Data catalogs

We talked about a data lake in AWS being a combination of the data in S3 buckets and the metadata of this data stored in a catalog. We will solve the mystery of creating a technical catalog in AWS by introducing another critical service for building a modern data platform, AWS Glue—a serverless data integration service. Now, Glue is actually an umbrella service consisting of multiple parts. It has the Glue ETL part, which is used for building data integration work, and we have multiple chapters on data ingestion and integration. The component of Glue that is relevant to our data catalog discussion is Glue Data Catalog. Let’s unfold more about the catalog in Glue and how it helps with our data lake in S3.

Glue Data Catalog

As the data passes through layers of the data lake in S3, the metadata of the data is captured and stored in Glue Data Catalog. It creates and stores the technical metadata in the form of data definition language (DDL) statements...