Business Glossary tools for Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)

List of tools that help build, maintain an share business glossaries.

Business Glossary is a collection of definitions and terms used within a business unitorganization. It is not used to define data, but rather to define what a particular term means from a business perspective. The definitions are mapped and logically linked to entities in the database. This enables structured communication between teams and allows them to reveal potential errors resulting from incorrect nomenclature.

Collibra Data Governance Center

Collibra Data Governance Center enables you to organize and understand data in your enterprise. It allows you to define the terminology, rules and regulations that matter to your business, document your metadata and its use, and create, review and update data policies.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: HTML,PDF
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog allows to add rich business context to the data by associating business terms with the right technical metadata. It enables automatic association of business terms with the technical metadata, which helps eliminate a tedious manual process for data governance. This allows business and IT stewards to collaboratively manage business metadata that includes efficient human workflow automation.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: CSV,MS Excel,Plain text,XML
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

Alation Data Catalog

Alation’s Business Glossary enables the creation of definitions, policies, rules, and KPIs through a rich, user-friendly interface. By leveraging machine learning, Alation’s Business Glossary automatically suggests business terms, identifies stewards and subject matter experts based on usage patterns, and incorporates crowdsourcing and collaboration to easily scale documentation.

Data Policies and Rules: Yes
Export: MS Excel
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: Yes
Support for workflow: Yes

Talend Data Catalog

Talend Data Catalog automatically crawls, profiles, organizes, links, and enriches all your metadata. The tool supports data privacy and regulatory compliance with intelligent data lineage tracing and compliance tracking. With a collaborative user experience, it enables anyone to contribute metadata or business glossary information.

Data Policies and Rules: No
Export: CSV,MS Excel,XML
Integration with Technical Metadata: Yes
Linkage to reports/apps: Yes
Reference data: No
Support for workflow: Yes

There are many tools for creating business glossaries. Whether sophisticated or not, they allow to create:
• access and alternate names,
• descriptions,
• explanations of how to calculate metrics,
• links to other elements.

To ensure access to all terms from different platforms, many business glossary tools are cross-platform compatible. More advanced tools provide a workflow to ensure that term definitions are updated and approved. In addition to the glossary creation features, the tools allow you to export to user-friendly and easy-to-share formats like PDF and HTML.

Proper communication between teams in an organization is crucial for the success of the project. Similarly, it is important to interpret data correctly. Each of the teams working together (business team, developers, marketing teams), use different nomenclature and terms. Within a team the logical meaning of data elements, acronyms, etc. are defined and understood only by a narrow group of members. This makes the area of inconsistency really wide. Even small misunderstandings can lead to fatal consequences. This is where the business glossary comes into play.

What's more, using glossaries not only makes the communication more reliable, but also improves efficiency and speeds up the decision-making process (e.g. wondering if "customer" means a single person, an organization, and repeating the consideration next time the project is approached).

In our list, we have included noteworthy business tools for creating and reviewing business glossaries.