Announcing intelligent unified governance in BigQuery

BigQuery’s built-in, intelligent governance simplifies data and AI management, helping organizations discover, understand, and leverage their assets, transforming governance from a burden into a powerful tool for data activation. Central to BigQuery governance is BigQuery universal catalog, a unified, AI-powered data catalog that natively integrates Dataplex, BigQuery sharing, security and metastore capabilities, bringing together business, technical, and runtime metadata.

BigQuery’s unified governance capabilities are:

1. Unified: BigQuery brings governance directly into the heart of your data-to-AI lifecycle, enabling discovery, understanding, governance, and utilization of your data assets and AI models. This gives data administrators, stewards, and custodians robust tools for metadata management and policy enforcement, providing end-to-end data-to-AI lineage, data profiling, insights, and secure sharing. And with the new universal semantic search, finding the right data is as simple as asking a question in natural language.

2. Intelligent: New governance capabilities powered by gen AI stand to revolutionize data management. By harnessing the power of large language models (LLMs), BigQuery universal catalog can help you uncover hidden relationships between BigQuery data assets, enable automated metadata curation and intelligent query recommendations at scale, automate governance, and democratize data-driven insights across the organization.

3. Open: BigQuery universal catalog insulates you from change with support for open storage standards such as Apache Iceberg, and a unified runtime metastore across SQL, open-source engines, and AI/ML. The BigQuery metastore, which is included in the BigQuery universal catalog, is Iceberg-compliant, enabling a multi-engine, multi-vendor architecture for governance and use of fully managed Iceberg data.

ANZ Bank, a multinational banking and financial services provider, uses the BigQuery universal catalog for comprehensive data governance, discovery, and observability.

“With BigQuery universal catalog, ANZ has significantly improved the reliability and trustworthiness of our data. The centralized data quality monitoring and automated validation features are increasing confidence and efficiency in critical business outputs and decisions based on accurate and consistent information. BigQuery governance has become a cornerstone of our data governance strategy, ensuring our data is not just available, but dependable.” Artur Kaluza, Head of Data Strategy and Transformation, Risk, ANZ