About DataHub Search

Feature Availability

Self-Hosted DataHub

Managed DataHub

The search bar is an important mechanism for discovering data assets in DataHub. From the search bar, you can find Datasets, Columns, Dashboards, Charts, Data Pipelines, and more. Simply type in a term and press 'enter'.

Advanced queries and the filter sidebar helps fine tuning queries. For programmatic users Datahub provides a GraphQL API as well.

Search Setup, Prerequisites, and Permissions

Search is available for all users. Although Search works out of the box, the more relevant data you ingest, the better the results are.

Using Search

Searching is as easy as typing in relevant business terms and pressing 'enter' to view matching data assets.

By default, search terms will match against different aspects of a data assets. This includes asset names, descriptions, tags, terms, owners, and even specific attributes like the names of columns in a table.

Filters

The filters sidebar sits on the left hand side of search results, and lets users find assets by drilling down. You can quickly filter by Data Platform (e.g. Snowflake), Tags, Glossary Terms, Domain, Owners, and more with a single click.

Advanced Filters

Using the Advanced Filter view, you can apply more complex filters. To get there, click 'Advanced' in the top right of the filter panel:

Adding an Advanced Filter

Currently, Advanced Filters support filtering by Column Name, Container, Domain, Description (entity or column level), Tag (entity or column level), Glossary Term (entity or column level), Owner, Entity Type, Subtype, Environment and soft-deleted status.

To add a new filter, click the add filter menu, choose a filter type, and then fill in the values you want to filter by.

Matching Any Advanced Filter

By default, all filters must be matched in order for a result to appear. For example, if you add a tag filter and a platform filter, all results will have the tag and the platform. You can set the results to match any filter instead. Click on all filters and select any filter from the drop-down menu.

Negating An Advanced Filter

After creating a filter, you can choose whether results should or should not match it. Change this by clicking the operation in the top right of the filter and selecting the negated operation.

Results

Search results appear ranked by their relevance. In self-hosted DataHub ranking is based on how closely the query matched textual fields of an asset and its metadata. In Managed DataHub, ranking is based on a combination of textual relevance, usage (queries / views), and change frequency.

With better metadata comes better results. Learn more about ingestion technical metadata in the metadata ingestion guide.

Advanced queries

The search bar supports advanced queries with pattern matching, logical expressions and filtering by specific field matches.

The following are use cases with example search phrases. Additionally, an example link is provided for our demo instance. These examples are non exhaustive and using Datasets as a reference.

If you want to:

• Exact match on term or phrase

  • "datahub_schema" Sample results
  • datahub_schema Sample results
  • Enclosing one or more terms with double quotes will enforce exact matching on these terms, preventing further tokenization.

• Exclude terms

  • logging -snowflake Sample results
  • Results can be excluded by term using - to negate the term.

• Term boolean logic with precedence

  • logging + (-snowflake | os_audit_log) Sample results
  • ( ) can be used to set precedence of boolean term expressions

• Find a dataset with the word mask in the name:

  • /q name: *mask* Sample results
  • This will return entities with mask in the name. Names tends to be connected by other symbols, hence the wildcard symbols before and after the word.

• Find a dataset with a property, encoding

  • /q customProperties: encoding* Sample results
  • Dataset Properties are indexed in ElasticSearch the manner of key=value. Hence if you know the precise key-value pair, you can search using "key=value". However, if you only know the key, you can use wildcards to replace the value and that is what is being done here.

• Find a dataset with a column name, latitude

  • /q fieldPaths: latitude Sample results
  • fieldPaths is the name of the attribute that holds the column name in Datasets.

• Find a dataset with the term latitude in the field description

  • /q editedFieldDescriptions: latitude OR fieldDescriptions: latitude Sample results
  • Datasets has 2 attributes that contains field description. fieldDescription comes from the SchemaMetadata aspect, while editedFieldDescriptions comes from the EditableSchemaMetadata aspect. EditableSchemaMetadata holds information that comes from UI edits, while SchemaMetadata holds data from ingestion of the dataset.

• Find a dataset with the term logical in the dataset description

  • /q editedDescription: *logical* OR description: *logical* Sample results
  • Similar to field descriptions, dataset descriptions can be found in 2 aspects, hence the need to search 2 attributes.

