The advent of big data technologies with an emphasis on the ease and speed of ingestion of large amounts of data into a data lake — as opposed to the often-complex traditional ETL processes for load­ing into a data warehouse — has meant far less focus on defining schemas or structures. The focus now shifts toward how to achieve an adequate level of governance of such data lakes. This is where the data catalog provides a central canonical reference point of business meaning to underpin any data governance activities of the data lake.