Search for data assets

After data is scanned and ingested into the Microsoft Purview Data Map, data consumers need to easily find the data needed for their analytics or governance workloads. Data discovery can be time consuming because you might not know where to find the data that you want. Even after finding the data, you could have doubts about whether you can trust the data and take a dependency on it.

This article outlines how to search Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog to quickly find the data you're looking for.

Permissions to search the Unified Catalog

Searching Unified Catalog will only return relevant data assets that you have permissions to view.

You can find a data asset in Unified Catalog when:

• You have at least read permissions on an available Azure or Microsoft Fabric resource.
• You have at least data reader permissions on a domain or collection in the Microsoft Purview Data Map where the asset is stored.

Permissions to these assets are managed at the resource level and at the Microsoft Purview Data Map level, respectively. For more information on providing this access, follow the links provided.

To search for curated, ready-to-use data assets, you search for data products your organization has developed.

Searching the catalog

To search for data assets in Unified Catalog:

1. In the Microsoft Purview portal, open Unified Catalog.
2. Under Discovery, select Data assets.
3. Find the search bar under Data assets.
   1. When you select the search bar, it presents your search history and the items recently accessed in Unified Catalog. This allows you to quickly resume a previous data exploration.
   2. Enter keywords in the search bar that help narrow down your search, such as name, data type, classifications, and glossary terms. As you enter in search keywords, Microsoft Purview dynamically suggests results and searches that could fit your needs.
4. To complete your search, select View search results or select Enter. For full search syntax information, see search query syntax.

The search results page shows a list of data assets and glossary terms that match the search terms. The keyword is highlighted in the return results, so you can see where the term was found in the asset. In the example below, the search term was "Sales."

The Microsoft Purview relevance engine sorts through all the matches and ranks them based on what it believes their usefulness is to a user. For example, a data consumer is likely more interested in a table curated by a data steward that matches on multiple keywords than an unannotated folder. Many factors determine an asset’s relevance score and the Microsoft Purview search team is constantly tuning the relevance engine to ensure the top search results have value to you.

Filter results

If the top results don’t include the assets you're looking for, you can filter your results using the filter pane to the left of the search results.

On the search results page, select Filter to open and close the filter pane. With the filter pane open, select a filter category, then select the checkbox next to the values you want to filter on. For some filters, you can select the ellipsis to choose Or or And.

Available filters

• Activity - allows you to refine your search to attributes created or updated within a certain timeframe.
• Asset type refines your search to specified asset types. For example: dashboards, files, glossary terms, or metamodel assets.
• Assigned term - refines your search to assets with the selected terms applied.
• Classification - refines your search to assets with certain classifications.
• Collection - refines your search by assets in a specific collection.
• Contact - refines your search to assets that have selected users listed as a contact.
• Data source type - refines your search to assets from specified source types. For example: Azure Blob Storage or Power BI.
• Endorsement - refines your search to assets with specified endorsements, like Certified or Promoted.
• Label - refines your search to assets with specific security labels.
• Data asset attributes - refines your search to assets with specified data asset attributes. Attributes are listed under their attribute group, and use operators to help search for specific values. For example: Equals or Doesn't equal.
• Rating - refines your search to only data assets with a specified rating.
• Tags - refines your search to assets with selected tags.

Bulk edit search results

If you're looking to make changes to multiple assets returned by search, Microsoft Purview lets you modify glossary terms, classifications, and contacts in bulk. To learn more, see How to bulk edit assets.

View assets

From the search results page, select an asset to view details, such as description, attributes, schema, lineage, and classifications.

Browse the Unified Catalog

Unified Catalog offers a browse experience that enables users to explore what data is available to them either by collection or by exploring the hierarchy of each data source in the catalog.

In Unified Catalog, go to Discovery > Data assets. Under Explore your data, select a card for how you want to expore your data: in Microsoft Auzre, in Microsoft Fabric, by source type, or by collection.

You'll only be able to see the data sources you have permission to view.

Searching Microsoft Purview in connected services

Once you register your Microsoft Purview instance to an Azure Data Factory or an Azure Synapse Analytics workspace, you can search Unified Catalog directly from those services. To learn more, see Discover data in ADF using Microsoft Purview and Discover data in Synapse using Microsoft Purview.

Search query syntax

All search queries consist of keywords and operators. A keyword is a something that would be part of an asset's properties. Potential keywords can be a classification, glossary term, asset description, or an asset name. A keyword can be just a part of the property you're looking to match to. Use keywords and the operators to ensure Microsoft Purview returns the assets you're looking for.

Certain characters including spaces, dashes, and commas are interpreted as delimiters. Searching a string like hive-database is the same as searching two keywords hive database.

The following table contains the operators that can be used to compose a search query. Operators can be combined as many times as need in a single query.

Known limitations

• Grouping isn't supported within a field search. Use operators to connect field searches. For example,name:(alice AND bob) is invalid search syntax, but name:alice AND name:bob is supported.

Next steps

• How to create and manage glossary terms.
• How to import and export glossary terms.
• How to manage term templates for business glossary.