations, System-of-Record designations, security/privacy classification, known issues, and usage guidance.
Examples: - approved definition of Active Customer; - owner and Steward; - Net Revenue calculation rule; - privacy classification; - accepted value domain; - DQ threshold.
Technical Metadata — How is it implemented, stored, mapped, and moved?
Technical Metadata describes schemas, tables, columns, datatypes, keys, indexes, models, mappings, transformations, ETL jobs, file formats, program/application structures, access rules, dependencies, and technical lineage.
Examples:
- CUSTOMER_STATUS VARCHAR(1);
- CRM.customer_id → DW.party_key;
- ETL dependency between Stage Party and Load Customer;
- report dependency on a warehouse view.
Operational Metadata — What actually happened?
Operational Metadata is runtime evidence: execution times, status, errors, volumes, query/report usage, backup status, SLA performance, retention operations, patch/version status, and operational events.
Examples: - load began at 01:05 and failed after 1.2M rows; - 37 records were rejected; - report X ran 400 times this week; - an extract missed its SLA.
Do not classify by audience
A business user may consume technical lineage. An engineer may need an approved business definition. The content/function determines the type, not who views it.
Exam trap: “operational”
“Orders processed today” can be ordinary business data. “ETL job processed 1.2 million order rows in 14 minutes and rejected 37” is Operational Metadata because it describes the processing of data.
A second classification lens
Information science also uses:
- Descriptive Metadata — identifies or helps retrieve a resource: title, author, subject.
- Structural Metadata — describes relationships among parts: pages, chapters, sequence.
- Administrative Metadata — supports lifecycle management: versions, archive dates, rights.
These do not replace Business/Technical/Operational. They answer a different classification question, especially useful for documents and content.
Stop and check
A repository contains: 1. approved Customer Churn definition; 2. SQL expression used to calculate it; 3. last night’s execution duration.
Answer: Business; Technical; Operational.
Deciding rule: meaning/governance vs implementation/movement vs runtime evidence.
Source anchor: pp. 399–402.