• Find a dataset which reside in one of the browsing folders, for instance, the hive folder

  • /q browsePaths: *hive* Sample results
  • BrowsePath is stored as a complete string, for instance /datasets/prod/hive/SampleKafkaDataset, hence the need for wildcards on both ends of the term to return a result.

Videos

What can you do with DataHub?

GraphQL

• searchAcrossEntities
• You can try out the API on the demo instance's public GraphQL interface: here

The same GraphQL API that powers the Search UI can be used for integrations and programmatic use-cases.

# Example query
{
  searchAcrossEntities(
    input: {types: [], query: "*", start: 0, count: 10, filters: [{field: "fieldTags", value: "urn:li:tag:Dimension"}]}
  ) {
    start
    count
    total
    searchResults {
      entity {
        type
        ... on Dataset {
          urn
          type
          platform {
            name
          }
          name
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

DataHub Blog

• Using DataHub for Search & Discovery

FAQ and Troubleshooting

How are the results ordered?

The order of the search results is based on the weight what Datahub gives them based on our search algorithm. The current algorithm in OSS DataHub is based on a text-match score from Elasticsearch.

Where to find more information?

The sample queries here are non exhaustive. The link here shows the current list of indexed fields for each entity inside Datahub. Click on the fields inside each entity and see which field has the tag Searchable.
However, it does not tell you the specific attribute name to use for specialized searches. One way to do so is to inspect the ElasticSearch indices, for example:
curl http://localhost:9200/_cat/indices returns all the ES indices in the ElasticSearch container.

yellow open chartindex_v2_1643510690325                           bQO_RSiCSUiKJYsmJClsew 1 1   2 0   8.5kb   8.5kb
yellow open mlmodelgroupindex_v2_1643510678529                    OjIy0wb7RyKqLz3uTENRHQ 1 1   0 0    208b    208b
yellow open dataprocessindex_v2_1643510676831                     2w-IHpuiTUCs6e6gumpYHA 1 1   0 0    208b    208b
yellow open corpgroupindex_v2_1643510673894                       O7myCFlqQWKNtgsldzBS6g 1 1   3 0  16.8kb  16.8kb
yellow open corpuserindex_v2_1643510672335                        0rIe_uIQTjme5Wy61MFbaw 1 1   6 2  32.4kb  32.4kb
yellow open datasetindex_v2_1643510688970                         bjBfUEswSoSqPi3BP4iqjw 1 1  15 0  29.2kb  29.2kb
yellow open dataflowindex_v2_1643510681607                        N8CMlRFvQ42rnYMVDaQJ2g 1 1   1 0  10.2kb  10.2kb
yellow open dataset_datasetusagestatisticsaspect_v1_1643510694706 kdqvqMYLRWq1oZt1pcAsXQ 1 1   4 0   8.9kb   8.9kb
yellow open .ds-datahub_usage_event-000003                        YMVcU8sHTFilUwyI4CWJJg 1 1 186 0 203.9kb 203.9kb
yellow open datajob_datahubingestioncheckpointaspect_v1           nTXJf7C1Q3GoaIJ71gONxw 1 1   0 0    208b    208b
yellow open .ds-datahub_usage_event-000004                        XRFwisRPSJuSr6UVmmsCsg 1 1 196 0 165.5kb 165.5kb
yellow open .ds-datahub_usage_event-000005                        d0O6l5wIRLOyG6iIfAISGw 1 1  77 0 108.1kb 108.1kb
yellow open dataplatformindex_v2_1643510671426                    _4SIIhfAT8yq_WROufunXA 1 1   0 0    208b    208b
yellow open mlmodeldeploymentindex_v2_1643510670629               n81eJIypSp2Qx-fpjZHgRw 1 1   0 0    208b    208b
yellow open .ds-datahub_usage_event-000006                        oyrWKndjQ-a8Rt1IMD9aSA 1 1 143 0 127.1kb 127.1kb
yellow open mlfeaturetableindex_v2_1643510677164                  iEXPt637S1OcilXpxPNYHw 1 1   5 0   8.9kb   8.9kb
yellow open .ds-datahub_usage_event-000001                        S9EnGj64TEW8O3sLUb9I2Q 1 1 257 0 163.9kb 163.9kb
yellow open .ds-datahub_usage_event-000002                        2xJyvKG_RYGwJOG9yq8pJw 1 1  44 0 155.4kb 155.4kb
yellow open dataset_datasetprofileaspect_v1_1643510693373         uahwTHGRRAC7w1c2VqVy8g 1 1  31 0  18.9kb  18.9kb
yellow open mlprimarykeyindex_v2_1643510687579                    MUcmT8ASSASzEpLL98vrWg 1 1   7 0   9.5kb   9.5kb
yellow open glossarytermindex_v2_1643510686127                    cQL8Pg6uQeKfMly9GPhgFQ 1 1   3 0    10kb    10kb
yellow open datajob_datahubingestionrunsummaryaspect_v1           rk22mIsDQ02-52MpWLm1DA 1 1   0 0    208b    208b
yellow open mlmodelindex_v2_1643510675399                         gk-WSTVjRZmkDU5ggeFSqg 1 1   1 0  10.3kb  10.3kb
yellow open dashboardindex_v2_1643510691686                       PQjSaGhTRqWW6zYjcqXo6Q 1 1   1 0   8.7kb   8.7kb
yellow open datahubpolicyindex_v2_1643510671774                   ZyTrYx3-Q1e-7dYq1kn5Gg 1 1   0 0    208b    208b
yellow open datajobindex_v2_1643510682977                         K-rbEyjBS6ew5uOQQS4sPw 1 1   2 0  11.3kb  11.3kb
yellow open datahubretentionindex_v2                              8XrQTPwRTX278mx1SrNwZA 1 1   0 0    208b    208b
yellow open glossarynodeindex_v2_1643510678826                    Y3_bCz0YR2KPwCrrVngDdA 1 1   1 0   7.4kb   7.4kb
yellow open system_metadata_service_v1                            36spEDbDTdKgVlSjE8t-Jw 1 1 387 8  63.2kb  63.2kb
yellow open schemafieldindex_v2_1643510684410                     tZ1gC3haTReRLmpCxirVxQ 1 1   0 0    208b    208b
yellow open mlfeatureindex_v2_1643510680246                       aQO5HF0mT62Znn-oIWBC8A 1 1  20 0  17.4kb  17.4kb
yellow open tagindex_v2_1643510684785                             PfnUdCUORY2fnF3I3W7HwA 1 1   3 1  18.6kb  18.6kb

