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Data governance overview

Governance in DeltaVault lives on business entities and attributes, not directly on tables and columns. A business entity is the single place where you declare who owns a concept, what it means, how sensitive it is, and how long data should be kept. Those decisions then propagate outward, appearing as read-only derived badges on any table or column that maps to that entity or attribute. This keeps governance authoritative and consistent: change the classification on the entity once, and every mapped source reflects it.

The three classification schemes

Section titled “The three classification schemes”

DeltaVault ships three platform-level classification schemes. Each scheme has a set of values (with a name, a color, and an optional description) that you assign to business attributes.

  • Sensitivity, single-select: how restricted the data is. Public, Internal, Confidential, Restricted.
  • Personal Data Categories, multi-select: what kind of data about identifiable individuals the attribute holds. Contact, Identifier, Financial, Health, Biometric, Behavioral.
  • Regulatory, multi-select: which regimes the attribute falls under. GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, Sarbanes-Oxley.

Platform defaults are set by your DeltaVault administrator. Your organization can copy and customize any scheme’s values: see Classification settings for how that works.

Ownership: owner and steward

Section titled “Ownership: owner and steward”

Every business entity can carry two named roles:

  • Owner: the person or team accountable for the entity and its data. Typically a business stakeholder.
  • Steward: the person responsible for maintaining the metadata, classifications, and definitions day to day. Often a data engineer or analyst.

Both fields are free text. Setting them is optional, but they appear in the entity sheet, making it easy to see who to contact about a concept.

Definitions and the approval lifecycle

Section titled “Definitions and the approval lifecycle”

A business entity’s definition is its authoritative prose description: what the concept means in your business, not just what the table says. Definitions follow a simple lifecycle:

  1. Draft: the initial state. Any editor can write or revise a definition.
  2. Approved: a user with the editor role explicitly approves the definition. An approval stamp records who approved it and when.
  3. Edit reverts to Draft: if anyone edits an approved definition, it returns to Draft automatically. The approval stamp clears, and the concept needs re-approval. This ensures approvals stay honest: an approved definition always reflects what was actually reviewed.

The same lifecycle applies to business attribute definitions. The entity sheet shows the current status and the approval stamp alongside the definition text.

Retention and freshness

Section titled “Retention and freshness”

Business entities have two optional governance fields:

  • Retention period: how long data in mapped tables should be retained (for example, “7 years” or “90 days”). This is a metadata label, not an enforced policy. It’s recorded so your data engineers and compliance team can act on it.
  • Freshness expectation: how often the data should be updated. Again a label, not a live check.

Both fields appear in the entity sheet.

How derived badges reach source metadata

Section titled “How derived badges reach source metadata”

When a business entity or attribute carries governance metadata, that information propagates automatically to any source metadata that maps to it:

  • Catalog grid: tables and columns that are mapped to governed entities display read-only classification chips in their row.
  • Column governance: open a mapped column and its Governance section shows the derived classification, labeled From attribute {name} so the provenance travels with the value.
  • Glossary: the Sensitivity and Classifications columns show what each attribute carries, and the mapped-column count shows how far it reaches.

These badges are always read-only on the source metadata side. To change a classification, edit the business entity or attribute it comes from.

Where to find each governance surface

Section titled “Where to find each governance surface”
SurfaceWhere
Entity sheetBusiness › Entities, or click any entity in the glossary or on a model canvas
GlossaryBusiness › Glossary: flat table of every business attribute with its definition, status, and classifications
Governance requirementsSettings › Data Governance, organization administrators only
Classification schemesSettings › Conventions, in the Classifications block
Derived classification on a columnCatalog › [table] › Columns, then open a mapped column
Section titled “Related guides”