The index name will vary from instance to instance. Indexed information about Datasets can be found in:
curl http://localhost:9200/datasetindex_v2_1643510688970/_search?=pretty

example information of a dataset:

{
        "_index" : "datasetindex_v2_1643510688970",
        "_type" : "_doc",
        "_id" : "urn%3Ali%3Adataset%3A%28urn%3Ali%3AdataPlatform%3Akafka%2CSampleKafkaDataset%2CPROD%29",
        "_score" : 1.0,
        "_source" : {
          "urn" : "urn:li:dataset:(urn:li:dataPlatform:kafka,SampleKafkaDataset,PROD)",
          "name" : "SampleKafkaDataset",
          "browsePaths" : [
            "/prod/kafka/SampleKafkaDataset"
          ],
          "origin" : "PROD",
          "customProperties" : [
            "prop2=pikachu",
            "prop1=fakeprop"
          ],
          "hasDescription" : false,
          "hasOwners" : true,
          "owners" : [
            "urn:li:corpuser:jdoe",
            "urn:li:corpuser:datahub"
          ],
          "fieldPaths" : [
            "[version=2.0].[type=boolean].field_foo_2",
            "[version=2.0].[type=boolean].field_bar",
            "[version=2.0].[key=True].[type=int].id"
          ],
          "fieldGlossaryTerms" : [ ],
          "fieldDescriptions" : [
            "Foo field description",
            "Bar field description",
            "Id specifying which partition the message should go to"
          ],
          "fieldTags" : [
            "urn:li:tag:NeedsDocumentation"
          ],
          "platform" : "urn:li:dataPlatform:kafka"
        }
      },

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Related Features

• Metadata ingestion framework